"This woman held in the fastness of her tomb the key to all of those mysteries he so longed to unlock. It was she who had known his father in a life where John was not, and in a country John had never seen. When he was nothing, nowhere, dust, cloud, air, and sun, and falling rain, not even thought of, said his mother, in Heaven with the angels, said his aunt, she had known his father, and shared his father's house. She had loved his father. She had known his father when lightning flashed and thunder rolled through Heaven." - Go Tell it on the Mountain

My cousin once told me that everybody feels like a reject, because in some way or another, during the history of their social maturation, they are a reject, for some reason or another. This is the origin of their feeling "different," and the origin of the pathologizing of difference in general..

In any case, one of my many differences (from the idea of a norm, not from any real average) is that I was raised almost exclusively by women. This separated me from all the private school kids I knew, most of whom (at least, of those who had straight parents) had a father in their lives.

At his very best, he was a confidant to his children, somebody who could be trusted and understood and forgave his children for their imperfections without encouraging them to do better. To be mensches, as my grandmother says.

At his worst, which seemed, unfortunately, more common, the wealthy white liberal father would be a kind of emblem of success, a seal of approval for their children once they were old enough to build a resume. He was a deadbeat with a great reputation, a man who shared a house with a family he barely knew and a woman he had once, maybe, enjoyed sex with. When they were grown, his children often didn't harbor resentment or love towards him any more than most workers do toward their boss. They saw him as a useful contact, a convenient person to know. The paradox of his wealth was the fact that he often did not have time to spend with his children and family, all of his time having been already converted into money.

This was not necessarily the case with the children who had less money, whose dads were schoolteachers or worked at nonprofits...some of these dads had sacrificed money for time. And it was not always the case with the wealthiest kids, some of whom had dads who had made a lot of money and were in the process of opting-out of enormous amounts of work, because they wanted to be able to get to know their kids and wife. But there is an unfortunate world between these two, one we could call the petit-bourgeois or managerial class lifestyle. This is the home of striving, as Dale Wright might say. A world defined by the sensation and the intense fear of inadequacy and scarcity.

So I had many fathers, and I was lucky enough for them to have been good role models. One day at the grocery store near our house, my mom met the manager of the store and within a few weeks he was babysitting me and taking me places. This says a lot about her trusting nature, which I like to think was more wisdom than naivete, and it also says a lot about him. He escaped rural Iowa and a drunken, abusive father. One time he showed me pictures of his family growing him, him and his siblings standing by a tractor. The picture was brown and grainy, he was trying to make a muscle out of his scrawny arm, and I realized I had never met white folks like those before--poor ones, ones with fathers who abused them directly rather than in absentia. He told me that he didn't see a black person until college. Leaving rural Iowa and everybody you know and love must not have been easy. He left in terms of geography, economics, culture, and also morality. He owned a head shop in Ohio, going against his upbringing in almost every conceivable way. This is a rebellion that created a situation against which I do not need to rebel. And thanks to his courage, I had a father figure at a young age.

We spend our days fighting the ghost of failure, the failure that our parents tell us about, that lives on the other side of town and in the history books, and in the back of our grandparent's eyes. We are afraid, almost exclusively, of underachievement, underqualifying, and this spurs our quest for accolades.

But what about being overqualified? When do we prepare ourselves for the feeling of being too well-prepared, so well-prepared that we are unable to do the work we are presented with? Where do these qualifications go?

The scholar

http://www.thaformula.com/doc_ruthless_to_death_row_thaformula_music.html

D.O.C., the guy who ghost-wrote verses which defined the California gangsta sound, from Eazy E to Dr. Dre, says "I've never really been a street kinda dude. I'm more of a thinker."

Here's an excerpt:

"I was always a reader as a young kid. I was never outside in the streets sellin' this doing that. I used to read books, that's what I did. I actually read books so that I could trick my parents into thinkin' that I was going to school and shit. But once I got to the West Coast, it was just such a thrill to be in California. I had been to L.A. as a kid or young child, but as an adult I had never been to L.A., so my vibe was so great I was putting songs together in fuckin' 5 minutes back then. I can't remember one rap I wrote that Eazy didn't love, and muthafuckas in L.A. from Dre's relatives to Eazy's relatives to Cube's friends didn't love. Muthafuckas were like, "Doc you the shit!" Once they came in like that it was hard for me to come back to Texas because Texas never showed me that kind of love."