Here’s a bit of trivia that ruins a favorite American saying. When the phrase “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” first appeared in the early 1800s, it was a joke. It described something impossible. Try it: grab the straps on your boots and lift. You won’t leave the ground.
Somewhere along the way, we forgot the joke and kept the phrase. Now it’s a moral lesson. Anyone can rise if they work hard enough. If you didn’t rise, you didn’t work hard enough.
I want to argue that this is not true. Not for everyone, and not entirely for anyone.
I Should Be the Poster Child
By the bootstrap story, I’m a success. A high school guidance counselor told me to get used to the idea of working on a factory line. My home was in constant turmoil, and my grades showed it. I entered college on academic probation.
Then I made the dean’s list my first semester. Years later came three master’s degrees and a Ph.D.
I could tell that as a self-made story. People would applaud.
But it wouldn’t be true. A college admitted me when my record said it shouldn’t. Professors saw something in me before I did. A dissertation Chair, as I wrote recently, sent my work back again and again until it was good.
And there were advantages I never had to think about. I am a White, educated man. I had the people, the money, the support, and the freedom to devote myself to my education and my work. Plenty of people with every bit as much drive never had that freedom.
I worked hard. I also had help, and I had doors that opened for me without my even noticing they were doors.
“But I Worked for Everything I Have”
I have friends who bristle at the word privilege. They worked hard, they say, and nobody handed them anything. And I believe them. They did work hard.
But they’re answering a question nobody asked. Privilege doesn’t mean you didn’t work. It means some of the obstacles other people face were never in your way. Your effort counted. It just counted on an easier course.
Think of two runners in the same race. Both train hard. One runs on a track. The other runs the same distance through sand, with a weight on her back. If the first runner wins, his training was real. So was the track.
Where the Roads Cross
Legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw gave us a word for seeing this clearly: intersectionality. Each of us stands at a crossing of many identities, including race, sex, sexual orientation, class, disability, age, religion, and where we were born. At some of those crossings the road is smooth. At others it’s blocked.
I know this from my own life. As a White, educated man, I was waved through many doors. As a gay man, and as a priest who left the priesthood, I also knew what it was to be judged, excluded, and held at arm’s length. And, ironically, some people distrust me precisely because of my education. Privilege and oppression aren’t opposite kinds of people. They can live in the same person.
The same is true all around us. A working-class White man may have struggled with money all his life and still never been followed around a store. A wealthy Black woman may never worry about rent and still be doubted in every boardroom she enters. Intersectionality doesn’t rank whose life is harder. It asks us to see what each of us carries and what we’re spared.
The Self Is Built With Others
This connects to something I keep returning to on this site. The self isn’t made alone. We are made with others: by the people who believe in us or doubt us, by the institutions that let us in or keep us out, by the stories our culture tells about people like us.
“Self-made” is a story we tell afterward, and it’s flattering, because it leaves out everyone who helped. It’s also convenient. If success is purely earned, then failure must be too, and we owe nothing to anyone. Even Frederick Douglass, who escaped slavery and became one of the great voices of the 19th century, opened his famous lecture on “self-made men” by conceding that, strictly speaking, there is no such thing.
When a politician who was handed a fortune calls himself self-made, we can laugh. The harder part is noticing when we do it ourselves.
Your Turn
Think about your own story of success, whatever it is.
Who isn’t in it? Who opened a door, wrote a recommendation, gave you a second chance? And which obstacles were never in your path at all?
Tell me in the comments. And if you think I’m wrong, tell me that too.
