Liberate Yourself from the Need to Beat Everyone

By Annsana Biju / Winter 2021

Dear 6th Grade Me,

I wanted to talk about how you treat the people around you, especially the people you consider your competitors. I know how important you consider your academic achievements to be and how hard you work every single day to improve yourself. The idea that the harder someone works, the more opportunities they will receive and hence the higher up the social ladder they will climb is really ingrained into your morals right now – even though you might not be aware that is what you are thinking. The point of this letter is not to discredit your efforts, rather it is to bring light to the efforts of others around you. What I really want you to realize throughout this letter is that not everyone lives in the same conditions you do, some people have privileges you do not and others lack privileges you do. It is important that you try to change the way you think about the world from a broader perspective and widen your horizons, if you can do this then it will really open your eyes and liberate yourself from the constant need you have to beat everyone around you.

I want to start this process by bringing up David and a few of your other friends. I really want you to understand the point I’m about to make so let’s focus on just the interactions you have with these people inside of your classrooms. David is the guy you were asked to tutor and someone who studies hard at school but cannot seem to produce results. There are bound to be people that get higher grades than others, but what I want to focus on is why some people have a harder time achieving the same goals you place out for yourself. I know that throughout middle school, you have looked down on a lot of people and called them lazy if they did not do well on something and complained. There is a whole other side to your current view that I want you to learn about.

Let’s take a moment to reflect on your daily life. When school ends, your dad usually picks you up and you head straight home. Then, you will get out your books and your laptop, go to your desk in your room and get to doing your homework or studying until you are done for the day. Likewise, David will also head home. After getting to know him, you know that his parents are not around until late at night. When they do arrive home, they like to turn off the lights and go to bed, and David is forced to do the same since his entire family lives in a small space. The conditions our surroundings have created for us are completely different than David’s, and this difference in conditions will affect what each individual is able to do. You may be wondering where this difference in conditions was created, and the answer is that it is something unavoidable. These racial and socioeconomic separations have been made since the beginning of time, it is an institutional form of suppression.

Ever since people realized that there were different skin colors, society has constantly been trying to figure which is the superior color. This has created many cruel and absurd institutional practices such as slavery, and it has had lots of influence in which groups of people will have easier access to income, education, and chances at the ‘American dream’. A huge point of separation within civilization has been differences in income and the resulting association with a certain class. In the past, there was an evident color line that placed most, if not all, white people above colored people. For example, white people of middle to lower class were considered ‘above’ colored individuals of upper-class placement. This color line made it so that no matter how hard people of color worked, their place had already been established and they could never be at the ‘top’ of society. I bring this up now because even though there is no clear color line in the current times, it is still present in more subtle ways. It is harder for African American individuals to get jobs than it is for White Americans mainly because if the resume has a stereotypically black name, it is much less likely to pass through to the next step of the hiring process. This recurringly happening to many African American families will leave them with an overall lower income and employment rate.

These decreased income and employment rates in African American families lead to a decreased set of resources available to them. Whenever you were stuck on your work, you could always use your laptop and try to find the answer online. Many other students do not have access to the internet or technology that will present this option to them. What this should help you realize is that people who happen to do worse than you academically are not lazy or unmotivated, everyone has their own resources and situation that you are unaware of.

So what should this mean for you? Now that you have learned about the history of suppression and how it is still continuing in modern times, I want to talk about how by not acknowledging the problem you are in a way contributing to it. Let’s bring back David to do this. He asked you to tutor him and you said no because you do not want to sacrifice your lunchtime and resources to helping someone else, mainly because you think that he can just independently work to better himself. I want you to realize your place of privilege and help others so that they can feel less alone in their fights to work against this systemic oppression. Right now, you can start off with helping your peers and by putting your presumptions about them away. A great way to change your perspective is to think of life as a race. But I want you to acknowledge that people start off at different places in this race and it is harder for others to complete the race because of this. Take this knowledge and apply it to your life so you can become a more conscious and considerate person.

Best Wishes, Future You