How I Got Lucky
My experiences as a first-generation philosopher have been shot through with luck.
I grew up in the middle of the Canadian prairies, in an 800-person town so remote it had neither paved roads nor stoplights. No one in my family had attended university. My little brother was ten years younger, and people differentiated me from my identical twin sister by labeling her “the smart one” and me “the one with the bad attitude” (because of my tendency to roll my eyes at teachers and because I liked boys). The town’s homogeneity prevented me from thinking of my family as underprivileged, and the fact that we were never “food-insecure poor” made us one of the wealthier families. My parents ran the local newspaper.
As twins often do, my sister and I leaned into our assigned labels. She got straight A’s and was high school valedictorian. My grades were decent, but my interests mostly lay elsewhere. (Ahem: boys. Also, girls.) We were both deemed clever and so university was presented as inevitable, though there was no real thought to how it would be paid for, and so we’d have to take out loans and work various blue-collar jobs. We attended a nearby community college run by Benedictine monks for our first year. My introduction to philosophy class marked the first time I wasn’t in the same classroom as my sister. I thrived without the constant comparisons, and loved that philosophy gave me the tools to tell people why I thought they were wrong.
I transferred to the University of Saskatchewan to complete my degree, remaining a middling student at best. That I’d made it to university marked me as a success in my family and community, but I lacked role models to help me navigate what came next. I applied to a few grad schools on a whim and squeaked off the waitlist into the MA program at Dalhousie University, and later—thanks to decent GRE scores—into a few PhD programs.
Some of my classmates in the PhD program at the Ohio State University (OSU) would tell me that I was getting A’s while they were getting B’s because, as one of the only women in the program, it wouldn’t look good if I were to fail. Not many of these critics successfully finished the program, and I can now see their insecurity for what it was. But I believed them at the time. We didn’t have a word for imposter syndrome back then—nor for mansplaining! How fantastically useful language like this would’ve been!—but I spent years consumed by it, convinced it was only a matter of time before everyone around me would wise up to the obvious fact that I shouldn’t be there. The intersection of my class and gender would cement my self-image as an outsider in the profession for many years—even more so as I specialized in analytic feminism, which was extremely marginalized in the discipline at the time.
I taught for a year at Bryn Mawr College while finishing my dissertation and then accepted a position at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, where I still teach. The imposter syndrome dwindled slowly over the years. Various professional accomplishments and awards, as well as tenure and promotion to Associate and then Full Professor, helped quiet the noise a bit. What put it to rest for good was a realization that struck me at an APA meeting: I didn’t need to place undue weight on the opinion of every single person there. I’d found and helped foster a community of likeminded analytic feminists, and our work was finally starting to gain recognition in the discipline. Recognizing the absurdity of fretting over the opinions of those who didn’t share my general outlook on philosophy was enough to scuttle the imposter syndrome for good.
The support and inclusion of first-generation academics are important for the same reasons it’s important to welcome people from any other diverse perspective. I’m not one to exaggerate the epistemic advantages of marginality—there are countless ways I’d probably be a better philosopher now if I’d had the advantages of my more privileged colleagues—but I do think standpoint theorists are right to emphasize the ways disempowered social positions can sometimes confer otherwise overlooked insights. For example, I had to teach myself Kant because there was no one working on his practical philosophy at OSU while I was writing my dissertation, and I lacked the confidence or networking skills to reach out to scholars elsewhere. This led me down a lot of blind alleys, but also to an idiosyncratic but eventually well-received Kantian account of the duty of self-respect, which I used in my first monograph to defend a duty of resistance for the oppressed.
Philosophy is better when it speaks to and for everyone, not just the elite. After receiving tenure, I grew tired of writing solely for an audience that looked nothing like the people I grew up around, and turned to public philosophy. I published op-eds to try to influence public conversation about issues I found important. I wrote a trade book spurred by the conviction that “regular people” would be interested in feminism’s theoretical nuances if I could denude the ideas of unnecessary jargon.
When people ask me about my career as a first-generation academic, I’m careful to deprive them of a narrative that emphasizes merit over luck. This isn’t to downplay my accomplishments (an apparently gendered bad habit), but to call out the cruel myth that with enough hard work anyone can bootstrap themselves out of poverty. I worked a lot harder as a truck stop waitress in my teens than I’ve ever needed to as a tenured professor. When I teach my students, many of whom are first-gen themselves, about Peggy MacIntosh’s invisible knapsack of privilege, I make sure they understand that their more privileged peers got into “better” schools or get better grades or will end up with “better” jobs not because they’re more deserving but because the game is systematically rigged in their favor.
I worry that some privileged people love rags-to-riches tales of first-generation academics because they feed the lie of meritocracy and the false promise of class mobility. I refuse to let my narrative be co-opted for such regressive purposes. So, I’ll talk about how I got lucky until I’m blue in the face. Though I wasn’t raised with the petty-bourgeois obsession with bolstering children’s self-esteem, some tricks the wealthy use to ensure their offspring’s success managed to sneak in. Being a twin made me stand out and feel special. The importance of reading to small children wasn’t particularly appreciated, but my dad figured out that reading to us as toddlers would quiet us down, so I grew up loving books. I was far from indulged, but my mom was usually willing to buy me cheap paperbacks or send me to the library. (A friend who’d taught herself to read before kindergarten, by contrast, had her books taken away by her mother who “didn’t want her getting ahead of herself.”) I attended decent public schools in a Canadian system where funding isn’t tied to local property taxes, so schools in poor communities aren’t drastically worse.
None of this has anything to do with merit, but it has everything to do with how I got here.
Carol Hay is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts Lowell.
