Individualism part 4
As long as I can remember the idea of collectivism has always appealed to me. The notion that we are deeply connected to each other and need each other has felt like a natural instinct. I can’t really recall if it was something that I was taught. I can’t recall a specific moment when it suddenly “felt right”. I do recall multiple encouragements to succeed at all costs, even if that means at the sacrifice of someone else.
I remember a teacher in elementary school telling me that if I really wanted to succeed I would need to stand out individually in sports to ever make it in the world. Not academics but athletics. I didn’t get encouragement around academics from teachers that often at all. That thankfully came from my parents.
For example, there was a teacher in elementary school that thought I should take a test to see if I should skip a grade because they thought I was too bored with the lessons and seemed to be ahead of others. (Side note: I took the test two years in a row and felt really confident in my answers and each time I was told I just missed the cutoff and I couldn’t see the results myself.) A few years later when I moved from one middle school to another middle school, the counselor at that school looked at my transcripts and saw that I had reading class and assumed I must need remedial classes. Despite the complaints from my parents and me, I was stuck in those classes. What the counselor missed was that I reading was an elective type of class and I chose to take it cause I loved to read. They assumes otherwise. When I got to high school, I and my parents had to sign a form that I was not taking the recommended remedial classes and defying their recommendations for harder classes. I remember the school official looking at me and saying that I’m taking a big risks and I should read the whole document before signing it because I’m jeopardizing my future. For the record, I did just fine and signed a form each year to get harder classes and remained doing well.
Obviously that experience stuck with me for a long time afterwards. I look back at it now and wonder, where was the collective support for me from these adults that were supposed to be helping me with my education. Why was individual success so important for others, but not me. There was a constant view that I was less than others and that my individual success could come through sports. Which, to be honest, I was good at multiple sports and loved to play so this encouragement was always felt conflicting in my body. However, in thinking about this narrative about individualism and self-reliance, self-determination, and individual liberty, the treatment I got doesn’t make sense unless you consider the role white supremacy and racism in American society.
There is a certain type of pressure for collectivism into the dominant white culture for many people of color, but not for many white people from my experience. However, that collectivism should not upset the powers that be.. You see it with the “shut up and dribble”, you can’t kneel in protest attacks, and now with the attack on voting rights and critical race theory. If an athlete or movie star speaks out they are told that they should “stay in their lane”. This brings me back to the initial quote from Tema Okun, “Our cultural attachment to individualism leads to a toxic denial of our essential interdependence and the reality that we are all in this, literally, together.”
At some point, I hope we must find a way to learn that we can’t keep going into this cycle of fear, defensiveness, individualism, either/or thinking, and more without dealing with our hard truths of systems that were formed with ideas of supremacy in mind. We would be much better off if we leaned into each other with some humility. As C.S. Lewis said, “True Humility Is Not Thinking Less of Yourself, It’s Thinking of Yourself Less.” Humility and collectivism doe not have to destroy individualism. It requires you to consider, what is good for us without self-sacrifice. As Nelson Mandela said, “There can be no greater gift than that of giving one’s time and energy to help others without expecting anything in return.”
