this happened my senior year of high school.
i had recently gotten into my dream school (which was also the only school i applied to; kids, don't be like me) and was feeling kind of buoyed. so buoyed, in fact, that when the topic of my dream school came up and a boy i'd never met before (he was cute, which will unfortunately be relevant) expressed his interest in going to the same school, i said, "sure, you should apply, why not?"
to which he expressed his chief concern, which was that his ACT score was pretty bad. (for those of you who didn't have to take the ACT, it's a standardized test used for college admissions in parts of the US).
he then told me his ACT score.
- it was not good
- but as i said, i was buoyed
- and as i said, he was cute
so i cheerfully told him, "hey, you could still have a shot. i mean, i got in, so how hard could it be?"
and he replied, "yeah, but you're, you know, a girl."
at which point, of course, about nine things happened in my head simultaneously. i hesitate to describe all of them, like, can you render in words the force of an explosion by naming each individual piece of debris?
- yes, i did instantly downgrade his appeal from "cute" to "oh god not in a million years"
- this was during the end of affirmative action at the school in question which i think(?) was what he was referring to???
- except of course there was never affirmative action for the category "girl" and if anything there might have been a slight tilt towards accepting boys bc they're the ones colleges historically have a harder time getting
- but jesus, how rude
- "you know" is the part that actually gets me; he was tacitly telling me to sign off on my own supposed unfair advantage
- what a mindframe with which to move through the world, like i can't stress enough that i had never met this dude before in my life so why would he just ASSUME the only way i could've gotten in was by leveraging my sex
- and yes, mixed in with my shock was some awareness, which would only be sharpened by the four years of liberal arts education i was about to receive, that my shock was itself a privilege, that most people who get accused of being diversity hires or whatever live in a world in which they are always kind of tensed and waiting for it
- ever get so angry you feel like lasers are gonna start shooting out of your eyeballs?
- ever know, to the core of your soul, that if you express an eyelash of the anger you're feeling, you are gonna lose the other person in your next breath, and he'll just walk away shrugging "wow what a bitch"?
anyway, what i said was, "well, that's probably not why i got in. probably i got in because—"
at which point i told him my ACT score
and look, i think we can probably all agree that the whole notion of assessing someone's college readiness through a standardized test is, at best, a waste of fucking time and at worst, a racist and classist exercise in which only the privileged can access the resources necessary to pass the damn test in the first place
but while it is in no way whatsoever a measure of a person's intelligence or other college-ready skills, i can and will absolutely kick a standardized test's ass.
- my ACT score was a full ten points higher than his
- if you took the SAT or another test like it, that might not sound like much, but bear in mind: the ACT is only out of 36
- like, you do the math (i won't because i'm not being tested)
i don't remember what he said then. i suspect not much.
"which is bullshit," i said, because it was and is. i guess we all agreed because that is the end of the memory.
anyway, the moral of the story is: before you make that self-deprecating comment, always remember, you're giving your audience the option of agreeing with you.
