Silence, Obedience, and Voice

Like most graduate students, that first year was tough for me. Although I had moved in relative ease as an undergraduate at a large public institution in my native California, the world of a small, elite private school on the way-over-there East Coast was another beast entirely. From a sprawling, airy, sunlit campus I was thrust among dreary neo-gothic buildings that pressed down on passers-by with all the weight that blue-blood place could muster. Up until then, I had always felt most at home at school, on campus, in class, but in graduate school, the classroom suddenly became unrecognizable to me. 

In the very first seminar of my graduate career, my excitement cooled as the class warmed up to a discussion of some assigned reading or another. For my part, I was utterly bewildered. What were they talking about? So perplexed was I by the conversation that I discretely checked the syllabus to make sure that my peers and I had, in fact, read the same book. This happened several times over in those first few weeks, repeating month after month, until it eventually dawned on me that the skills that had served me so well as an undergraduate – namely, the painstaking memorization of names, dates, and other historical facts, followed by their careful regurgitation and re-assembly in class discussions, exams, and papers – would simply no longer do. 

To nip this unpleasantness in the bud, I spent more and more time poring over our readings, thorough in my dedication to give every text the cover-to-cover treatment. Strangely, however, I noticed that most of my peers did the exact opposite, reading “book reviews” first and then, selectively, a few chapters here and there. While I was casting the net wide, trying to commit every detail of our reading to memory, my classmates were instead strategic in their efforts, summoning out of the few pages they did read some complex tangle of ideas, which they then debated amongst themselves with fervor. How they came by those ideas was beyond me. I was dumbstruck in seminar, a mute witness to their brilliance. 

The only mercy, I thought, was that my shame was known only to myself. But even that illusion was shattered when, halfway through the semester, two of my professors commented on my “lack of verbal confidence.” Rather than spur on improvements in my performance, their observations only hastened my precipitous decline. No longer could I slink unnoticed through those department halls, then fade into the background during class discussions. I had been caught, and everybody knew it. I had been exposed. In the space of a few short months, the transformation was complete: I went from being a confident, high-performing student to a hot weltering mess of self-consciousness, self-doubt, and self-loathing. 

After a particularly disappointing showing in seminar, I decided to confess my total ineptitude to my advisor. In his office, I tried to explain that I was sure I’d read the texts, same as my peers, but was still helplessly disoriented in talks, seminars, workshops, what have you. I’d been thinking about what made us different, me and my peers, and I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. Certainly, I noticed that, rather than report what they had learned, they instead used a vocabulary of assessment to judge the works we read, discerning the merits of this or that scholar’s “argument” and assembling it into a new narrative of their own making. But more important than that, I thought, they often spoke as though they were certain of being listened to and taken seriously, as though what they said mattered. Trying to name the difference, I recall explaining myself to my advisor thusly: “Who am to disagree with someone who literally wrote the book on the subject? They’re the experts. I’m no one.” 

 “That’s the problem,” he replied, with the certainty of a physician.  He went on to explain that, in graduate school, the act of critique is central to scholarly inquiry. The tacit assumption of all academic enterprise rests on being able to grapple with what scholars who have come before you have written, and to explain your reasoning. If I let myself be cowed by their authority, their expertise, I would continue to flounder. And he suggested that I start with a few basics: do I agree or disagree with the argument, what’s my hunch, and why? 

Well, that seemed simple enough, I thought. I had hunches, but I didn’t know that was all it took to “talk back” to experts, as it were, nor had I quite understood that we were supposed to “talk back” to them in the first place. Isn’t that terribly rude? Were we “allowed” to do that? My advisor looked at me quizzically. This certainly got us to the heart of the matter. Right then and there, he gave me what I needed to move forward: “permission” to question, to disobey, to misbehave, academically speaking. And though it took years to master, it was the best piece of advice I ever got in graduate school. 

**

It’s been more than a decade, and recently I found myself reflecting on that brief but impactful interaction. It was the impetus for designing a short lesson plan for inclusion in a handbook for college writing faculty. The goal of the lesson plan, entitled “Finding Your Scholarly Voice,”  is ostensibly to help students engage in reasoned thought about texts so that they can join the scholarly conversation, but it’s also meant to introduce them to this academic norm in the first place on the off-chance that they are unpracticed in the ways of “scholarly disobedience.” As I wrote the lesson plan, I returned to that first disorienting year in graduate school, and, for the first, time, I filtered those experiences through my own personal history and what I now know about systems and structures. Like a kaleidoscope, bits of my story rearranged themselves into new patterns, and a different narrative emerged. 

I’ve written elsewhere about my family and upbringing. For the purposes of this reflection, you need only recall that mine was a decidedly mixed cultural inheritance comprised of one part 1950s middle-class Indian cultural norms and one part 1950s white working-class conservative American values. It was an odd mashup. Bollywood songs rang out every Saturday morning and Rush Limbaugh’s rantings reverberated in the car on the way to school the rest of the week. Those two worldviews didn’t overlap much save for this: that children, and young girls in particular, were to be silent, obedient, and well-behaved, the kind who set the table and clear the plates when there’s company and leave the conversation to the men. 

Studies on the emotional lives of girls by scholars like Lyn Mikel BrownCarol Gilligan, and Rachel Simmons reveal the intricate workings of gender socialization – namely, how constant messages from parents, teachers, and most anyone else in their lives convince young girls that they need to make their small selves smaller still in order to be deemed “good.” Throughout childhood and into adolescence, girls endure a veritable apprenticeship in self-minimizing, self-diminishing, and self-silencing that leaves them, as Soraya Chemaly has recently written, stewing in quiet dissatisfaction as adults. The damaging results of gender socialization are so well-known in my field that it’s given way to an oft-repeated adage: by age 5, boys learn to silence their hearts while girls learn to silence their voices.

My sister and I, we weren’t just conforming to ambient gendered social messages, though. We were cast in the mold of traditional gender norms that reigned supreme in our household, as touted by a very politically conservative white American father and a very culturally conservative South Asian mother. Though it’s an unusual pairing, it stands to reason that girls raised in such environments will experience restrictive gender norms more sharply. Indeed, across the United States, households with more daughters are more likely to reinforce traditional gender roles. According to another study, researchers found that Asian-American girls have the lowest recorded self-esteem and one of the largest self-esteem gaps between the sexes.

In addition to gender, class played an important role in our adolescent socialization, too. As sociologist Annette Lareau has demonstrated in Unequal Childhoods, by encouraging their children to ask questions of, negotiate with, and interrogate authority, wealthy and middle-class parents set their children up for a different kind of adulthood than working-class parents who, by contrast, rely more often on issuing directives to their children and encouraging them to trust authority figures. And it’s not all bad. In fact, I would venture to guess that these deferential attitudes helped propel me to success throughout my early education, winning me the affection of predominantly while, female K-12 teachers besotted by my willingness to please.

But these gendered and “classed” ways of thinking, of navigating authority, often manifest in more problematic ways in higher education contexts. In college, first-generation students, particularly those from lower-income households and/or those who hold different cultural attitudes towards authority than their whiter, wealthier, continuing-education peers, are loath to speak up in class, too intimidated to chat with a professor in Office Hours, don’t realize it’s possible to ask for an extension, the list goes on and on. A lack of cultural capital, most would say. But what I’d suggest is that those first two decades have taught some of us different lessons, namely that our “capital” lies in holding our peace, keeping our distance, and following the rules as handed down by those in power. Maybe that’s how we make it to college in the first place.

For a number of different reasons, those deeply ingrained habits of deference and obedience borne of my gender, class, and cultural socialization actually worked to my favor at a large public institution. But once I was in an environment that was vastly different from what I was used to, that operated according to a different set of rules, those habits no longer worked, and everything about my immediate reaction was classic first-gen – from the useless, but commendable, “over-efforting,” as Claude Steele has called it, to the unshakeable belief in my imposterhood, which some researchers say hits Asian-American college students hardest. For most of my graduate career, I assumed I simply didn’t have the chops for grad school and, like many grad students today, especially graduate students of color from non-traditional backgrounds, my mental health suffered. 

But, as I said, things look different from where I currently sit. I see now that, at the age of 22, I’d been taught – and then rewarded – my whole life for performing quiet respect, passive listening, and humble obedience to any and all figures of authority, from parents and older family members to neighbors, teachers, doctors, and other respectable strangers. I was, then, precisely what two decades of training had made me: intellectually docile, compulsively pliant, and utterly incapable of complex critical thinking if it involved voicing disagreement or making other people – especially those I had been taught to see as my “betters” – uncomfortable. That these attitudes would impact my graduate school “performance” is only to be expected. After all, these habits shaped the way I moved through the world and, more importantly, how the world let me move through it.

And lest you think me obtuse, no, it is not lost on me that all this only began to change when an older white man in a straightforward position of authority over me first gave me license to try on a new way of being. 

At the time, I experienced this new academic expectation as a form of freedom, founded in possibility (that perhaps what I think matters) and in a new certainty (that participating in the scholarly conversation was key to my academic and professional success). After years spent honing my scholarly voice, I even became adept enough to share the rules of the game with a new generation of students, which is what led me to write that lesson plan in the first place. A full-circle journey, you might say. From silence and obedience in the early part of my life to learning to find, and trust, my own scholarly voice – that’s triumph, right? 

In my former academic life, it probably would have been. But, to my mind, the real triumph, the moment that reflected my ability to critically and productively engage with this world as a full and equal participant in it – that came when, after completing my PhD, I trained those sharpened critical thinking skills on the system that I had fought so hard to gain entry to. Finding it wanting, I left. Since then, that critical lens has continued to help me identify gaps in the structure of secondary and higher education, and to do my small part in calling them out and rectifying them.

During my graduate career, I thought I had moved from self-silencing to self-realization, but that realized self could only be “heard” if it conformed to a variety of constraints imposed by the discipline, the field, and academic culture, writ large. I’ve written about several of these norms-as-constraints here. In the end, then, part of leaving academia meant asking myself: in my exuberance to be a good student, had I in fact just traded one set of rules in for another, swapping an old set of trappings for a new one? Had I actually found my voice, or was it, yet again, muffled by a set of external constraints that I, ever obedient, ever docile, had agreed to? 

If there’s a lesson to be learned, it’s this: that to find a truer voice, I’ve had to learn to give myself permission to question, to disobey, to misbehave. That’s more than an academic or a professional journey. That’s a spiritual project, and it’s led to this blog – an ongoing experiment in finding my voice in a world that is, and has ever been, more ready to reward my silence. Thank you for bearing witness to my experiment.

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