Jealousy, the Underdog, and an Educated Fool
How I could be so aware of narcissism and so unaware of jealousy at the same time
Jealousy has never been an emotion I could harbor for more than a few minutes — it often has the shelf life of an unstable radioactive isotope in my heart and head. Even now, it takes a truckload of evidence for me to admit someone could be jealous of me, mostly because I am blind to the emotion’s existence. Really, why would anyone ever be jealous of me? Being a hater toward the rich, the famous, the powerful? Or being someone who acts out of their individualism (or really, narcissism) to build up favorites and engage in fandom only to eventually run them down over some imagined beef? That has always seemed to me an incredible waste of time, energy, and brain cells.
For as long as I can remember, I have seen myself as an underdog in life. For at least as long as I can remember, I have had a chip on my shoulder. For so many years, that sense of needing to be perfect in my work, needing extra motivation to earn degrees, to publish articles and books, to get a better job (sometimes to get any old job) was the suit of armor I wore every moment of every day in life to have any life at all. None of this was about coveting what others had or have or wishing that I could live like others in this age of narcissism and rank inequality. It was all about what I could do, what I needed to work on, going back into the lab to work on building a better set of plans for my life.
Because there was always something I needed to work on in working on myself, it’s only been in the past five years where I haven’t seen myself as a mere underdog. For decades I believed I have nothing that anyone should be jealous of. To me as a child who grew up with poverty, this was literally so. With the cool kids sometimes laughing at me as I walked by them in the hallways when I was in middle school or high school, I couldn't foresee a scenario in which anyone would ever be jealous of me.
So whenever what I worked on didn’t work out for me, I usually attributed some fault in myself or some fault in the stars and systems that allowed me to fail or have a setback. This is especially true of how I’ve seen myself in workplace situations, whether in academia, in the nonprofit world, or as a writer. Maybe I really was too cocky or arrogant. Maybe the chip on my shoulders was too big and too obvious. Maybe my perfectionism or my occasional curmudgeon-y takes on life, ignorance, and incompetence just pissed some people the fuck off. Maybe the racism of the university or the ageism of my organization was the reason some chose to not get along with me.
As life has turned out for me over the past three decades, it was never the faults I found in myself or merely faults in the racist capitalist Matrix under which we all have worked. No, whether it was Joe Trotter as my dissertation advisor at Carnegie Mellon, or Jay Wickliff as my executive director at Presidential Classroom, or Ken Williams as my immediate boss with the New Voices Fellowship Program at Academy for Educational Development, the problem was me. They harbored jealousy toward me, because of my youth, because of my plucky optimism and confidence in my abilities to make good things happen in my life, and because I refused to back down when I was in the right.
It came out in the worst ways. Like when Trotter “ran interference” on my behalf to keep me from publishing more non-scholarly articles after I came on board at Carnegie Mellon in 1993. Or when Trotter declared me “not ready” to apply for academic jobs two-thirds of the way into finishing my doctoral thesis during my Spencer Foundation Dissertation Fellowship year in 1995-96. Or like when a bemused Jay Wickliff quipped, “Slavery was a hoax” while inserting himself in a random conversation between me and a colleague in 2000. Or when the Wickless Wonder declared, “So what I’m a racist?” during a blowout argument we had that summer over how he had used me as part of a dog-and-pony edu-tainment show for Presidential Classroom’s civic education work. Or like when Ken Williams regularly tried to box me in from protecting co-workers from entitled requests and job-threatening abuses that New Voices Fellows and higher-ups at AED made regularly because of his lack of leadership. Or, when the little twerp called me into an HR meeting in 2003 and falsely accused me of “wanting his job” and “sexual harassment” purely on the basis of revealing his perpetual ineptness at a meeting a few weeks earlier.
In the 20 years since Joe, Jay, and Ken, I have wondered what it was about me that evoked such strange reactions from three supervisors from such different backgrounds. In the years since, I wanted to avoid the trauma of having such men as assholes supervisors (even though I have had at least one since then). At first, I thought it was me, because I suffered no fools, and because fools in authority get on all 100 billion of my nerves. Their lack of management skills and obvious tokenism (Jay) or their micromanagement (Joe and Ken) and their creation of hostile work environments was their response to my apparent arrogance. But then I realized the trio interpreted my so-called arrogance the ways they did precisely because I am Black and dogged in the pursuit of answers to questions and in helping people.
It was only once I remembered both Jay and Ken had admitted their envy of me that I began to think about the linkages between narcissism and jealousy. Jay had done so in the heat of our argument over my displeasure with the casual, everyday racism he encouraged at President Classroom. Ken’s was much more direct. “You think you’re better than me?” was a constant whine out of Ken’s mouth whenever we had a disagreement and it turned out that I was ultimately in the right (sometimes I did respond with “Yes, I am better than you!,” too). Joe’s only real slip-up was in May 1996, after I had come off a series of major conference presentations between Berkeley and New York. “You have time to run around the country, you can present your work here!,” Joe demanded after I initially refused to do a presentation at the Carnegie Mellon graduate school colloquium that month.
Occam’s Razor dictates the simplest number of steps to explaining any phenomena is likely the most accurate explanation of such phenomena. Would it be more accurate to say my doggedness as a worker and my sense of fairness and integrity has rubbed people the wrong way? Or, that narcissistic bosses incompetent at managing people will likely become jealous of those who do not pour their reason for living into working for them? It’s likely an and-both.
I know it was that way with Trotter, much as he liked to hide behind his cloak of politeness and his dagger of academic objectivity while I was his student. I damn sure know it was both with Ken Williams, with him leaving me ridiculous voice mail messages on my work phone like “I love you, Donald” knowing full well I only saw him as an obsequious toad and a racist supervisor. With Jay Wickliff, his belief in his own white-maleness superseded all, including whatever envy he felt toward my educational privilege and relative youth. My race, my not-so-obvious asexuality and not-quite-hypermasculine heterosexuality, my age, and my self-righteousness (not to mention my writing gifts). They likely saw these as attractive qualities and reasons for working with me and as reasons for their jealousies at the same time.
It took me the better part of two decades to see this clearly about the people for whom I had worked and to see it as a critical failure on my part to not account for the personal and the petty in my workplace relations with other people. And is it in this sense that I am an educated fool. How could I sense the relationship between American racism and collective narcissism from a historical standpoint and not sniff out its relationship to the ways narcissistic people had treated me in the workplace over the years? How could I not taste the bitter jealousies and hear the petty statements and see the responses to my ways of working, writing, and being in real time? That is what made me an educated fool for so long. I was never an underdog, not even when I was homeless, not even in my suicidal moments growing up.
It also took me years to accept that I cannot control how people see me or react to me, that I can only do the work, my work, and do it as well as I can. If that invokes jealousy out of others to the point of micromanaging, verbal abuse, attempts at bullying or a hostile work environment, then fuck them.