This week we present two stories of people who struggled fitting in.
Part 1: After switching majors to anthropology, Edith Gonzalez struggles to dress like an archaeologist.
Edith Gonzalez is an Assistant Professor of Archaeology at University of Buffalo, studying bio-prospecting and experimental agriculture in the 18th-century, English-speaking Caribbean. She, like many archaeologists, has a slight obsession with LotR, loves 70's disco-dancing, is committed to seeing LeVar Burton become the permanent host of Jeopardy!
Part 2: At seven years old, Brianna A. Baker gets confronted with some uncomfortable realities of being the only Black girl in her class.
Brianna A. Baker (she/her/hers) is a second-year doctoral student in the Counseling Psychology Ph.D. program at Columbia University. Born and raised in North Carolina, she graduated from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with an undergraduate degree in Psychology and African American Community Health and Resilience. Currently, she is a Health Equity Strategist at Takeda Pharmaceuticals where she uses her expertise to promote community engagement and diversify clinical research. Her research interests include sociopolitical determinants of mental health, positive Black youth development, and ameliorating sociohistorical racial trauma through community-focused program development.
Episode Transcript
Part 1: Edith Gonzalez
My kitten heels went clickety-clickety-click down the industrial green hallways of Hunter College. I had just come from my very fancy job in a boutique on Madison Avenue. It was the early 1990s. I want you to picture the really mean sales girls in Pretty Woman who would not serve Julia Roberts. That was my job.
And I was running to get to the chair of the anthropology department's office. Even though it was after hours, he frequently stayed late, Dr. Bates, because I wanted him to sign off on my paperwork to be admitted into the accelerated master's degree program for archaeology. And I was running down the hallway.
Now, I really wanted to be in this program because I had spent the summer excavating a site in Brooklyn, after not telling my parents that I had switched my major from chemistry pre-med to anthropology, because, if you're a first-generation college student from a working-class family, there are only like four majors you can have. Like accounting and pre-med and maybe you can go for a nursing degree or to teach, but anthropology is not on that list.
So I'm booking down the hallway and I realized the only job you can get, in my mind, as an anthropologist is to be a professor. And to be a professor, you need a PhD. And to get a PhD, you need a master's degree. I think. I don't know. I've never really known anybody who has a PhD before.
So I bang on his door and my little heels are silent. I have my Chanel red lipstick on. I'm ready for him. The door flies open and out comes this cloud of unfiltered cigarette smoke and cheap red wine fumes and condescension.
Edith Gonzalez shares her story with the Story Collider audience at Caveat in New York City in August 2021. Photo by Zhen Qin.
And I present him the sheaf of paperwork that he just needs to sign off on for me to get admitted into this program. He holds all the power here. As I extend it towards him, he gives me this up and down look and looks at the cover sheet as it's coming towards him and he doesn't quite take it. He just pushes it back towards me and says, “You have too many credits,” and closes the door.
He's right. Because in order to apply for this program, you're supposed to do it in the first semester of your sophomore year, and I am in the middle of my junior year at this point. But I don't really see a way around it, because I don't have the funds and wherewithal to do a full master's program. I need to do this one that is accelerated because of practical, working-class things. I only have enough money to pursue it if I can do it in this very narrow time frame.
Most people would think, “Well, hey. How about a student loan?” But for Puerto Rican people, borrowing money from the government rates up there with being a serial killer or a child pornographer or being mean to your mother.
So I stomp off down the hall, regroup, and I decide to go back. I have Tuesdays off from my fancy job. I decide to go back on a Tuesday when I'm working in the lab.
I go in first thing in the morning, so I know he has not yet been drinking, with my little sheaf of paperwork. I'm dressed like the rest of the— in sort of the anthropology dude-bro grad student uniform of the early ‘90s, which is ripped jeans and Chuck Taylors and some really soft, faded, grungy flannel that you just picked up from some outdoor festival show laying in the mud somewhere.
So I go into his office first thing in the morning and the door is open, like welcoming. Welcome. I walk in and he's behind his desk, still smoking but clearly not drunk yet, and I hand him this sheaf of paperwork. And I'm ready. I'm ready to argue my case and to defend my scholastic aptitude.
I give it to him and, without really looking at me, he just signs it and hands it back. I was like, “Oh, what just happened?”
And I think he has no idea that I'm the person who was here last week. That must be it.
So I get accepted into this program. It's supposed to take two years. Like I said, I don't have the money to get a regular master's degree, but I also don't have the money to do a two-year program. I'm going to have to do this in one year with a full-time job.
So I begin the most grueling year of my life in which I sleep four hours a night to grind it out. I get through the summer program. I get through the first semester. I get through the winter program, sending in all my PhD school program applications and taking studying and taking the GRE, which, by the way, I got a perfect score on the GRE, if we're going to talk about overachievers.
But by the time I get to the last semester, I'm so burned out that I can barely function and get to my job. I realize that the very last class I have is this intense theoretical— it's an all-anthropological theory class with Professor Bates. I have to pass this class or else I won't graduate and then I won't be admitted into my PhD program.
The semester starts and I'm like, “Okay, Edith. You can do this. You just got to hang on for another 15 weeks. You can gut it out.”
It's a seminar class so that means there are seven students in the class. I'm one. And there are the six sort of uniformed dude-bro anthropology graduate student guys, beard optional. So I go in there and the way the class works is there are readings every week and each student does a presentation of that week's readings as when it's your turn.
I quickly sign up to go first. I love to go first in things. To go first because I know I'll still have energy at the beginning of the semester. So I do my presentations right at the beginning of the class and as the semester progresses, I begin to fall behind on the readings when other people are presenting.
If I haven't done the readings, my strategy is sort of to just nod or take lots and lots of notes because in my mind I'm imagining that, eventually, I'm going to have time to read these readings. But that becomes this sort of faint and distant dream as the semester continues.
At first, I'm still trying to keep my class participation going. I ask questions that are met by the other students in this class, especially this guy Matthew, with derision. Like why am I asking such a simple question and how stupid must I be that I don't understand this basic concept.
And when they begin to do slide presentations, I will frequently put my hand on my chin and fall asleep.
As the semester progresses, Professor Bates lets us know that we don't have to write a paper for this class. At first, I was really excited by that notion, but then he says we're going to have an in-class final exam in those little blue books, like they used to have in olden times, with a pencil.
And I'm thinking, “Holy crap! Okay.” I think I had a momentary like I just blocked it out of my memory because there was just no way that I'd be able to ever catch up with the readings.
As it's getting closer to exam date, he lets us know that we will have to answer one question. Now, I'm really beginning to panic because I've done maybe 30% of the readings. I just don't know how I'm going to be able to answer anything well enough to pass the class.
So I decide that a couple days before the final, I will just cram. I will just go to the library and get that box of reserved readings and I will just cram as much of this into my head as I possibly can.
And throughout the semester, as I've been sort of meekly hiding amongst these dude-bros, I have been sort of disguising myself because I never wanted Professor Bates to connect me back to that first girl that he saw in his office with the Chanel lipstick and the kitten heels. So I have been rushing from work to wash my face and put on my anthro grad student uniform to blend in.
I'm sort of just nowhere in this. I'm feeling like I don't— I'm trying to remember why the hell am I doing this in the first place. It's exhausting and awful.
Edith Gonzalez shares her story with the Story Collider audience at Caveat in New York City in August 2021. Photo by Zhen Qin.
As I get up to the day of the final, turns out I couldn't take time off from work. Even on the very day of the final when I was supposed to be off for the whole day, I actually had to work in the morning. So about an hour before, I managed to escape work and I run to the library and I get this big box of the folders of all the readings.
I start flipping through them and there's just no way in an hour that I can read 60% of the coursework. In this moment of exhaustion, all of the extraneous information just kind of fell away and I had a flash of brilliance.
“What did Professor Bates say at any point during the semester,” is the question I asked myself. And I was like he gave one talk about kinship.
Now, in anthropological theory, kinship is the system by which we name the people to whom we are related, either by blood or by marriage. And you can tell a person's closeness to you based on how you name them, how you call them.
So I pull out this folder on kinship and I begin to read how Leslie Spier in 1925 determined that there are six forms of human kinship. There are Sudanese, Iroquois, Hawaiian, Eskimo, Omaha and Crow. And I'm like, “Fine. I can learn that in an hour.”
And I dig in and I learn the kinship systems. I study the little kinship charts thinking I only have to remember this for the next three hours. And I go running to the classroom, clicking along, because I've come straight from work and I haven't had time to change into my anthro grad student uniform.
I walk in with my Chanel lipstick and my very cute Calvin Klein dove gray slip dress, some sling backs and the dudes are like, “What happened to you?”
Bates doesn't comment and he passes out the little blue books and he passes out the question and the question is, “Describe the six known kinship systems.” I'm like, “Yes!”
I flip open the little book and, everyone, they're frantically writing in the book, and I write the sentence, “The six known kinship systems in human society are Sudanese, Iroquois, Hawaiian, Eskimo, Omaha, and Crow.
Then I realize I don't need to write an essay. I can just draw the diagrams. So I draw the little diagrams, takes me ten minutes, and I walk up to Professor Bates with my little book.
And as I walk up to him, I realize that this entire semester that I have been hiding, he's known all along exactly who I am. And when I give him the book he says, “Edith, do you have a question?”
I said, “No.”
And he opens the book and he flips through my six pages, and he closes it and he said, “That's A-plus work. Have a great summer.”
So I turned and as I'm clickety-clacking my way out of the classroom, I stop to adjust the slingback of my shoe, and I hear Matthew, Asshole Matthew in the class go, “You're done?” He starts to scream at me. “You're done? How can you be finished?”
And Bates says, “How are you not?”
Part 2: Brianna A. Baker
I want you all to picture 2004 in rural North Carolina where I was born and raised. I'm from a very small town. I think maybe it had about 6,000 people at the time and about 80% to 90% of those people were white. So, as you can imagine, it was a very lonely experience.
In the south, they separate children based on if you are a smart kid or a dumb kid. Luckily, I was labeled a smart kid. That meant that my classroom racial makeup was basically as white as the walls. But it didn't matter because I enjoyed school.
I was seven years old in 2004 and about in second grade, and I loved school. I really liked it. I got so excited for the first day of school, picking out my outfits, going back-to-school shopping. All that kind of stuff really excited me. I loved reading and writing and, at one point, I even enjoyed math. It's crazy.
Everything was great. I had a lot of friends. I was very well adjusted in the school setting. Things were going really well until, one day, my friend Ashley, she was blonde. She was pretty. She was perfect. Decided that she was going to hand out the invitations to her birthday party during our reading circle. And what a reading circle is is basically all of these squirmy little second graders get around in a circle on the carpet and we read together.
So it was a very big deal that she got this special permission to hand out these birthday party invitations in the middle of the school day in the middle of the reading circle. So you knew it was a big deal.
Brianna K. Baker shares her story with the Story Collider audience at Caveat in New York City in September 2021. Photo by Zhen Qin.
We're all sitting around, probably around 15 kids sitting in the circle and Ashley stands up in the middle. She starts announcing the details of this birthday party and she's like, “This year, I'm turning eight years old, which means I'm having a sleepover.”
And I'm like, “Oh, my God. This is great!” I've only been to one sleepover in my life. It was actually a half sleepover where you put on your pajamas and you act like you're going to sleep over but then your parents pick you up.
I'm so excited for a real sleepover because I know that this is like real eight-year-old stuff, you know? I'm ready to take this on. And I'm just bursting with excitement at the idea of going to this party.
She's wearing this like purple dress. She's standing in the center of the reading circle. She has a little brown satchel bag that she starts pulling off these glittery pink invitations. At this point, I'm just like, “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, oh my God.”
She starts pulling off invitations and she hands them off one by one to our peers. All the girls in the class are supposed to receive an invitation. So she hands one to Olivia and she hands one to Elizabeth and then to Savannah until they're all gone. I'm sitting there kind of confused because I'm empty-handed and I should have an invitation but I don't.
But I'm not alarmed because me and Ashley are really good friends. So I'm like, “You know what? I bet she's going to give one to me very special way, maybe after school or something. She didn't forget about me, of course, because we're friends. Me and Ashley are really good friends.”
So now the class is starting to line up for recess and I'm like, “Okay. I can't wait till after school to ask her. I'm just going to ask her now. I need this invitation. I'm really excited to go.”
So I go up to her. She's still standing. I get up and I'm like, “Hey, Ashley,” she has her back turned to me. No response.
Okay. Maybe she didn't hear me. “Ashley.” Still nothing. Okay.
I tap her on the shoulder hoping that I can physically grab her attention and I'm like, “Ashley, what about my invitation?”
And she does this little like sly heel turn to me and she's like, “Oh, my dad said I can't invite black people to my party because they're yucky. Okay?”
“Okay.”
She said it with such confidence that I felt like I had to accept it. And I was so confused at the succession of these words ‘black’ and ‘yucky’. She said them like they were one and the same, like I should know inherently that black people are yucky.
But I'm also confused because I'm black, right? But I didn't know that black was so painful. And I didn't know that black meant being yucky. I'm just so confused. My chest is starting to get very tight, but I also know I can't challenge a white person on something related to race. I can't speak about race because this is 2004 and colorblindness is the mentality. We don't talk about race.
So we go to recess and we play, because that's what I'm supposed to do. I don't know if I have permission to bring up this race thing that really just hurt me, but I'm seven years old so I don't know.
When we get back into the classroom, I'm still feeling this weird stomach-knot feeling. My chest is still tight. I'm still feeling like I'm in pain.
I remember looking to the teacher who was in earshot of the conversation that Ashley and I had had where she said that I was yucky, I looked at the teacher and I'm just hoping that somehow she'll be able to understand and decipher and uncode what is going on with me internally because I am distressed. I had never heard black people being called yucky before and I didn't know what that meant for myself.
But the teacher didn't say anything. So that's when I learned that maybe I shouldn't either, and I just kept it inside.
Now, I study something called racial identity development where we call that first experience with racism an encounter. And now I know that that's what I had. It's basically when a black child realizes that they're going to be treated unfairly or as sub-human, as inferior to their white counterparts based on the color of their skin. And for black children, that happens as early as three to four years old. But for white people, they may never have to reckon with what it means to be white in America.
That experience happened to me over and over and over again, but I never talked about them because I didn't know what to say. And I really didn't know if I was allowed to talk about the fact that I was being hurt at school by classmates who wanted to exclude me or throw things at me or mess with my hair. I just kept it all inside.
By middle school, gone was that girl who loved school so much, the one who was so excited for back-to-school. In middle school, I dreaded school. I hated it. There was two years that I didn't look in the mirror, if I could help it, because I hated what I saw. I hated this hair that seemed to defy gravity even though I tried to fry it into a crisp so that it would stay down. I hated my skin because it was so dark and so dirty and those words of yucky stuck with me for so long.
The kids would make fun of me all the time. They would say that my body, because I was even thinner and more frail than I am now, they would say but I look like a crack addict, which is funny because Ashley, who had a similar build but happened to be white, was somehow a model.
Middle school was rough, to say the least. There was one time I remember sitting at my desk completely unprovoked doing my work and there was this class-clown type kid roaming around the classroom doing whatever. Teachers didn't care.
He comes up to me and he goes, “Hey, Brie, I know you're always trying to be white but the whitest thing about you will always be the ash on your legs.”
I just took it because at this point I had learned that that's what I had to accept as my life and what I had to go about the world knowing and understanding and feeling about myself, this hatred that I had for myself.
When I was 12 years old, I walked around like I was the ugliest thing that could have possibly been created. I remember I used to pray at night to God and ask him if he could just right this wrong in creating me because, surely, he meant to design something better.
I think that in middle school it's safe to say that I was clinically depressed. My parents had started to notice when I couldn't keep up with my hygiene as well as I should have been and I started failing in school and not being able to keep up in my classes.
They would say things like, “What's wrong with you? How do you think this makes us look?”
I wanted to let them know that I was trying as hard as I could but my parents had moved from predominantly black spaces to this white neighborhood to give us better opportunities, so I'm sure it felt like a slap in the face. But I was hurting so bad. I was trying so hard.
But I couldn't say that because, in the black community, especially then, we didn't talk about depression. Definitely not in childhood. I had everything that I needed in theory. My parents loved me. They gave me everything I needed, but it was so hard to go about the school day where we spend most of our time as children, feeling this incredible weight of being black and not even knowing who to talk to or how to express what I was feeling. And, mind you, this had been happening since 2004.
In high school, my depression and anxiety turned into something a little bit different. It's what we call high-functioning depression anxiety. Somehow, I still managed to do well on standardized tests, because I had failed middle school, but my standardized test scores had allowed me to still be in honors courses in high school. In high school I decided that it was going to be academic achievement that would distance me the most from my blackness that I tried so hard to shed and run from.
So, In high school I would take on a bunch: five AP classes, three varsity sports, student body president. I'm trying to do it all because black people don't do that, right? The black kids are the ones who are sitting in detention and silent lunch, but I'm going to be the one that can lead. I'm going to be the one that can do all of these things at once. And then people are going to start to notice me as Brie and not black Brie and I can finally be myself.
But of course that didn't work either, because when you live life trying to defy a stereotype, you'll never be enough.
High school was a lot as well. There were times where I would cry myself to sleep and be like I want to go to prom but I know none of these white boys are going to ask me, so I just have to act like I don't want to go.
Brianna K. Baker shares her story with the Story Collider audience at Caveat in New York City in September 2021. Photo by Zhen Qin.
High school was really rough as well but things changed for me about four days before my high school graduation. We had an assignment in my English class where we had to write about any topic and present it to the class. It was a three-page essay on anything we wanted. It was called ‘This I Believe’. I think that, knowing who I was, I wrote it weeks in advance on musical theater or something like that. I don't know.
But four days before my high school graduation, I learned that Kalief Browder, a black man who allegedly stole a backpack, had been sentenced to years of solitary confinement. He killed himself when he got out.
And I remember getting that news. My peers, of course, thought nothing of it. I don't even know if they know who Kalief Browder is today, to be honest. But I remember reading this article on him and thinking to myself, “Wow. I see myself in him.” And the fact that he chose death over being a young black person in America says something.
That story really stuck with me and I think that it was then that the wheels in my head started turning and the puzzle pieces started getting put together about black mental health and what it means to be black in this society, in this context, especially for me. I hadn't had a black teacher in my life. I didn't even get black classmates until college so my life was very, very, very white.
I started to think were there chains on my mind that prevented me from living and thinking and emoting as freely as my white peers? Were my thoughts being challenged by forces that were out of my control, such as oppression and racism? Was none of this my fault? Was there something outside? Because, for years, I had been blaming Brie. Something's wrong with Brie.
So during that time I decided to write my essay on the beauty of blackness, something I don't think I've ever acknowledged before that point. Because I had to think to myself how beautiful are we to continue shining despite all of this adversity that we face? And how strong are we to continue putting up with these white folk?
I presented that essay to my peers. I lost a lot of friends after. I realized that our politics were not the same. But I gained some incredible allies as well.
Now, I'm a PhD student. I study counseling psychology and mental liberation, helping others achieve what I achieved, but hoping they don't have to go through years and years and years of trauma like I did, especially in the school system.
Because of COVID, I got to go back to that school district in North Carolina. And this summer, I started a program around mental health and social justice for girls and young women of color, that same school district where I had had so many traumatic experiences. And man, helping those girls find this radical self-love and acceptance, watching them realize that they are capable, it just gives me back the life that I feel like was stolen from me back in 2004.
My mental health journey is still being written, but I'm so in love with where it's going. Thank you.