MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
What is the relationship between promise and perception? What does it mean to be a virtuoso when nobody expects anything of you at all? And what if what we recognize as gifted is often more about what we can monetize or measure than about what might truly make a difference in the world? Those are just some of the complicated questions the poet and writer Joshua Bennett asks in his latest book, "The People Can Fly." In it, Bennett, a professor at MIT, weaves together folklore, history and memoir to sort through what it means to be a prodigy, especially a Black prodigy, such as Phillis Wheatley, Stevie Wonder and himself. And he is with us now. Professor Bennett, thank you so much for joining us.
JOSHUA BENNETT: Thanks for having me, Michel.
MARTIN: How'd you get interested in this? Was it your own story of being understood to be really gifted at a really young age and then going to schools and sometimes people acting like you're dumb and you couldn't even do basic work, which obviously turned out not to be true? How did you get interested in this?
BENNETT: Some of it had to do with becoming a father in 2020. I felt like I needed a radically different vision of education for my son than the one I'd had for myself. So from the time I was very young, my mother instilled this idea in me that when I went to school, I was always on the defensive end of things - right? - that school was an elaborate labyrinth and I had to navigate teachers' perceptions of me. There was also this idea that I was representative of the race in a certain way. So in becoming a father who's raising my children in a very different context in suburban Massachusetts and not in the Bronx and in South Yonkers and having very different experiences than my parents did - you know, my father integrated his high school in Jim Crow Alabama. I just started to think, what's the full breadth of what I've inherited around this idea of what it means to pursue an education? And that's really what inspired it.
MARTIN: You write that a prodigy is not only an outlier. They shift the bar of our collective expectation. They tell us a new story about who we are and who we have the potential to become. But one of the things that you point out is that for Black prodigies, that gets really complicated.
BENNETT: Yeah. I mean, part of what's complicated is that there's this entire discourse set up around the idea that Black people had no interior life. This begins long before the 20th century, which is no small part of the reason that I include not only prodigies like Phillis Wheatley, but also enslaved prodigies, like Thomas Fuller, who is a kind of calculating prodigy. And so part of this fundamental tension at the center of the book is, well, how can you, on the one hand, have something like chattel slavery or Jim Crow - right? - or segregation and, on the other hand, have these geniuses. How can you hold together the idea, both that Phillis Wheatley can be enslaved and that she publishes this gorgeous of poetry that clarifies, actually, the vast reservoirs of intellect and imagination that she holds within herself.
MARTIN: We're used to thinking of geniuses as people who can, like one of your subjects, compute large numbers in his head or somebody who has a musical gift that manifests early or even a linguistic gift, like yourself, that manifests sort of early. But you're arguing that actually we should think bigger than that. Why do you think that matters?
BENNETT: I just worry that we're now in a cultural moment where our sense of what it is to be brilliant is ever narrowing and that we're failing to make room for students who might be incredibly gifted painters, musicians, playwrights, dancers but, nonetheless, are told that that's not going to eventually get them into an elite college and on the pathway to a life where they can take care of themselves and their loved ones.
MARTIN: But, again, I'm going to push you on this because you are a person who, by any standard, met that mark. I mean, you were preaching at age 4 or 5. You were very...
BENNETT: Yeah.
MARTIN: ...Very little. And then you went to a - on scholarship - an exclusive private high school, and then you went to an Ivy League college, and then you got your Ph.D. at another elite institution, and then you got tenure at a very young age. And you are now a distinguished professor at another very exclusive institution. I mean, you've met all those marks.
BENNETT: Sure.
MARTIN: And some people might look at you and say, why does it need to be bigger than that? You've done it.
BENNETT: Yeah. The system might be working all right, at least for you, right? Yeah. No, I would say to that that at every step along that journey, I've seen people that I loved very much fall through the cracks but also that at every step along that journey, I almost fell through the cracks, if not for the courageous interventions of my teachers and parents and community members when I was as young as 5 years old but also again in elementary school, again in middle and high school, again, honestly, in college and graduate school. I almost dropped out of graduate school.
My mother was the only person in my family who had ever even gone to college. And so being not just at an elite private school in New York that I lived 2 hours away from, right? I was taking two buses and a train every day. That's why I was very tired in addition to not really having much practice at what it meant to be part of the fabric of these institutions. And so part of why it needs to be bigger than that is I don't think we can bank on the idea that everyone will have this kind of cloud of witnesses behind them to root for them.
MARTIN: You have a whole chapter about your younger brother, Levi. He was diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder when he was 3. He really is central to your understanding of what it means to be a prodigy. So say more about why that is.
BENNETT: So I grew up with a number of kind of neurodivergent family members. It very much expanded my idea of what it meant to live a valuable life, to be imaginative and certainly to have gifts. Because I saw my little brother grow and work through subjects and skill sets that were immensely difficult for him at various points, and yet I saw him triumph, I just had a very different sense of the limits on our current vocabulary for the way we talk about people with disabilities in general, neurodivergent people and even people who are designated as neurotypical. The idea is unless you can stand up and impromptu offer some sort of eloquent defense of a topic or you're a science or math genius, you're just clearly not really seen as that smart. There are so many other beautiful, incredible moments that are available to us that have nothing to do with that with the ability to access that part of our minds. That's something that my brother has taught me that I don't imagine I'll ever forget while I'm here on earth.
MARTIN: Joshua Bennett is an award-winning poet and MIT Distinguished Chair of the Humanities. His latest book is "The People Can Fly, American Promise, Black Prodigies, And The Greatest Miracle Of All Time." Professor Bennett, thank you so much for talking to us.
BENNETT: Thank you, Michel.
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