The Vision | No one is safe

The myth of meritocracy in the time of violence

By Jameel Mohammed 03/23/15 10:41pm

One of the ideas most integral to America’s conception of itself is the idea of meritocracy. It’s a seductive one, aligning well with what we’d like to believe about our nation and ourselves. It allows us to deeply commit to the notion that our successes are solely the dividends of our own skills and abilities and, conversely, that others’ failures are results of their own inadequacies: their thug personalities, their music, their pathology.

Every so often though, we are struck by a case that challenges this narrative, unearthing the entrenched forces that produce the injustices that we see almost every day. One such case was the recent beating of University of Virginia student Martese Johnson by police last week. As it happens, I have known Mr. Johnson since I was in eighth grade, and while we certainly are not best friends I know him well enough to know that he is a man of incredible integrity. So when an image of Martese’s bloodied face peering up from a cobblestone sidewalk came scrolling lazily down my newsfeed last Wednesday, I have to admit that I was shocked.

I can speak personally when I say that Martese is level-headed and that it is his incredible work ethic that has led him to become both a Gates Millennium Scholar and the ONLY black student to serve on the UVA Honor Committee. While in high school, he maintained an excellent GPA and provided a positive example to myself and others. Though he used his position on the Honor Committee to advocate for black people, his language was far from incendiary, instead promoting cross-cultural understanding, an ideal that liberal America purports to believe in. Put simply, he did everything right.

It goes without saying that this incident made me seethe with anger, but I think the emotion that most characterizes the reaction to cases like these is not anger, but fear. As I watched Martese repeatedly cry out “I go to UVA!” in hopes that the officers would treat him better, I realized that any semblance of security I’ve managed to squeeze out of my student status is indeed its own polite fiction. I realized that I too am invested in the idea of meritocracy, believing implicitly that the work I do while here will furnish a level of success that will protect me from suffering the same fates of less privileged people like Mike Brown and Eric Garner. This case forces me to recognize that the people I know, my aspirations, my education, my worldview, my politeness, my willingness to look the other way, my status as an alumnus of Phillips Exeter Academy, my student status at Penn, my accolades, my accomplishments, my button-up shirts in pastel colors, my love of Ira Glass and Godard; none of this will save me — something that truly terrifies me.

I think this case terrifies us all, especially those who want to believe that we have progressed as a people, because it seriously threatens our own self-conception. If someone so utterly unassailable could be treated with such brutality, perhaps we aren’t actually the good people we like to believe that we are. So we look for ways to disassociate from these examples that threaten the comfortable myth that we’ve subscribed to. That’s why people were so quick to latch onto false reports that Martese had a fake ID — they wanted to make it about him and not themselves. Ultimately though, the solution to this paradigm will come as we force ourselves to deal with the truth as it exists, not as it makes us feel comfortable. All of us, especially those who purport to be activists and allies, have a responsibility to question and engage with these horrific acts of violence.

What struck me most about the video of Martese’s arrest was not his treatment by the police. Rather, it was the white onlookers who shielded their eyes as they nimbly leapt past his body, content not to see or deal with the tragedy at their feet. We cannot continue to ignore our place in the violence that surrounds us, unless we are willing to accept that in so doing, we ensure that it will continue unabated.

JAMEEL MOHAMMED is a College sophomore from Chicago, Ill. His email address is jmoham@sas.upenn.edu. “The Vision” is a column for unfiltered black voices at Penn that appears every Tuesday.

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