The America That Is Not For Me: Part 14

I took an economics class in New York taught by two professors, both white. Both professors stood out as two of the finest and most industrious consultants I knew at the time. For the most part, the two, whose consultancy company was stationed in Manhattan, New York, advised, conducted research, and strategized for a number of high-profile companies and institutions littering the tristate area―New York, Connecticut, and New Jersey. Both taught me microeconomics.

The broad-based topical contents of this class and my own private readings on moral philosophy, sociology, and political philosophy reinforced my deep appreciation of the political economy of America, for, in addition to studying the traditional concepts that usually make up the body of microeconomics, we also briefly studied race and racism, questions of equality and opportunity and luck, immigration, assimilation versus segregation, gerrymandering and redlining, social mobility, linguistic profiling, and what sociologist William J. Wilson calls “the neighborhood effect” in his book The Truly Disadvantaged―mostly as part of our out-of-class readings for homework assignments.

Is there anything called luck in America? Opportunity? Equality? If so, what could I’ve been doing wrong to deserve one crushing failure after another? I can’t seem to give a straight answer to this tricky question. It has taken me forever to puzzle out what it actually is that I could’ve have been doing wrong. Throughout the years of my ambivalent relationship with the US, I have come to view this economics class as a place to seek answers that convincingly contextualize my repeated failures to find my feet in the US notwithstanding my hard work and status as a law-abiding citizen. In spite of my failure to find convincing answers to some of life’s most challenging questions in my particular case, I pressed on in life with a positive disposition while still confronting emerging streams of one disappointing failure after another. Life was a bitter mystery to swallow.

Did I have a Faustian covenant with the Devil? Why is America consistently hurting and abusing one of its law-abiding social butterflies? Well, on a more positive note, I put the incident about my poorly graded essays behind me even as I confronted another mind-boggling challenge at the same college where my Irish-American professor taught the Intensive Writing course. I went to the Financial Aid Office to inquire about the status of my FAFSA application and to submit some documents the office had asked for. At the time, I was embroiled in a back-and-forth tussle with the office over issues the Financial Aid Office never bothered white and Hispanic students with.

Then, I remember asking one of my friends and classmates, a fluent Spanish-speaking Nigerian who dated mostly light-skinned Hispanic girls, to accompany me to the Financial Aid Office to make further inquiries about a couple of outstanding questions I had. I joined one of two queues. I was signaled to approach a counter at almost the same time a female Hispanic student from the other queue approached the counter. She and I stood side by side at the counter. The officials began asking questions and taking down some of our answers. My Nigerian friend, who had been listening intently to both officials, got the surprise of his life when the two Hispanic officials attending to us separately around the same time gave us two entirely different responses for the same problem.

Whether the reasons behind these radically different responses to the same problem were to frustrate students like me, and therefore force us to take loans when we didn’t have to so as to free up resources for groups of students of certain races and ethnicities, still remain unclear to me. I know for a fact that some students did end up taking unnecessary loans when they were actually eligible for free tuition. There’s no denying the fact that public education had become big business.

The official who had attended to the Hispanic student, an immigrant, spoke Spanish, and, according to my Nigerian friend, the official discreetly explained to the student how she could circumvent an outstanding problem she had with the Financial Aid Office by producing certain documents. She further told the student that she’d qualify automatically for aid only if she excluded certain documents from the office’s prying attention. My case was a different story―however. Mine passed me on to another official who in turn passed me on to another official. I didn’t give up and pressed on for what I thought was due to me. They in effect gave me the runaround. As a result, my Nigerian friend and I spent a good part of that day going around in circles―from one official to another, and from one office to another―until one of the officials, without directly looking at me, said to me, “Are you a US citizen?” My friend had left for home.

“Yes.”
“Our records don’t indicate you are a US citizen.”

The official’s response baffled me. I’d provided information regarding my US citizenship on my FAFSA application, had given my US passport to an official of the Financial Aid Office several days previously and this official had made a photocopy of it and meticulously kept it in my file, yet questions were now being raised about my citizenship status. I didn’t take my eyes off when the official made a copy of my passport, when he approached a pile of files in his office after making the copy, and when he pulled out a file and opened it and then cautiously placed the copy in the said file, if I remember correctly. “You have copies of my US passport, haven’t you?” I asked.

The official got up from his seat, lumbered toward a pile of files then pulled out one. He looked at its contents closely. Then, as if on cue, he returned to his seat without uttering a word to me or to himself. He stared off into space as question after question circled around me. “Of course we have copies.” He looked away.

“If you claim you have copies…”
“You don’t seem to understand!”
“Sir, what is the basis for your claim that your records are saying otherwise?”

He fixated on his computer monitor. “I can’t see anything about your citizenship status on our computers.”

We continued the dialogue in circles when an idea, an idea from nowhere, jumped out at me. I was silent for a while. I could see my silence unnerve him. He threw a cold look at me, and then I locked eyes with him. I noticed ripples of wrinkles spreading out on his prominent forehead. I excused myself to use the bathroom in response to the call of nature. I was back in his office again about ten minutes later. I was hoping for a ready answer on my return. He didn’t have one. So I asked him one more direct question, “Can I see what you’ve on your computer, please?”

“Legally you are not required to use our computers.”

“You probably didn’t get my drift, sir.”

“I didn’t?”
“I was not asking to use your computer.”

“What is your problem then?”
“I merely wanted to see what exactly the records say about my citizenship status on your computer.”

He fixed me an intent stare. “I’ve a solution in mind,” he said.

“What is it?”
“Go to the Social Security Office and tell them you are a US citizen. Request a letter from them confirming your citizenship. And then bring this letter to this office. We’ll go from there once we’re in receipt of this letter. Good day!”

My Nigerian friend had described to me in painstaking detail the type of documents the Hispanic student was asked to turn in but, as far as I can recall, none of these documents included a US passport, a Social Security card, or a letter from the Social Security Office. Was I being browbeaten into the labyrinth of a mischievous bureaucratic game that I wasn’t interested in? Or that I had no clue about? I agreed to go to the Social Security Office the following day for the letter, and took my leave of him. I went home emotionally and mentally broken. Instead, I shuffled my body around on the bed as though I could somehow cajole myself into sleeping for one or two hours at the very least. Sleeplessness gnawed away at my sleep. Sleep never came.

At the Social Security Office, I came upon three or four queues and joined the shortest. My line shrank so fast that before long I found myself at one of the transaction windows, face to face with a lady with a pleasing personality. The lady was clothed in a contagious aura of professionalism, urbanity, and official seriousness. I greeted her at the window and she greeted me back with an infectious smile. “What can I do for you?” she asked politely while leafing through a sheaf of papers.

“I am here for a letter.”
“A letter?”
“Yes.”
“What kind of letter? Tell me about this letter?”

I told her everything she needed to know. And she was shocked. Her understanding was that a photocopy of my passport should have been enough for them to approve my application, with the proviso that I didn’t have other outstanding issues with the Financial Aid Office, that she couldn’t understand their overriding motivation for demanding such a letter from the Social Security Office, and that there could be more to their demand that she probably wasn’t privy to. Following the brief exchanges on the matter, she asked for my date of birth and Social Security number which I rattled off to her. She punched the numbers into her computer and the numbers returned a letter. She printed it out and handed it to me. “Good luck,” she said, “I hope all goes well.”

“Thank you, ma’am.”
I went to the Financial Aid Office the next day and handed them the letter.

Unfortunately, my long-fought battle wasn’t over yet with this institution of learning. Another psychological snafu intended for me was on its way. The following semester arrived with its vexatious headache. My brother Kingo called me at work one morning to deliver an important message from the Scholarship Office. The Scholarship Office wanted me to come in and answer as well as confirm some information, a routine procedure aimed at outstanding students selected for different kinds of scholarships. I’d been designated a Presidential Scholar and consistently appeared on the Dean’s List. I’d also been a member of the Golden Key International Honour Society. My near-perfect GPA birthed these privileged designations and accolades. Finally, I should mention my strong work ethic, personal ethos, unadulterated commitment to delayed gratification, upbringing, and studiousness as engendering these positive outcomes.

Of course I was exhausted and uncontrollably sleepy but didn’t allow these to vitiate my focus, rushing to the Scholarship Office right after my overnight shift. “Good morning,” I said to one of the three or four officials in the Scholarship Office, particularly to the one whose shabby desk and face one immediately came into contact with upon entering the office.

“Good morning,” the three or four officials replied in unison.

“What can I do for you?” asked the one to whom I directed my salutation. The rest went back to work.

“I am here because I received a call from this office.”

“A call?”
“Yes.”
“From this office?”
“Yes.” I went about explaining to him that I didn’t directly receive the call but that it was Kingo, my brother, who had actually received the call on my behalf on a landline we both shared. Kingo and I attended the same institution and shared the same apartment as well. Kingo answered the call when I was getting off work. After my brief explanation as to how I got the information to report to the Scholarship Office, the official asked for my Social Security number. He looked up from his computer monitor. “Francis Kwarteng?”

“Yes, I am Francis Kwarteng.”
“I don’t think we called you.”
And then it hit me!
I had jotted down the phone number for the Scholarship Office on a piece of paper. I kept this paper in one of my back pant pockets. I brought out the slip of paper and showed it to him. “What is the phone number for this office?” I asked, adding my home number for confirmatory or juxtapositional purposes.

He looked up at me as if he was in physical pain. “The same number you have on your paper.” He returned his attention to his computer monitor. His colleagues were listening in on our exchanges now.

“How do you think I got this number then?”

“Perhaps online.”
“Online?” I immediately changed the focus of the discussion and demanded to see whoever was in charge of the Scholarship Office, for my patience had run out by the time I made my polite request to see his boss, but then, the room froze all of a sudden. The official suddenly changed his story line. He finally conceded that someone from the office must have indeed called to ask me to come in and take a test.

“A test?”
“Yes.”
Not again! “A test for?” I was getting frustrated with and growing tired of the evasive, merry-go-round behavior and Machiavellian tactics of these glacial officials.

“A writing test.”
“A writing test? Again? What for?”
“If we have to approve your scholarship.”

“To approve my scholarship?” I had already taken and passed the Writing Skills Assessment Test as part of my admissions requirements and been exempted from taking college-level English courses on that account. However, the Writing Intensive class was a different matter in that it was required of every student who wanted to graduate from that institution. I brought this information to the official’s attention, an important piece of information he’d confirm to be the case after consulting my records. I was baffled that he didn’t know this. Mayhap he was feigning ignorance of the absolvitory facts. I pressed on with another question: “What is next?”

He came up with another tactic. “I guess, well, there’s another test for you to take?”

“Which other test?” At this stage I was tired, sleepy, confused, and dejected. I even felt rejected and disowned by this senseless, unforgiving, and wicked world. I felt consumed by a repressed fit of temper. I looked at him with a jaundiced eye. He didn’t bat an eye. I wasn’t surprised.

“Pre-algebra.”
Another joke of the century!
I was losing my tired mind in a whirlpool of bureaucratic theatrics. “Pre-algebra?”

“Yes.”
As was the case with English, I had been exempted from taking mathematics classes due to my undergraduate degree in mathematics. The Mathematics Department had evaluated my undergraduate mathematics degree for a tentative undergraduate degree in chemistry, following which it accepted some of my undergraduate courses it hoped would count toward this tentative chemistry degree. A staff from the Mathematics Department also revealed to me after my transcript had been evaluated that some of my mathematics courses had the content structure of graduate-level courses. “You should qualify for financial aid since the courses we have accepted for your tentative chemistry degree don’t even add up to a hundred credits,” she stressed more than once.

Also, the US-based World Educations Services (WES) assigned higher credits to some of my undergraduate mathematics courses. I reminded the official of these facts and insisted on seeing the person in charge of the Scholarship Office. All three or four officials pointed to a room across the hallway in chorus, supposedly the office of whoever was in charge of the Scholarship Office.

I stepped out of the office almost immediately and made a beeline for the designated office. I knocked on the door. “Come on in,” said a female voice. I opened the door quietly and approached her desk, leaving the door ajar behind me. She had her heart-shaped face buried in a women’s magazine when I walked in. She looked up from the magazine and pointed to one of two empty chairs positioned directly across from her desk. “Please take a seat. How may I help you?”

I told her everything. After that, she took my Social Security number and date of birth and entered them into her computer. “What I see on my computer tells a different story from what you just told me. I don’t think you deserve what they put you through,” she explained looking at me. “You have excellent grades and deserve a scholarship. As a matter of fact you don’t have to take any writing and mathematics tests either, I mean, for this scholarship.” This latest information drove me directly into the arms of elation. She stood up and made her way around her desk, then through a clutter of folders and scattered paraphernalia. “Come with me,” she said, gesturing with her left forefinger and middle finger. I followed her to the Scholarship Office.

Once we were inside in the Scholarship Office, she quickly changed her story after the official I had spoken to earlier that morning winked at her before my very eyes. I was stunned by this blatant contravention of professional norms. The fact that they conducted these artful visual exchanges in their unadulterated perspicuity in my presence said a lot about the kind of people I was dealing with.

Why did he connive with her at changing her original story? How do I wiggle myself out of this encircling labyrinth of deceits and unprofessional japery? My instincts, however, told me this lady couldn’t be the person in charge of the Scholarship Office. But she left the office before I could call her out on her deceitful character and unprofessional behavior, but not before another official, one whose angular face I was seeing for the first time that day, asked me to go to the third floor where their boss’s office was supposedly located. He gave me the room number and stormed out. I went to the third floor but didn’t find the said room. I returned to the second floor again, where the Scholarship Office was located. Like the unscrupulous officials in the Financial Aid Office, these officials from the Scholarship Office gave me the runaround to the extent that they touched a nerve and exposed its rawness.

Then I understood!
Unknown to me, the new information to go to the third floor was a ruse to defuse the rising tension. I could no longer feel my presence of mind speak in my behalf. Running around endlessly in circles without getting the answers I was looking for made me feel out of sorts―suddenly. I was so loud that I drowned myself in my loudness. In fact I was oblivious to my loudness. I toned down my voice eventually. That was when a man walked through a door contiguous with the main Scholarship Office. In fact his claustrophobic office space was part of the Scholarship Office―and he was the boss, the real figure in charge of the Scholarship Office. He asked me to join him in his office, a space that couldn’t accommodate Ronnie Coleman and Arnold Schwarzenegger. His office was a cell. It was such a stiflingly small hive for a man his size and swashbuckling airs. My addition appeared to have exaggerated the claustrophobia. We shook hands and exchanged pleasantries. His face went blank. “What can I do for you?” he asked.

He appeared to listen attentively as I painstakingly explained myself for the umpteenth time. “You don’t deserve this scholarship,” he interrupted before I could finish my side of the story.

“May I know why?”
“Because you are not from here!”
“I am totally lost.”
“You are not from here!”
“Not from here, you mean?”
“Yes.”
“Please what do you mean exactly? I am not getting your drift?”

“What don’t you understand?”
“I am not from the US or New York, you mean?”

“You are not from the US!”
“But I am a US citizen!”
“So?”
That was the end of the story. I didn’t get the scholarship. Neither did anyone explain to me why I was asked to come to the Scholarship Office in the first place.

Another pipe dream.
But at least I wasn’t daydreaming.
Those elements making up some of the cherished ethos of the American body politic―equality, opportunity, equity, social justice―and the many discussions we had about luck and social mobility in American society in my economics class were unreal―part of a hidden utopia for a select few. The subtle correlation between white privilege and social mobility was never broached, let alone discussed in any shape or form in my economics class. I had no idea how to haul myself up by my bootstraps any longer, having exhausted all practical avenues open to my self-actualization.

I should’ve known!