WP1: A Culturally-Induced Disorder
My parents migrated to the U.S. from Cameroon, and in our culture, service is extremely important. Not only serving the community but serving your elders, especially your parents. So that’s how I was raised, with unwavering obedience to my parents’ requests. And the request that they emphasized the most was to excel in my academics. The reason being higher education is the most secure way of achieving “success” — success defined as living a comfortable life without worrying about money — and my parents never got to experience this success they thought they would when they immigrated to the U.S. So, they projected their beliefs about success onto me because they care for me and wanted me to live better than they do. However, this seemingly innocent belief often came at the cost of my mental health. At the time, I didn’t realize the “strong work ethic” derived from this was unusual because my parents themselves didn’t regard it as unusual, in fact, they encouraged it. It was also due to seeing how hard they worked as well, especially my dad.
My father picks up shifts at his blue-collar job as early as 4 am and would come home as late as 10 pm with few breaks in between. Despite having two master’s degrees from Georgetown, being a black immigrant in America played against him as he searched relentlessly for jobs that would take non-US citizens. Coming from a very poor part of West Africa, my parents barely had enough money to even fly here. And because they had children early, they had little time or money to apply for citizenship as well. Wealth, especially generational wealth which isn’t often found in black immigrant families, is important because “wealth makes it easier for families to invest in their own futures” but “… systematically different experiences in the labor market exacerbate the need for more wealth for African Americans but also make it more difficult to build that wealth in the first place” (Weller). My family is depending on me to build said wealth. It’s why many immigrant families are forced to place the burden of success on their children through the only way they’re certain will work: academics.
Of course, our families mean well. And because these intentions are so pure, it’s not obvious how harmful they can be to children who grow up in this workaholic environment. We see our families struggling financially and they tell us the only way to make things better is to work hard. So, we obey. But this attitude adopted by both black immigrants and their children is a direct result of how Americans’ relationship with work is portrayed in the media. We see the media romanticizing the working class as heroes whenever they’re thrown into dangerous situations yet still manage to be productive members of society. Take this article from the New York Post of a man who was delivering food during a flood, for example. Literally in the first two paragraphs, they claim, “A heroic Brooklyn delivery man was captured in jaw-dropping footage schlepping takeout through waist-high flood water during the historic storm that swamped the Big Apple” (O’Neill). And throughout the rest of the article, they use various examples of people wanting to give this man a “massive tip” and praise him like he’s Batman or sum. This human risked his life for a job. A minimum-wage job. And people are acting as if it’s heroic and not the result of a system that conditions us to only feel good when we are being productive. By doing this, they succeed in stripping him and the rest of the working class of their humanity. Because if we aren’t aware that we are humans in the workplace, they can exploit us until we are physically unable to work (and sometimes even longer than that).
Even terms like “dream job” convey the idea that to be able to work is a desire everyone should want to achieve. That having a career is an essential part of being human. Yet many careers that qualify as a “dream job” are unattainable for black immigrants because of discrimination against black people and foreigners in the U.S.
Freire speaks of unbalanced power dynamics between the oppressed and oppressor which I interpret in this case as working-class immigrants and wealthy capitalists. The pressure the oppressed face to overwork themselves until — in many cases — death is a form of dehumanization the oppressors use to maintain power in society. This power keeps the working class submissive in their jobs, but they then reframe that mindset into their own homes. Freire claims, “almost always, during the initial stage of the struggle, the oppressed, instead of striving for liberation, tend themselves to become oppressors, or “sub-oppressors” (Freire, 45). This manifests itself best in the term “Tiger parents”: a form of strict parenting commonly found among immigrants that are unhealthily obsessive with their child’s success. These “Tiger parents” employ the same fear of unproductivity that was implemented in them by their co-workers, employers, and society, into their own children (“Tiger Parenting”). They unknowingly become the “sub-oppressors” in their households because that is the concept of freedom they know best. To be free to work and become rich.
The children then internalize that concept and combined with the desire to accomplish their immigrant parent’s notion of success, create this workaholic identity that I, and many others, are inflicted with. Workaholicism is defined by anxiety and feeling unsatisfied whenever I had “nothing to do” and gaining motivation to actually work from the fear that I wasn’t doing enough to attain a secure future.
I don’t feel comfortable when people point out how hard I work or ask how I stay motivated because I’m aware it comes from a place of fear and anxiety instilled by the people I admire most and a society that does not view me as human. But I’m also not satisfied with the status quo right now, to work till death do you part. Especially when someone like Jeff Bezos can breathe and make thousands of dollars because he happened to get lucky being born into a family with loads of generational wealth. Immigrants should not have to arrive in America in search for a better life just for that “American Dream” to be constantly searching for a job and overworking themselves at every job to make sure they don’t lose it. It’s a huge violation of our humanity but since we digest this type of content all the time without even realizing it, it begins to taint our own values. And the immigrant working-class, who is most at risk, eats it up and regurgitates the same ideals to their own children. And it’s this exchange between parent and child which creates generations of workaholics at an early age like me.
Works Cited
O’Neill, Natalie. “Hero NYC Delivery Man Kept Pushing through Floodwater, Video Shows.” New York Post, New York Post, 3 Sept. 2021, nypost.com/2021/09/03/hero-nyc-delivery-man-kept-pushing-through-floodwater-video-shows/.
Weller, Christian E. “African Americans Face Systematic Obstacles to Getting Good Jobs.” Center for American Progress, 5 Dec. 2019, www.americanprogress.org/issues/economy/reports/2019/12/05/478150/african-americans-face-systematic-obstacles-getting-good-jobs/.
“Tiger Parenting.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 17 Sept. 2021, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiger_parenting.
Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Herder and Herder, 1972.
