Thorns

The problem with education I’ve always had is that I have trouble relating well to educated people. Or educated people of certain varieties. I get less educated pretty well, because I can understand pretty why people wouldn’t or couldn’t learn a lot of things. (I, for instance, am woefully under-educated in electrical engineering, and will never be a carpenter). Education is (or can be) hard. But it’s when I run up against people with similar backgrounds to me that it gets strange, because then I let my assumptions run free, and I think things like “well, I know I’m a fairly ignorant person, but this is an argument about race, between people with an intellectual background that is similar to, or better than mine. So of course they’ve read DuBois, and they own Gilroy, and they’ve can quote Said, and they’re familiar with that article in Race Traitor, and they’ve been inspired by Roy’s speeches, and they get the Marxist critique of Garcia. And then they’ve gone further. Because, I mean, it’s an argument about race between educated people.” And it trips me up really badly, because they’re not really valid assumptions to make, because well educated can mean completely different things, even within the same general field, and so I get caught out by my understanding of people I superficially think of as relevantly like me.