so basically “the gifted kid” is a smokescreen for increasing and/or affirming white privilege/white supremacy?

i’m not the right person to explain this at great length, so i won’t, but—intelligence testing has a long and complicated relationship with classism and racism. gifted (and other sped) programs rely on that testing.

that’s as far as i’m willing to explain as a non-expert, lmao. if you want to know more, there’s about 573857 pages of research/opinions/documented personal experiences available for you to sift through, both within and outside of ‘academic’ circles. here’s an excerpt from the abstract of a case study on the topic:

“We show how gifted and talented status meets the criteria of white property interests and is defended by recourse to law and policy. Efforts to improve identification of students for gifted services reveal that the implicit operation of these Interests is an important reason why identification practices favoring white and middle-class children have been resistant to change. Dismantling underlying white property interests in gifted and talented identification is a necessary, though not sufficient step, toward a more just educational system.” [DOI]

i haven’t read this case study in full—i’m just using it to point out that this is a prominent, ongoing discussion. in my opinion, this should be a much larger part of the “former gifted kid” conversation, but alas

Into the Wild

When i was a kid in the 6th grade, we went on a field trip to Sly Park. It was one of those overnight, weekend, excursions into nature for hands-on learning. Being a poor ass black kid from the ghetto, this weekend trip was the closest thing to summer camp I'd ever experience. I hated it. I hated every f*cking minute of it. I'm not an outdoorsy kind of guy. I don't know I you know this about me, but I'm a little bit anti-social and a lot bit anti-nature. I hate fishing. I hate camping. I hate hiking. I hate hunting. I hate pooping in the raw. If there's no indoor plumbing or PlayStation, I don't want anything to do with it. I don't care for any of that. Also Bigfoots. These are my experiences trapped for three days, in my personal hell.

Sly Park is in the mountains of California. We all had to pile on a bus at, like 9 am and drive for three hours to this desolate as place in the middle of an old growth forest up there. It was cougar country. I know that for a fact because, when we got there, we had to sit on the bus for an extra hour while the sheriffs hunted down and shot one in the f*cking face. That was day one, hour zero. We hadn't even made it to orientation yet and mountain lion murder. If that's not a sign, I don't know what is.

That night, we shuffle into our cabins and choose bunk-mates or whatever. It was weird because there were f*cking sixteen-year-olds in charge of us. Who does that? Where the f*ck were the actual adults? I don't know if you know this about boys but, if you gt a bunch of us together, we kind of devolve into this Mad Max-esque, might is right, violence based society. Anyway, it was a bunch of dudes in this cabin running around playing grab ass and punch out. It was the gayest sh*t ever and I was done with it before it started. If you're going to tease a dude for wearing tight-whiteys, I feel like you got some sh*t to work out, yourself. I just sat in my bunk, drowning out the noise with the tacit tones of Az Yet and No Doubt, on my off-brand Walkman,.

Eventually, when it was time for lights out, the teenage overlords of our little lord of the flies troupe, told us not to the leave the cabin for the girl's hut or whatever because of the wild animals. No sh*t, dude. We all watched a mountain lion get it's sh*t pushed in the second we pulled up this morning. I didn't plan to go outside during the day, let alone at night when I can't even see sh*t. The f*ck is you saying? And, as if to drive my int home, our cabin got swarmed by bats that night. N*gga, wat.

You had to do some sh*t for learning or something because this was an educational trip, That we had to pay to go on. School had us hustle candy bars for a seat on that bus, it as ridiculous. I sold three boxes, pocketed the money for two, turned in the one, and was on my way. Each day was broken up into activities. I only remember two. The first was shelter building. These motherf*ckers broke us up into groups, led us into the f*cking bush, and told us to build a shelter with what we could find. I'm 11. I'm not a farmer. N*gga, i was just doing math worksheets, the f*ck you mean build a cabin? Need I remind you that, not only was there a wild ass cougar at your front door, yesterday, it had to be killed before we could even get of the bus and you got us out here exposed, in that motherf*ckers territory, talking about tepees and sh*t? Word? There were three of us in my group and we ended up just leaning a bunch of sticks on the side of a broken tree. Our shelter was whack, yo. We just wanted this sh*t to be over and back in a place with doors and deadbolts. The counselor tried to clown our effort but we were like, "N*gga we don't camp. We ain't survivalist. We sixth graders, you prick! Motherf*ckers is just trying to grasp integers and exponents, not f*cking brick work.”

Since everyone sucked at shelter building, we had to take the long hike back. That was an option that the asshole in charge decided to inflict upon us, literal children, because we're not f*cking carpenters. Tacked on an extra hour so we only had, like five minutes for lunch. It was f*cked up. The food was the only thing i liked about that place. I have an affinity for sh*tty food and it doesn't get much more sh*tty than school lunch. I miss crispitos and those round pizzas with the four pepperonis. And chocolate milk. I f*cking loved those Crystal chocolate milks. They had these catfish nuggets that were dope and unlimited chocolate milk. I was f*cking that milk up, man. They also had bomb ass cornbread and pancakes. Sh*t made me mad we couldn't get that mess at school.

The second activity was the killer hike. Now, this thing was infamous. It's infamy had been drilled into our heads for our entire elementary careers. Sh*t was seven miles, one way, downhill. It was f*cking treacherous. A dude i knew actually fell of the side around mile two. Half of it was like traversing this narrow path with sheer drops into manzanita and death, on either side. He was saved before plummeting to his oblivion, but he lost a Jordan to the cruel nature gods. Dude had gone out the day before so that sh*t made it back to us quick. We spent the entire night before trying to figure out how to get out of this bullsh*t. We didn't come up with any ideas. We resolved ourselves to death. That morning, we all lined up where they killed that cougar, and the counselors hyped everyone up with the promise of a surprise at the end of the hike. All of a sudden everyone was super hype to go on nightmare march. F*cking surprise better be incredible. It already cost one Jordan XI.

I walk this seven f*cking miles, looking at my idiot classmates and peers enjoying themselves, and I'm just straight up visibly morose. Like, quietly, aggressively, seething. Someone asks me what the f*ck was my problem and i ask him how does he think we're getting back to camp? I could see the gears in his brain clicking, slowly putting the sh*t together. Dude got wide eyed and immediately got as morose as i was. We had to walk that seven miles back, all f*cking uphill. No one had put that together. These f*cking idiots were running downhill, talking about surprise this and surprise that, and I'm just like, "Yeah, stupid, you're gonna get a surprise alright."

So we get to the end of this hike and the surprise is; a waterfall. It was a waterfall and a little stream with kind of a mild  current. Everyone was like, the f*ck? The counselors tell us we can swim and the entire f*cking class jumps in. I'm just standing there, hot. Counselor looks over and says, "What's the matter? you don't want to get wet?" No, b*tch, i can't swim. I just walked seven whole ass miles, in this California summer heat, just to WATCH someone else, have fun in the water. AND we still have the seven mile trek back, all uphill. F*ck, you! While everyone is splashing about, the counselors tell us there's gold in the stream and everyone starts looking. I can't, because of the drowning, so I just have to watch everyone engage in a literal treasure hunt. A girl I know finds an actual gold nugget. She took the deep dive and came up with the booty. We later found out it was worth about six hundred dollars in 1996 money. Bro, I blew a f*cking gasket.

I don't really remember what else happened, it was like twenty-five years ago, but I do remember having a bad time. It was the worst, for all of the reasons. Cougar murder, all of these unnecessary hikes, incredibly minimal interaction with the girls during the day, stupid boy hierarchy during the night; It's just counter intuitive to everything that I'm about. I don't know how kids do summer camp. I was only out there in a facsimile of that sh*t for three days and couldn't get on the bus home fast enough.