Educational profiling

SIDE BAR: My coreopsis started to bloom and they were jamming friday night on radio disney at 8pm

Profiling is a strange and tricky subject. We are all profiled in certain ways. Women are often profiled. I can only imagine what it may be like to walk in a bar or happy hour and see al these goons starring at specified apportionments of ones anatomy over ones eyes. Now don’t get me wrong. I mean I attend to observations that outline in layman terms as a phat azz azz, and that such will leave an imprint as operationalized by Konrad Lorenz and his work with Graylag Geese, but I don’t have to gawk for the eyes are even more so appropriate to gaze into as well as show value and respect.

Then there is what I am familiar with, racial profiling. I get this all the time, not just by twelve, but people also. They look at my face and proceed to think I maintain the possibility of a criminal disposition. They see my hair and are even brazen enough to ask if I sell weed or if I am a musician. Even worse, they ask if they can touch it as if they were petting a goat in the public zoo.

Believe it or not I can deal wit he later, but there is one type of profiling that slides well subaltern the radar. I have decided to call it educational profiling. As a man, a man of African descent, I have been blessed to obtain what many would consider the highest merit in Academia – a terminal degree. If I am not in one of the times when I tell them I do construction work, I sometimes say I am an infectious disease specialist, an associate professor with a PHD in the appropriate discipline.

Sometimes their look alters, but from that moment on, when a person find out I have a PHD, they start to profile me. They beginning to ask why didn’t I introduce myself as such, or say Dr. Stephens. I respond, “My momma named me Torrance, not doctor.”

They think hat the addition of three letters behind your name or two in front makes you different. In the same way it makes folks who are Islamic different in America or African American males, driving on the highway different and warranting more scrutiny. They have expectations, of being snappy, boastful and pedantic. They see them as being intellectual astute, competent, and maybe even well to do. It is a burden I don’t like. Just because I display accomplishment ex post facto hard work, discipline and patience.

The place you above what you are and where come from and act as if magically being a Dr (what ever that is) makes you automatically smarter, more important and beneficial than the average person. The answer is NO we are not. True, I got some colleagues that think they the smartest person in the world, and even with a PHD introduce themselves as Dr. They may not even be tight, or worse got their PHD when they stopped being proficient in a foreign language. That took about 65% of the folks who were in class with me. Truth is they may be actually dim, poor read and even unversed in the scientific literature or their field. Scary to me, and don’t even ask them about their research or publication record, don’t exist. Then these be the loudest ones bragging. But at any case.

Next time you meet someone or know up front but their terminal illness called a doctorate, see if you change how you see them or compare them to another standard. See if you profile folks too. Like I said, my momma aint name me doctor nor did getting one make me more smarter if I had not. And al the degrees I have worked had for, that Hamilton High School Diploma, followed by Morehouse mean the most.