They Called Us Exceptional: And Other Lies That Raised Us

by Prachi Gupta

I did not know that the way I understood and related to the world was through a myth carefully constructed by those in power to keep Black people locked into low-wage labor to build white wealth.

Because stories designed to uphold hierarchies protect only one group—those at the very top.

Myths imbue the ordinary and mundane with celestial meaning. But this is also what makes them so dangerous: They do not reveal truths. Rather, they obscure any part of our realities that do not conform to the fantastical narrative.

The myth forces our minds to forget that which our bodies cannot: that belonging is always conditional.

The world we live in, which demands perfection and achievement, teaches us we cannot love ourselves as we are. The myth teaches us to think greatness always resides outside us instead of within us. We must become stronger, taller, richer, thinner, smarter, prettier—and perhaps then, we think, we may be worthy of love. Yet we cannot love ourselves and we cannot love each other well so long as we are preoccupied by the desire to leave ourselves, to abandon ourselves in search of something beyond ourselves. Serving the myth teaches us how to belong but severs our ability to connect.

Now I think of memories as haphazard blots of ink in a Rorschach test that we assemble along the spine of the story we are told about who we are. If given enough space, time, and support, we can arrange the memories along a story that we write for ourselves, extracting new meaning from events experienced one way and later understood as another.

In our family, we learned to love one another for how well we were able to conform to the story they wrote for us—not as who we really are.

Now I wonder who we could have been if we saw our ethnicity not as something to manipulate into belonging in white America but as an opportunity to understand why we were treated differently in the first place.

The problem with that kind of a personality, I said, was that when everything was peaceful, one had to create wars to feel useful or important.