Thriving more as gifted or BIPOC - navigating cultural dynamics and conformity pressures

"I was also aware that I was not really allowed to be so gifted, that I threatened their self concepts. Which is to say that I wasn’t really encouraged or allowed to be my full self, but I was rather being asked to act as a kind of instrument or one dimensional trophy for other people.

"And I found that it’s really hard to live inside such suffocating and dehumanizing expectations.

"But in adulthood, I have come to understand that I don’t actually need to be beholden to such expectations." - Kaitlin Smith

This is a short clip from a longer excerpt from an Embracing Intensity Podcast episode: host Aurora Remember interviews Kaitlin Smith, a scholar, facilitator, and founder of Our Wild Minds.

The longer (17 minute) excerpt is available to subscribers of The Creative Mind Newsletter - learn more on the podcast post https://thecreativemind.substack.com/p/thriving-more-as-gifted-or-bipoc

Topics in the full interview, as listed on the Embracing Intensity page, include

*Kaitlin’s journey as a scholar, facilitator, and founder of Our Wild Minds.

*The intersections between the history of mind sciences and African American studies in Kaitlin’s research.

*The challenges Kaitlin faced growing up in a predominantly white suburb and the conflicting expectations placed upon her as a gifted Black individual.

*The impact of cultural dynamics on expression and the pressure to conform to societal expectations.

Listen to the full podcast episode 266-Navigating Intensity Through a Cultural Lens with Kaitlin Smith, MSW, and learn about the Embracing Intensity Free Resource Library - includes links to blog posts, podcasts, videos, Course Membership, and more. https://thecreativemind.info/EI-free-resources

The photo of Kaitlin Smith and the drawing are from her site https://www.ourwildminds.com

Transcript

Transcript - Kaitlin Smith podcast

Aurora Remember is founder of Embracing Intensity with Resources to quote, help you identify and use your neurodivergent strengths while supporting your challenges, unquote.
This is an excerpt from one of her podcast interviews.
Getting back into the interview episodes with the wonderful Kaitlin Smith, MSW.
Kaitlin is a Boston-based scholar, facilitator, and founder of Our Wild Minds, which offers online community and programs that help gifted BIPOC unleash their natural gifts.
Caitlin is also a PhD student at Harvard in history of science where her research interrogates the history of mind sciences and intersections with African American studies.
So welcome, Kaitlin.
Thank you so much, Aurora.
I'm so excited to have this conversation with you.
Yeah, super glad to have you and glad to finally make this connection.
So tell me a little bit about yourself and what you are intensely passionate about.
Oh, goodness.
Well, I am a Boston-based scholar, writer, and facilitator.
I run a small company called Our Wild Minds, which is dedicated to supporting gifted BIPOC adults.
So that's Black, Indigenous, and people of color.
And I currently run an online community and an online course for gifted Black adults in particular that's focused on helping people befriend and operationalize their natural gifts.
In addition to that, I'm also a PhD student at Harvard University in the history of science, where I'm studying the history of mind sciences and its intersections with African American studies.
And I also write creative nonfiction, much of which is on nature related themes.
And then I run a smaller business called Storied Grounds through which I offer digital learning tools and very occasional
Educational Events That Draw Upon My Background as a Public Humanist, Naturalist, Ecotherapist, and Herbalist.
So those are some of the hats that I'm wearing at this moment in time.
Awesome.
Yeah, and those are some of the things that I'm intensely passionate about.
Awesome.
So definitely multi-potential it.
So tell me a little bit about your own personal brand of intensity.
What does intensity look like in your world?
Intensity.
Goodness, let's see.
Well, I would describe myself as very intellectual and also very existential.
People who know me well often remark upon that aspect of my personality.
I'm also strongly connected to spirituality and intuition.
I would also say that I am highly introspective and I'm also very curious about other people's inner worlds.
I will also say that my life revolved around professional dance training when I was growing up and really until I sustained a pretty serious injury that I experienced while dancing and I ultimately struggled to recover from that injury after a number of years of rehabilitation.
Despite all of that though, I feel that I've always been someone who's highly activated in the kinesthetic and musical
and yeah I would say that those are some of the ways in which my intensity shows up.
Awesome and talking about growing up with the dance piece how else do you think your intensity affected you growing up?
Let's see, there's so much to say about that.
If I think back to my upbringing, I began school very young.
When I was two years old, I started Montessori school and I was in a mixed age classroom in which I was able to engage largely in self-directed learning, which was really
Good for Me, I think.
I really enjoyed being in an environment in which I could kind of call the shots about what I was doing and why I was doing it.
But things kind of shifted when I had to start attending more of a conventional public school.
at which point I ended up being accelerated and was also identified as gifted and then began participating in a talented and gifted program and that was sort of like a significant shift in my life and experience because I was suddenly in an environment that was not a multi-age environment or wasn't intended to be and I was younger and physically smaller than my classmates
so I experienced a lot of bullying and there were some other reasons that were unrelated to like intensity and giftedness that that were shaping those dynamics for example I was very involved in entertainment when I was a kid and I did modeling and acting and dancing as well and attracted a lot of attention that was positive but then there was negative attention as well because

one of the highlights for me was that I had an incredible black English teacher who is definitely gifted and was a wonderful role model to me and then I think moving into high school I participated in a lot of advanced placement and honors classes and in those spaces I
I would say that it was at that time in my life that I began to think more consciously about the role of racism in my everyday experience.
And at that time in my life, I was typically in predominantly white classrooms.
I grew up in a predominantly white suburb though there connected to people's sentiments about giftedness.
So I didn't necessarily think about it in those terms at the time.
For example, I once had a teacher in high school who told me that she couldn't believe that I wrote the paper that I submitted to her because of how sophisticated the language and concepts were.
So a lot to unpack there, but that's just a snapshot.
At the same time, I was also really fortunate to have an incredible teacher in high school who is
Ultra Gifted and has also contributed to the field of creativity studies and gifted education as a scholar.
Even Though His Formal Role in the School was Teaching French.
And I consider that to be a really, really significant relationship.
And that helped me get through what was a challenging period of time.
And then I have a lot of reflections around what it was like for me to be intense in the particular ways that I'm intense in college and graduate school.
But maybe I'll pause here in case you'd like to respond to what I said.
Yeah, it's interesting mentioning kind of growing up in a mostly white suburb.
That's one of the things in the area that I live in and work in is, you know, it's a suburb near Portland.
And so it's not the most diverse of areas.
But yeah, someone brought up the it's never a surprise it's because i'm in the gifted world so it's like when you notice someone who has those traits it has nothing to do with that but yeah it's an interesting thing to navigate in a school especially the one i'm in now is more of an alternative project-based school and so there's a lot of gifted and neurodiverse folks there so that's been kind of a fun change
Oh, that's awesome.
So you've already kind of touched on this, but were there any specific cultural factors that affected how you expressed yourself?
yeah i would definitely say so when i'm thinking back about my experience as a child and as an adolescent there are a few i guess dynamics that come to mind one has to do with the internal politics of the black community in which it's common for people to say things to one another about quote-unquote talking white or acting white and this i guess relates to what you were just saying about
being articulate quote unquote I think for all kinds of reasons that are really complicated and I think too numerous to unpack fully in our conversation here when a black person speaks in ways that depart from stereotype and certain people's expectations it can elicit all kinds of reactions that are ultimately driven by racism and that can be internalized racism that that black
people that we can hold within ourselves and that can also arise from outside.
But definitely that notion that you're talking white or you're acting white just by using that multi-syllabic word just now, or reflecting upon the work of a philosopher, whatever it is that departs from expectation could be held up as evidence of someone being a race traitor or someone engaging in
some sort of deceptive performance.
So that's definitely one thing.
I also had a number of really challenging experiences where
some of my predominantly white peers would basically intimate that I was not really black either because again of this way in which I departed from whatever they imagined blackness to be like real blackness and it was just striking that you know people would say things to me like white people like but you're not really black and they would mean it as a compliment and not have any apparent insight into the implications of that how harmful that was
yeah so i think that just having my the way that i communicate and just my way of being constantly held up as evidence of something or another that said something about me and the way that i'm constituted as a racial being and also just about the black community at large was a lot of pressure and really complicated and yeah so that's another thing and and then maybe a third

I grew up in the Rust Belt region of the United States in Cleveland, Ohio, Greater Cleveland, in a community that was, I would say, predominantly blue collar and middle class.
And I think that's both a region and also just like a cultural space in which a lot of people don't take kindly to anything that they perceive as upper class or uppity in any way.
So if someone is
you know if there's a kid who has a larger than usual vocabulary and can speak authoritatively on various subjects and people aren't expecting that and also she's black that was a challenging combination in a lot of situations both in the community and in my family too so there are a lot of dynamics to unpack and try to navigate yeah so I could say more about the family dynamics but I don't know where you would like to go
Oh yeah, well, and it's funny when you were talking about the dynamic of, on the one hand, being accused of not being black enough because of your intellectual pursuits, but then also being in a culture where the white people are not, also not, you know, accepting of those intellectualism either.
So it's kind of ironic that people would accuse you of one thing when actually it's like totally counter to that culture.
yeah yeah exactly there were just a lot of conflicting elements converging and it was challenging to assert myself in that environment without being I don't know dehumanized in some sense at every turn yeah well looking at the future questions you mentioned the family dynamics and I think this would be as good a time as any to to get into that if you'd like
Yeah, when I think about family dynamics and this question of cultural forces, one of the things that I was aware of growing up was that in many ways, my strengths and giftedness provided some of my family members with a sense of identity or worth that they didn't necessarily have otherwise.
But I was also aware that I was not really allowed to be so gifted that I threatened their self-concepts, which is to say that I wasn't really encouraged or allowed to be my full self, but I was rather being asked to act as a kind of instrument or one-dimensional trophy for other people.
And I found that it's really hard to live inside such suffocating and dehumanizing expectations.
but in adulthood I have come to understand that I don't actually need to be beholden to such expectations and that I'm actually not responsible for other people's emotional states and that realization has been truly indispensable to me and it's really helped me move into a life phase in which I'm much better able to express myself fully and use my fire for good as you say on your podcast sometimes and one other thing that comes to mind around family dynamics is and that I think

What My Family Dynamic Was Like When I Was Growing Up.
One of the things that I've found is that some of my relatives are, and just people around me in general, are really connected to the here and the now and not so comfortable with say metaphor and symbolism and anything that's super meta or philosophical.
Unfortunately, that stuff is kind of my bread and butter and where I sort of exist
Naturally and What Feels Most Meaningful to Me Generally.
So there's been a basic barrier to understanding that's just kind of ever-present, but also very, very difficult to address and even make legible to folks I'm engaging in conversation.
And I remember one particular example, one particular instance in which

Just Really Anything About It Beyond the kind of immediate visceral reaction.
And so no meaningful discussion followed, really.
But the situation did reveal for me the importance of differentiating between people who speak your language and people who just don't.
And also that that includes people who may have no idea of the extent to which they don't.
For Any Number of Reasons, including their own thinking styles, trauma, and also ways in which gifted people often overfunction in relationships to avoid being attacked.
So for me, that looked like sometimes mirroring other people, empathizing with other people, and not really showing up fully in ways that would make it evident to them that, oh, this person has an inner world that
Maybe I Don't Know Very Much About or whatever, but those for me were some of the learnings that come to mind when I think about growing up in my family and that there was kind of an element of cultural difference present there that relates to giftedness.