Elephant Prints: Reconstructing Our Image of Brilliance

By Radunich

There's an elephant in the room, and it's doing society a great disservice. 

Often we're made to believe that diversity doesn't exist within intellectual history or accomplishments - or at the very least that most records of such work

• Language: English
• Publisher: New Degree Press
• Release date: Dec 18, 2021
• ISBN: 9798885040174

Book preview

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Elephant Prints:

Reconstructing Our Image of Brilliance

Jolie Radunich

New Degree Press

Copyright © 2021 Jolie Radunich

All rights reserved.

Elephant Prints:

Reconstructing Our Image of Brilliance

ISBN

978-1-63730-698-7 Paperback

978-1-63730-789-2 Kindle Ebook

979-8-88504-017-4 Ebook

I always think about the next generation and creating a different blueprint for them. That’s my goal: to let them know there’s another way.

—Janelle Monáe

To the people in my childhood and young adult life who have advised, improved, and encouraged my writing, especially Mom and Dad.

Introduction

There’s something almost magical about hearing someone’s journey toward greatness until you’re reminded by the harshness of the realities so many people face every single day. I’ve caught myself a time or twenty reacting to an uplifting story by immediately criticizing it as an unrealistic cliché: an experience that when shared, couldn’t possibly impact society in a positive way. I can imagine how you’d react to a story like this:

A young girl named Lisa usually found her father sitting with the morning paper in front of him. One morning, newspaper in hand, he asked her to read an article aloud, something he always did. A moody teenager at the time, Lisa snapped, Why don’t you read it yourself?

Her father put the paper down, looked his daughter straight in the eyes, and in two syllables admitted, I can’t.

Today Lisa’s a lawyer. Growing up in South Carolina, she was adopted by two loving parents who wanted nothing more than for their daughter to achieve great things. Every time Lisa’s father asked her to read newspaper articles, her reading comprehension and articulation improved. Her family placed so much value on education that her father routinely pretended to read in order to create the image of a positive educational role model.

You might come away from that story rolling your eyes, considering that in a nation where 21 percent of the adult population is illiterate or functionally illiterate (Library Journal, 2020), an optimistic story like this only distracts listeners from focusing on the issue of illiteracy in America. If my assumption about you is right, it’s because that’s the first thought that raced through my mind when I heard it from Lisa firsthand at the National Black Pre-Law Conference in New York City.

Hearing about her father’s lack of education felt frustrating and depressing. Illiteracy often passes from generation to generation (Resilient Educator, 2021) and I knew not every Lisa would grow up to become a lawyer—a career path whose name holds authority, intelligence, and strength. I must admit, hearing that story did strengthen my desire to push for increased access to quality education because I want to see more Lisas in the future. Then the voice in the back of my head challenged me by repeating the phrase: toxic positivity.

The phrase has gained more traction as society becomes increasingly more transparent and understanding of mental health issues. According to Medical News Today, toxic positivity is the belief that people should put a positive spin on every experience and avoid feeling negative emotions. Even in an attempt to preserve our sanity, putting a positive spin on every negative circumstance has consequences. Choosing to ignore the harm people have suffered cuts off channels of communication to further investigate and find solutions to harm. Keeping an unwavering optimistic front also allows negative thoughts and feelings to fester. At the same time, we shouldn’t always prioritize negative experiences over positive or neutral ones, something humans tend to do (Healthline 2021). 

Here’s what I’ve realized. We need to balance our intake of good and bad. Only surrounding ourselves with positive information makes us delusional while exclusively doom scrolling can create or reinforce preexisting anxiety. In order to solve problems, education-related ones or otherwise, we must rationally evaluate the issues, but we also shouldn’t shy away from using hope and joy to motivate change. I hope the difference between toxic positivity and my mission is clear. 

Year after year, my classrooms ignored something that only grew glaringly obvious to me. 

Over the course of my K–12 years, I learned about the US historical figures who used scholarship, design, and entrepreneurship to advance American society. These people were creators and problem solvers who’ve been written about in textbooks as a result of their inventiveness. Of course, the history present in learning materials isn’t a complete reflection of American ingenuity. So many creators, makers, and doers are largely absent from mainstream curricula. Their absence doesn’t diminish their talents and societal influence but reflects who learning material creators consider to be great. 

Because of the brilliance of these hidden thinkers, I like to think of them as elephants, a nickname that brings to mind the majestic beings with the largest brain out of all land mammals (Scientific American, 2014). The legacies of these elephants are part of a historical record that, while seemingly unknown to many, hasn’t been forgotten. Elephants have volumes worth of pursuits that are concealed from mainstream curricula. Not learning about any of these figures and groups felt like the elephant in the classroom for me. It felt strange to seldom hear about any elephant history, but I never questioned why.

One of my most memorable classroom moments was reading Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry in fifth grade literature. Nine-year-old Cassie Logan and her family were enduring lives of poverty and the incessant racism that came with living in the Jim Crow, Mississippi South. As the closest and only representation of someone who looked like the Logan family in my classroom, learning about race relations felt uncomfortable. I couldn’t articulate it succinctly at ten years old, but the depictions of the characters weighed on me. 

The book’s theme felt intense enough when I read each chapter alone at home. The classroom discussions were a whole other level of awkward. During one class, my teacher announced that we were going to portray characters in the book for an activity. The specifics of that activity are hazy in my mind, but I can still feel the visceral emotions that I felt, today. My classmates naively laughed their way through the exercise, imitating the southern dialect of the struggling Logan family. They likely had no idea how I felt. Their ten-year-old lack of awareness and the fact that my appearance didn’t directly resemble the characters on the book cover are likely explanations. The private elementary school I attended cherished the Golden Rule. San Francisco, the city I grew up in, prided itself for its diversity and inclusion, and was once named the most progressive city in the US by Forbes (Forbes, 2014). The insensitivity toward the delicate themes in that classroom activity didn’t feel very inclusive to me. 

Looking back, I can laugh at the silliness of my peers and the inexperience of my young teacher. Learning about periods of American history like slavery and the Jim Crow era felt undoubtably uncomfortable, but I now understand the importance of remembering these events and understanding their relevance in history’s chain of events. Still, the way African American history was presented to my growing mind felt very monolithic. Of course, historical injustices have led to certain shared experiences, like the bigotry and economic devastation that exists throughout different sectors of society. But I walked away from my K–12 experience believing this was where history for this group of people began and ended.

Moving across the country to New York City gave me more than a syllabus makeover. Like millions of other products of a K–12 US education, knowledge of African American scholars, designers, and entrepreneurs—elephants—wasn’t instilled in me. I thought of the intellectuals and victors of history as belonging to the narrow group of people who were consistently reflected in my textbooks and curricula. In college, elephants began taking up space in my classrooms. My freshman year was the first time a Black instructor ever stood in front of me to teach me something. 

This lack of representation doesn’t exist everywhere. In some sports and entertainment industry roles, the hard work, perseverance, and achievement of diverse teams and performers