Some of the most intelligent people you will never meet live in the hood. You will never personally come into their presence, but you will in fact become well acquainted with their media chosen representative. He or she will never disappoint the stereotype that has been well crafted and frequently shown to you throughout the years: the men will generally wear clothing several sizes too big, tattoos will be abundant upon their person, and their words will be spoke both loud and in a broken dialect. The women will likely fit their stereotype as well. It all serves to reinforce the stigmatization and fear that society holds towards a people that are largely misunderstood and a culture which is both a by-product and response to institutional marginalization. Yet, with all of that…intelligence and potential for greatness abounds – raw, untapped, abundant, but hidden behind the smokescreens. Intelligence comes in so many forms.

We’ve been trained to believe that intelligence is something that is given to us between the hours of 7 a.m. and 3 p.m., Monday through Friday. According to the programming we’ve been fed most of our lives, intelligence is something that we gain via education from persons who have degrees in varying capacities. It is in this that we error, for we do not understand what the outcome of an education should be or what the nature of a degree implies.

The word education stems from the Latin educationem which involved the rearing of children…and animals. For the former, its purpose was to instruct in socially acceptable norms and workforce training. This is vastly different from the understanding that many have as to what education is. Many believe that it is to make us more intelligent, thereby increasing our chances of being able to be gainfully employed somewhere in the future. The grades issued to student being indicators of success – when in actuality they are simply tools to administer social value upon students within that system. Education, however, should be about drawing out that innate genetically encoded intelligence – which would direct and inform the person of their employment or career choices – not a pouring in of predetermined corporate outcomes and qualifiers. In similar fashion the word degree comes from the Latin “de” and “gradus”: it literally means a step down.

I am neither against education or degrees – I am an educator who holds several. However, as I grow older and begin to understand this world a bit better, I am able to acknowledge just how these polarizations of the have’s and have nots are created – how ghetto’s come about – why 80% of all special education students are African American and Hispanic males — how the stereotypes and fears keep us from identifying and investing in the entrepreneurs, engineers, teachers, writers, web designers, and product developers of tomorrow who live in the hood today – and who may respect their own genius enough to rebel against the systems effort to stifle that.

I am reminded of one of my favorite books, the Immortality of Influence by Salome Thomas-EL. Thomas-EL is an award winning educator in the Philadelphia School District. He has intentionally courted inner-city children to experience their own potential for greatness by teaching them the game of chess. Chess is a game that cannot be play without engaging critical thinking skills. Being aware of the tactics of one’s adversary (opponent) is as vital to playing the game of chess as to planning a strategy for one’s own movements well in advance of making them. These skills easily translate into the everyday lives of his students. As a result of teaching the game of chess as an intervention, he has taken some of the roughest children in the district, turned them into chess champions, and aided them into not only surviving the educational system and their neighborhoods, but thriving in them. His example was the catalyst for my taking a chess board with me to every school that I’ve worked in since reading his book.

We’ve much to reconsider in our evaluation of what intelligence is. By its very definition the introduction of information does not precede the presence of intelligence, for it is the capacity to learn and reason that makes one intelligent – the degree to which one can do that it is literally embedded in one’s genetic code. The genius of so many in underserved communities may never be known, because fear, fallacies, and systems are rarely challenged towards the advent of change.In lieu of the sweeping changes needed in how society understands both intelligence and education, we can encourage people within our sphere of influence to rise to their highest potential – sometimes we just have to see beyond the smokescreen created by their media chosen representatives to reach them.