Double Bind

by Robin Romm

  This is how things get taken from you. Somewhere along the way, a seed was planted, and a part of me began to believe that maybe my accomplishments—academic degrees and published books—were not much more than a matter of luck or a helping hand. In my better moments, I knew that was stupid. But at times when I was feeling low, or vulnerable, or unsure of who I was anymore, the seed bloomed like ivy, threatening to strangle. At those times, I began to believe it: that I got what I got because of forces beyond my control, not because of any particular talent or skill or ambition, and certainly not because I deserved it.

  The other night I visited a book club—approximately twenty middle-age women who had read my novel and invited me to join them. We sat in the host’s beautiful living room with its stone fireplace, and ate candy corn and drank wine. After we discussed my book, one of the women asked me what I was working on next. I mentioned that I was trying to finish an essay about ambition. I said, “Do you all think you’re ambitious?”

  Immediately, a petite woman with red hair spoke up. “I absolutely think I’m ambitious.” She went on to tell the group how she had known, since she was twelve years old, that she wanted to be a lawyer, and how she let nothing stand in the way of achieving that goal. She told us about her daughter, who she described as driven, and who had just been accepted to a prestigious PhD program. “Have you had explicit conversations with her,” I asked, “about her own ambition? About claiming it?” Yes, the woman told me. She paused. “But I’m of an age now where I want grandchildren,” she said almost apologetically, “and I would like them before I’m too old to do anything with them.” The rest of the women nodded. I could see where this was going. All along, she’d been sending her daughter one message, and now she didn’t want to send a second—one about how she hoped her daughter would take time to start a family—that seemed counter to the first.

  “But maybe we’re too limited in our definition of ambition,” another woman said. “I had a lot of ambition, but I didn’t necessarily succeed in anything I did. I failed at most of it, but I still consider myself ambitious.”

  Can failure be part of ambition, too? All along I had been thinking that achievement was the end point. I thought of ambition, I realized, like a curve on a graph where desire was the point of origin, striving was a sweep upward in the middle, and achievement was the result. But maybe I’d been thinking about it wrong.

  Another woman said, “I don’t know. I wanted to stay home with my kids, so I turned my ambition toward them. My kids are older now, but I remember back then worrying that by staying home with them I was putting aside my ambition. But now the way I see it is that I just redirected it.”

  “I think that’s true,” someone else said. “And I think that’s the difference between men and women. Men measure ambition by their professional achievements, whereas women measure it by how much of a difference they’ve made in the world.”

  “Exactly,” another woman offered. “I don’t think of it as ambition so much as passion.”

  “Like finding your purpose.”

  “Right. And going after it.”

  I smiled. Here we were, dancing around the word again, only now we were all doing the dance together. It was a slippery concept for everyone, apparently, one that was hard to get a handle on. And yet, as I sat there among these women, I felt a certain clarity that I hadn’t before. Maybe it was something they had said, or maybe it was because I had spent so much time in the weeks leading up to that moment considering ambition and scrutinizing it, untangling all of my associations with the word. I thought about how, not long before, I had asked everybody I knew whether they saw me as ambitious. But I didn’t need anyone or anything else, I realized—not a person, not a book deal, not a paycheck—to tell me what I already knew. I do want things—sometimes I want all the things—and often those things feel out of reach, but I stretch my arms out for them regardless, in my way. My ambition was there, and it had always been there, subdued at some times and thunderous at others, but never absent. I only needed to look within myself to see it.

  The conversation went on for a while, but near the end of it one of the women threw the question back at me. “Do you think you’re ambitious?” she asked.

  I turned to her. “Yes,” I answered without hesitation. “I think I am.”

  Becoming Meta

  HAWA ALLAN

  A noun is the proper denotation for a thing. I can say that I have things: for instance that I have a table, a house, a book, a car. The proper denotation for an activity, a process, is a verb: for instance I am, I love, I desire, I hate, etc. Yet ever more frequently an activity is expressed in terms of having; that is, a noun is used instead of a verb. But to express an activity by to have in connection with a noun is an erroneous use of language, because processes and activities cannot be possessed; they can only be experienced.

  —ERICH FROMM, To Have or to Be?

  I have been to a few Madonna concerts in my day, so I may or may not have been straining to get a view around the pillar planted in front of my discount seat when I beheld the superstar kick up into a forearm stand in the middle of the stage. For non-initiates, a “forearm stand” is a yoga pose wherein you balance your entire body on your forearms—lain parallel to one another on the ground, and perpendicular to your upper arms, torso, and legs, all of which are inverted skyward. Imagine turning your body into an “L.” And then imagine Madonna doing the same, except spotlighted before thousands of gaping fans in a large arena.

  I hadn’t done any yoga at that point, so the irony of Madonna flaunting her ability in a discipline meant to induce inner awareness was totally lost on me. I just thought it was cool. Precisely, I interpreted Madonna’s forearm stand as a demonstration of power—power that was quiet yet fierce. An expression of power that I immediately decided I wanted to embody. So, not too long thereafter, I went ahead and enrolled in a series of free, introductory lessons at yoga studios across Manhattan and Brooklyn. My modus operandi: take advantage of the introductory classes and skip to another studio (once I no longer had a discounted pass). I was doing this, I told myself at the time, to test out different teachers—to find “the right fit.” In hindsight, I can see that this was just an excuse for being itinerant and cheap.

  In any case, I had a fair amount of time to shuttle between boroughs. My schedule was relatively flexible because I was in my second year of law school. Of course, with law school being law school, my schedule was not absolutely flexible, just relatively—relative, that is, to the circulation-cutting constraints of my first year, which is both notoriously and actually all-consuming. I hadn’t seen any of the films you are supposed to watch before your first day of law school, the ones in which some curmudgeon badgers you with cryptic questions and cleverly insults you as you strain to answer them amid the muffled chuckles of your peers. In my experience, all institutional education was rife with illegitimate authority and bullying, so I didn’t see why law school should be especially different. If anything, I was up for the challenge. I was quietly determined.

  My quiet determination, mind you, had very little to do with the subject at hand. Of course, I cared deeply about injustice, which, unlike the lofty concept of “justice,” was down to earth and concrete—evident in the myriad of detrimental effects that structural inequality was having on actual human beings who lived in the real world—and, moreover, I thought law school would provide the practical tools to upend injustice. However, as it turned out, I just didn’t care very much about the law. A “tort,” as far as I’d ever known before that first year, referred to a kind of cake. And subjects like constitutional law, which were, to me, less esoteric and more pertinent to eradicating “injustice,” were systematically drained of all intrigue by the sheer volume of material we were expected to retain.

  My charge that first year was not to think and critique, but to memorize and regurgitate. There was no time to consider what the law should or might be, only to apprehend what it was, and then dutifully
apply it to a hypothetical fact pattern while ignoring my moral compass. Throughout this experience, I fully grasped the meaning of that saying about the unpleasantness of sausage factories. “Justice” was no longer an abstract concept. “Justice” was sausage. “Justice sausage,” moreover, was oft composed of the dismembered carcasses of injustice; but once we students arduously cranked it through this elaborate machine, we were too exhausted by the process to question the fairness of the outcome. (Burning crosses, for example, was totally constitutional, a protected form of free speech, even—as long as you burned them on your own lawn.) And so, for many, the legal process in and of itself came to justify the result, whatever it happened to be. I watched many a fellow student transform from a sentient being into an android that spouted legal precedent on demand.

  My growing distaste for the law notwithstanding, I still wanted to do very well. So, I suspended disbelief and went with the program. I tagged textbook pages with fine-point pens. I dropped the holdings of cases into classroom mics. Like a dutiful subject of colonial education, I imbibed and disgorged. In the end, my results that year were mostly in the B+ range. I was told that I had done “very well,” as we were all graded on a strict curve. But I was appalled. I’d studied harder than I ever had—all the while denying myself an active social life and lugging around brick-thick books and rainbow packs of highlighters in an unflattering purple Jansport—just for a bunch of B-pluses? I thought this was unacceptable. I would have to do much better the next year. I was quietly determined.

  “Education is transformational. It changes lives,” former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has said. “That is why people work so hard to become educated and why education has always been the key to the American Dream.” I found this quotation in Think and Grow Rich for Women—a female spin on the 1937 motivational classic by Napoleon Hill, who studied successful businessmen of his day and distilled their secrets into a subset of principles anyone could presumably follow toward his dreams. (I’m not using “he,” “him,” and “his” loosely here, merely indicating the target audience of the time.)

  The 2014 version for women features Rice’s quote in a chapter titled “Specialized Knowledge”—one of Hill’s promulgated steps to success. The chapter title implies that a deep knowledge of one’s subject area or corner of her profession gives her a wide lead in the rat race. However, though Hill points out in the original text that all employers value specialists, he spends the rest of the chapter dismissing the intrinsic value of knowledge. Knowledge, Hill says, is only useful insofar as it translates into some tangible—i.e., monetary—value. He illustrates the insufficiency of mere knowledge by noting that, while university faculties possess “practically every form of general knowledge known to civilization . . . [m]ost of the professors have but little or no money.”

  So, knowledge, for Hill, is a means and hardly an end in itself. And specialized knowledge is not gleaned solely to deepen one’s understanding of any given subject, but to capture a niche in the marketplace. Specialized knowledge, moreover, is a commodity that can be bought or sold. Hill illustrated this point with automobile magnate Henry Ford. Having filed a libel claim against a newspaper for publishing editorials that called him “ignorant,” Ford—testifying in court—became frustrated when he found himself unable to answer basic questions about U.S. history. Ford eventually went on the offensive, telling his cross examiner: “I have a row of electric push-buttons on my desk, and by pushing the right button, I can summon to my aid men who can answer ANY question I desire to ask concerning the business to which I am devoting most of my efforts.” Why then, Ford continued, should he “clutter up” his mind to answer “foolish” questions when he could just order the men around him to do so.

  Hill referred to the consortium of men Ford had at his fingertips as a “Master Mind” group—a collective of informed peers with whom one could brainstorm and strategize, or, for Ford, who were hired to know things that he didn’t want to know. Former President George W. Bush must have considered Rice to be a master mind. “One summer day in 1999, Condi, Laura and I were hiking on the ranch. As we started to climb up a steep grade, Condi launched into a discourse on the history of the Balkans,” Bush wrote in his 2010 memoir Decision Points. “Laura and I are huffing and puffing. Condi kept going, explaining the disintegration of Yugoslavia and the rise of Milosevic . . . I decided that if I ended up in the Oval Office, I wanted Condi Rice by my side.”

  It’s all well and good that specialized knowledge can put one in a coveted position of being an indispensable advisor—one who can supply knowledge that is in demand. However, what is missing from Hill’s discussion of this knowledge is how one gets to be in the position of a George W. Bush or Henry Ford. In other words, Hill doesn’t tell you how you get to be the one who does not have to know.

  At some point during my second year of law school, I availed myself of a discount membership to the campus gym and enrolled in an Iyengar class that counterbalanced my yoga-hopping. Iyengar is a school of yoga that emphasizes the precise alignment of one’s body when doing an asana, or a pose. A stern woman with long black hair who was more like a stereotypical law professor than any of my actual law professors taught the class. She reprimanded me for whispering for help from my neighbors. She wondered aloud about whether my voluminous box braids would impede my practice. When we all stood our backs against the wall with arms raised, she pushed my own biceps in line with my ears, pooh-poohing my alarm when we both heard something in my upper back crunch. She was intense.

  My law school classes, by contrast, seemed far less challenging. This was due, in part, to my ability to select course subjects, which were a welcome substitute for the mandatory curriculum of my first year. However, the load—the bulk of information that I had to stuff into my head—was comparable. If this portion of the essay were a film montage, Madonna’s Don’t Tell Me to Stop would be playing in the background, its acoustic guitar alternately lilting and stuttering as I struggled to hold an asana, then streaked textbook pages with a neon pink highlighter, then raised my hand in class to mouth an answer that was inaudible behind the music but appeared to be correct as, after a pregnant pause, I smiled to myself in response to some off-camera validation. This kind of sequence would repeat with some variation, the key difference being that I would hold the asanas with seemingly less effort. Also interspersed in this sequence would be some shots of me hanging out with college friends somewhere in downtown Manhattan, as I was also going out incessantly during this period. You would not, however, spot a purple Jansport in any of the frames, as I wisely shed it for a more fashionable tote.

  Suffice it to say that, by the end of my second year, I earned almost all A’s.

  There was more to Rice’s quote in Think and Grow Rich for Women. She declared that education “erases arbitrary divisions of race and class and culture and unblocks every person’s God-given potential.” Rice’s mother and father, a schoolteacher and college administrator, respectively, instilled in their only child the importance of education. Born in Birmingham, Alabama, about six months after the Brown v. Board of Education decision, Rice was afforded as many advantages as her parents could afford. She started piano lessons at the age of three and moved on to take lessons in ballet, flute, violin, ice-skating, tennis, and French by her adolescence. Her parents relocated to Colorado, where Rice attended a racially integrated school for the first time and eventually enrolled into the University of Denver at age fifteen. After getting a master’s degree in international relations at Notre Dame, she became a professor at Stanford and went on to become the youngest, first black, and first female provost.

  During Rice’s tenure as a professor, a graduate student she was advising had tried to discuss racism he was experiencing over the course of his studies. “She never allowed me to have that discussion in any extended way,” now Carnegie Mellon University Professor Kiron Skinner said, adding that Rice seemed to believe what she was saying, but kept refocusing Skinner on h
er work. “She was very young—maybe thirty-two—but she was thinking about it as a military general. I remember she said, ‘If you don’t prevail on one front, you move to another.’ ” Rice is, after all, a realist—in international relations terminology, one who believes states are like rational actors that only take action to further their respective self-interest and self-preservation.

  Rice’s move in her twenties from the Democratic to the Republican Party is often framed as her disagreement with then President Jimmy Carter’s foreign policy or due to the refusal of the erstwhile Democratic Party to register her father to vote during Jim Crow. However, the motivation for Rice’s shift was personal as well as political: She’d grown disgusted by what she viewed as the Democratic Party’s condescending attitude toward “minorities.” As Rice also once said of her lateral move to the right, “I decided that I’d rather be ignored than patronized.”

  I have only a vague memory of the time before I became aware of my relationship to knowledge—or before I became meta, as they say. Both of my parents are professors and were each, as I was oft reminded, typically at the top of their classes during their upbringing in colonial Sierra Leone. So, I must have known that knowledge was important. But I didn’t have any distance from what I thought I knew; I was simply immersed in it. Throughout first grade, I would watch programs like Nova and write little impromptu “book” reports on what I’d learned. My teacher would accept these missives carefully handwritten on wide-ruled paper, her face drawn with what I now recognize as world-weary bemusement. I, on the other hand, was very excited to share all the new things that I’d come to know.