wicked-grin:

and how deeply that rejection convinced me (based on all the context around it - my friends were getting into their schools, college was the penultimate experience, to not go to college was failure, to not be able to do any of this effortlessly was failure) i was more than just not good enough, i plain wasn’t good.

how ridiculous is intelligence and how we measure it and how we value it. how racist is that intelligence. how classist and hurtful. We took this letter that said “your school is worth less because of who you admitted” and shouted back “Nuh uh I AM smart look at my GPA!” instead of just telling her that what she was saying didn’t hold any relevance to us.

My school is so fucking far from perfect, but the fact that I can see people standing up and saying that fact is even more fucking powerful than any attempt by the white wealthy student body (and carol christ) insisting to some random alum that Smith IS good by that random alum’s standards.

No guys, that alum’s standards are fucked, don’t try and prove you meet them. 

This is really, deeply true.  And I will be the first to say that I jumped in with proof of my GPA, my acceptances elsewhere, etc.  But those aren’t the things that matter.  Academics are such a small part of why I wanted to be here - the reasons I want to be here have significantly more to do with the things that this alum condemned.  Being somewhere that my queer identity could have a home, that could give me the funding I needed to be the first person in my family to go to college - those were the things that mattered.  And those things still didn’t stop me from feeling like an outsider in a place that is so deeply encoded as upper class and well educated.  Even as a white student, I often felt that I was in some sort of minority when I talked about my family’s educational background.

We may be more like what this alum wishes than we even want to be, because @wicked-grin is right - her standards are totally screwed up.  Why would we want to be girls in cashmere and pearls, marrying Amherst men because their wealth and achievement is the only way to make a name for ourselves?  What would that say about us?  It’s nothing I would ever want to be, and I want to believe that Smith has taught us all well enough that these are not goals to aspire to, that critical conversation and social justice - the right to a quality education that everyone deserves - are more valuable than having our names on buildings.  I would be proud to go to a school defined by the things that Spurzem derides, but we’re not even there yet and mostly I wish those were our characteristics - that this could be a school as good as the ivies, but refusing their elitism and opening doors to everyone.

(via soft-animal)

Source: wicked-grin