It's graduation season, so I want to repost this piece that I wrote very early in the life of this site. It's about a profile in a campus publication of a remarkable first-gen graduating student and how the author of the piece (he also seems to be first-gen) framed her story as "inspirational" while downplaying her intellectual and political work and embellishing what she's said about her childhood. There are a lot of these kinds of profiles of first-gen students this time of year.
Reading this again today, I wonder what might happen if even a handful of faculty on each campus worked with graduating first-gen students next year to author counter-stories to these annual stories of "inspiration" on many campuses. These stories implicitly normalize unequal childhoods and treat educational inequality and restricted access to public resources as mere speed bumps in the road to unlimited opportunity.
What would it take to create spaces for first- gen students to craft their own counter stories?
