THE ENVY OF The World by Ellis Cose

Author:Ellis Cose
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: POCKET BOOKS
Published: 2002-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

When I was working on The Rage of a Privileged Class, I interviewed scores of college students and graduates, many from exclusive schools, who talked bitterly of the condescension rampant in their universities, of the presumptions of inadequacy they had been forced to overcome, of having teachers, administrators, and fellow students question, generally subtly, whether they were capable of the work the university required. While such patronizing behavior and unintended racial slights were not the defining elements of their college days, many encountered enough of both to mar their entire educational experience.

The accounts rang true not only because so many told stories that were so similar, but because they took me back to a point when I was in my twenties and had decided to study management. At the time, I already had a master’s degree in science and public policy and had been an op-ed page columnist and reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times for a number of years. I had also worked briefly as an editor and was toying with the idea of a management career. Since I was living in Washington, D.C., and already had one degree from George Washington University, I consulted an administrator in their business school about enrolling in their MBA program. To my astonishment, he immediately launched into a monologue, the essence of which was: Before you can seriously consider getting an MBA here, you first have to make a decent score on the GMAT (a standardized test for business schools). Since I had never seen a standardized test on which I could not do better than 95-plus percent of whites, it had never occurred to me that I might not make GWU’s relatively low cutoff score. So as the man rattled on about the test, I found myself getting angrier, until, fed up with his lecture on passing the test and what I considered to be his patronizing attitude, I politely cut him off.

As I walked home and reflected on the conversation, I became angrier by the minute. How dare he assume I couldn’t ace that stupid test! How dare he disregard all my accomplishments! How dare he turn a simple request for information into a question about my academic abilities!

Truth is, there may have been absolutely no racial assumptions behind his comments. For all l know, he might have given that same little lecture to a comparable white would-be MBA student. But somehow I doubt it, just as I doubt the validity of the argument, fashionable in conservative circles, that affirmative action created the attitude among certain whites that blacks might not be quite up to speed. I can say, from personal experience, that attitude existed well before affirmative action became such a popular conservative whipping boy.

Some years ago, broadcast journalist Charlie Rose asked me whether I had been discriminated against, whether my race had resulted in my life somehow being worse than it otherwise might have been. I told him that I could not be sure whether my life was worse, only that it was different than it would have been if I had been white.

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