Fabulous

I always keep a pen on hand when I read. If I ever come across a word or topic I’m not familiar with, I underline it, with the intention of looking it up when I put the book, newspaper or magazine down long enough to get to a dictionary or to Merriam-Webster online. At this very moment I’m sitting near the gate at the Chicago-O’Hare airport reading Pearl Cleage and highlighting patchouli with my blue uniball. I’m pretty sure that I know the word…I think it’s a food. But, I want to be sure so I’ve made a mental note to look it up before I read the next chapter.

I think it is so important to be knowledgeable. I never want to appear unintelligent. I don’t want to be the person who is asked by a member of the press how ubiquitous I believe hip-hop to be and think to myself…”Huh? Who bit who?”…while I stare utterly dumfounded by the question. I don’t want to be the person who is engrossed in an intellectual discussion about African-American social responsibility but who continuously pronounces Dubois like du-bwah, while the rest of the group of people I’m speaking with are too ashamed or too polite to correct me. Or don’t know themselves which is correct. I don’t want to be like an employer I had who, at a staff meeting, brow-beat her secretary for using poor grammar in her correspondence, but then says, “You should send he and his wife a follow-up letter…” ARGHHHHHH!!!!

[Side note: Don’t feel bad if this sentence does not seem wrong to you. But know that it is. The pronoun ‘he’ is functioning as an indirect object in this sentence and indirect object pronouns should always be in an objective case, i.e. him.]

I think it is so important to be open to learning things. People seem so afraid to say, “I don’t know” that they are pigeoning themselves into saying “I’m an idiot.” Please people, I beg you; don’t be dumb.

And that goes for more than just language. And rest assured that ‘being dumb’ is not exclusive to the uneducated. ‘DUMB’ is anytime you are uninterested in becoming better than you have been. ‘DUMB’ is when you have an opportunity to expand your knowledge base but then don’t take it.

My case study for this topic involves two women I know.

Woman A is a twenty-something dancer at a club in Atlanta, shakin’ tits and twat for cash. Good money. She just bought a new SUV and is living the good life (at least “the good life” as she believes it to be and in contrast to her lower middle class upbringing).

Woman B is a nearly 50, university vice-president and business executive. She was once recognized by a popular magazine as one of the 100 most influential black women in America.

Okay, so what’s the connection between Woman A and B? Both are extremely intelligent. Both are tremendously beautiful. And, both were single mothers at the age of 17.

Now I hear you. A lot happens between “twenty-something” and “nearly 50”. But do I think that Woman A will ever reach Woman B’s stature? Hell-to-the-nah! Why? Because Woman A is DUMB.

Now I’ll concede that W.A. makes more money than I do and works fewer hours making it. But what makes her dumb, in my humble opinion, is that she has given up believing she can do better or wanting to. She wanted to be a nurse but found it to hard to juggle school and kids, so she dropped out. She considered joining the Air Force, but she settled for marriage to an ex-convict. She just gave up. She now will never become a nurse or a business executive, not because she’s not smart enough to, but because she is no longer interested in any kind of existence other than a day-to-day one. Just barely makin’ it.

Ralph Waldo Emerson says that “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds”—and while I tend to agree, I would venture to say that complacency is a far worse troll.

You never hear 5 and 6 year old kids saying they want to be strippers and drug-dealers when they grow-up. (Okay, maybe in some places you do, but that another monster I’ll tackle another day) Kids want to be ballerinas and basketball players, doctors and singers, or like my daughter, firefighting ballerinas with a medical practice on the side. Yet somewhere along the line, they lose those dreams and they lose the hope and determination it takes to reach those dreams and they end up as shift leaders at Arby’s and Oil Lube specialists at Wal-Mart’s Auto Service Center and no longer dream about putting out fires with a stethoscope in a tutu.

So while I myself am not even close to posing for my first cover of Black Enterprise, I’m going to keep underlining words in my books so I don’t become satisfied with a marginal existence. And if I were you (please never say, if I was you…), I’d do the same. That way, when you host your first book signing party, or opening night for you first concert appearance or dinner celebrating a major promotion, you can tell the caterer that you would like to serve crudités with a gorgonzola dressing as opposed to celery and blue cheese.

Remember, before you can strive to be supernal, you have to know what it means.