You Can Be Smart Without Being An Asshole
Finding the Right Words Day #13: SMART
This is gonna be a rant about movies and about myself. Hope it makes sense.
During my deep sad days, I typically occupy my time laying in bed by watching movies. Usually the same films I’ve seen a million times, familiarity is comforting. Historical fiction is one of my fave genres and I once I spent a whole day watching movies “based on a true story,” starting with The Imitation Game, a WWII drama starring Benedict Cumberbatch as Alan Turing, the mathematician and computer scientist who helped crack Germany’s Enigma code during the war. Turing as portrayed in the film is anti-social, rude, condescending, passionate and sometimes mean.
And then I watched Hidden Figures, another favorite that happens to take place in my hometown of Hampton, Virginia. It stars Taraji P. Henson as Katherine Johnson, the mathematician at NASA who helped launch one of the first manned spacecrafts into orbit around the earth. The film centers around Johnson and her fellow Black women scientists trying to excel in their careers while maintaining their dignity in the Jim Crow South. Taraji’s portrayal of the genius Johnson is mild-mannered, kind, thoughtful, loving, and resourceful.
After watching both films back-to-back, I found myself asking: How come all the white male geniuses are assholes? And the super smart Black ladies somehow maintain their manners?
It reminds me of the pretentious white men (and women) I met when I was in college. They used their intelligence to insult anyone who didn’t know the same things they did. I went to one of the best universities in the country and one of the first things I learned there is that intelligence and pretentiousness went hand-in-hand.
The smarter I became, the more knowledge I accumulated, the more I used that knowledge against others. I’d berate people, not just my classmates but literally anyone, for not knowing things that I knew, things that I thought were obvious. “How could you not know that?!” “Oh you didn’t hear about this? Wow.” “Don’t you read?!” I was isolating my friends, shaming my family. All for the sake of being right and proving they were wrong.
Not very smart of me when you think about it.
I think being kind and sharing your knowledge to help others—not to insult them—is the smartest thing a smarty pants can do.
I think one of the reasons smarty pants are hard on other people for not knowing things is because inside, we’re hard on ourselves. We’re overachievers who beat ourselves up if we don’t have all the answers, we torture ourselves by researching and reading and absorbing and trying to know everything about everything. And if other people aren’t putting in as much of an effort to perform intelligence as we are, we resent that. And we puff up our own self esteem by trying to tear theirs down along with whatever argument or point they’re trying to make.
I like being a smarty pants, I like being a know-it-all. I think having a vast knowledge about a variety of subjects is a good and useful trait. But I’m learning that being smart doesn’t give you an excuse to be an asshole. I don’t wanna be remembered like how history remembers Alan Turing: crass, annoying, unsympathetic. I wanna use my smarts to be kind and helpful, like Hampton’s own Katherine Johnson.
As a Black woman in America, I do have to be twice as good as my white male counterparts (something I think Katherine knew all too well). But I don’t just want to be better than privileged and pretentious assholes only in the classroom and at a debate. I want to be a better person as a whole. I want to be twice as good to the people around me and use my brain to make a good impact on the world.
I don’t want to lord my intelligence over anyone as if it makes me better than them. I believe everyone is an expert in something and book smarts aren’t the only pieces of knowledge that hold any value. I think being kind and sharing your knowledge to help others—not to insult them—is the smartest thing a smarty pants can do.
This entry was written under the prompt SMART, Day 13 of the Finding the Right Words 30-Day Journaling Challenge. Follow along using the graphic above and write about whatever comes to mind with the corresponding prompt. Share with me using the tag #FTRW or email me at joliedoggett [at] substack.com.
There’s no wrong way to journal. You just gotta find the right words. Happy Writing!