ESTHER LAVARIN

After reading several college texts that reflect the subliminal ways that society thinks, I have come to the conclusion that society tends to view “white” as being a marker equivalent to success. What society does not acknowledge is that not all white people are successful, and society does not examine how most successful people empower themselves with individual will power. I have come to realize that success depends upon the individual, not one’s skin color, in determining how far one can take individual talent. Success is the achievement of a dream as when a student becomes a doctor, a teacher, an entrepreneur, or an artist. Will power provides the drive to pursue and accomplish a dream, no matter the cost or the odds against this accomplishment. Will power provides the strength to represent what a person believes, no matter the opposition.

 

When Debra Dickerson was a child, she was raised in a household where education was not valued. Her parents were manual laborers; they never went to high school, and they blindly assumed the same dead-end fate for their child. Trapped in a never-ending ring of failure and constant inferiority, with most of their problems attributed to the white race, her parents did not believe that blacks could make themselves as good as whites in the American social order.

 

Years later, in the first chapter of her autobiography – An American Story, Dickerson describes the moment where she realized who the “real oppressor was” in her world. This point occurs in the story just after the young Dickerson has convinced her parents to send her to a private school, but she is dealing with how education, and all the homework, begins to upend her life at home. From her earliest days as a little girl, Dickerson’s mother had instilled in her daughter the presumed fundamentals of what a black woman had to learn: how to cook, clean, and care for the children. It was expected that she could only become a working housewife like her mother, but education had opened the child to unexpected possibilities that she started to dream.

 

Dickerson recollects in her narrative about how one morning when she was cleaning the table, her father walked in and complained about the way the table was being cleaned. He told her that she would never be a good waitress, and she responded by telling him that she wanted to be a lawyer.

 

He responded, “A lawyer, eh? Girl, don’t you know you’s Negro? You think the white folks calling you ‘gifted’ or all that book-readin’ change that?” He walked away chuckling and that was the moment when it hit Dickerson that the real oppressor was already within the environment that she inhabited. From her mature perspective, she reports, “Whites didn’t have to place barriers in my path; I did it myself by accepting my preordained place at the end of every line. Racism and systematic inequality are very real forces in all our lives, but so is fatalism and a perverse exaltation of oppression.”

 

To see that we do not have to be exact products of our parents’ world is the beginning of individualism. To have gotten angry at her parents’ limitations being placed upon her was the beginning of young Debra’s will power that would eventually take her through Harvard Law School and allow her to find the voice to become an award-winning writer.

 

From that point forward, Dickerson began to notice that the language spoken at home was not proper English, and in order for her to become successful, she would have to learn another English. She briefly spoke about the time that she was sick and her mother asked “which un?” She began to correct her mother and the penalty for teaching her the right way to speak was a smack across the face. At that point Dickerson realized how much education would separate her from her parents by making her “better educated” than they were. The child was haunted by questions about why people would not rather know the right way to speak or do things, but she knew that she could never reach her parents with her newly acquired forms of knowledge. Dickerson had to focus on other ways of thinking and living to use education to her benefit.

 

Projecting what I see in Dickerson, I understand how many people in the world of the inner city have imprisoned themselves and given up on the chance to become successful. People have to realize that they are “humans” and not let themselves be defined by skin color. Success is within reach, when people search for it and fight for it. This can only happen if we first question what we were taught to believe. If Dickerson had believed and never questioned what her father had told her, she would have never gone on to become an officer in the United States Air Force, a graduate of the University of Maryland, a Harvard Law School grad, and such an incredible writer. It all became possible when she refused to accept that “poor people can only afford the present tense.”

 

I once heard a saying “the only place that success comes before work is in the dictionary” and that saying came back to me while reading how Debra Dickerson struggled, not just with getting to her dream, but with getting away from the world that was constructed to keep her from pursuing her dream. What I have noticed in the inner city is a tendency to believe that white society owes black people for all of the suffering endured in the past. Dickerson is writing her book to establish how she has left behind not just a place, but a way of thinking, noting: “Those blacks who came of age after the 1964 Civil Rights Act (which I knew ended discrimination) but who were still marginalized were losers for whom I need feel neither compassion nor a sense of connection.” Any person, whether black or white, has to work hard before becoming successful. Nothing is handed to people on a silver platter because the goal is to work to acquire the platter on which we can place our own dreams.

 

The key to success is not to be black or white, but to have the will power to attain success. Few white people are born rich. The celebrated white families with fortunes had someone who had to decide to pursue a dream that would acquire a fortune. These people stood up and thought about the future and invested in their dream that created a foundation, a platter, which provided benefits for their future children. They sacrificed in the present, so that life would be easier in the future. What we blacks have to do is to stop oppressing ourselves and learn from our situations. In the words of Dickerson, “I knew that hard work was all that was required for a successful, stable life. Wasn’t it obvious that education was the only way out of all this?” All of us, as individuals, must take education in our own hands and never give up on our dreams. We have to withstand the trials of past times and the opposition that we face daily in life from all the nay-sayers. Will power is the power to stand for something in which we believe and to pursue a dream. We must achieve no matter the circumstance. Dickerson put it best when she said: “The real odyssey was the pilgrimage from Debbie to Debra, from self hating to sane, from mental ghetto to mental freedom.”  Here in my first year of college, I am learning what it really means to say, “I have a dream.” It makes all the difference in the world.