My fourth-grade teacher, Mrs. Dubler, was an evil woman. She once told me – an unkempt, problematic, but clearly gifted ten-year-old – that I “would go nowhere and be a failure at life”. That’s the kind of feedback that destroys a child, and it very nearly did.  I acted much worse after that – because hell, if I was already a failure, what more did she expect?  In fifth grade, I had Mrs. Adams.  She took one look at me – disheveled, angry, and smart enough to figure out exactly what I wasn’t supposed to say – and took me by the hand and dragged me into the broom closet.  She told me in no uncertain terms, “You are not going to act this way in my class.  You’re better than this.”  She literally cut my fingernails (which by that point were probably lethal weapons with their length and the crap growing underneath), sat me in the front of the class, slammed a high-school book in front of me, and demanded that I read it and tell her what I read about at the end of each class.  And when she signed my graduation book a year later, she wrote, “Be the best that you can be, and more… because I expect it of you.”

These are perfect examples of feedback in action.  The first is an example of terrible feedback that does nothing to help the individual and instead breaks them down.  The second is an example of constructive, caring, blunt feedback, and the third is what I would consider nearly perfect feedback. Now that I think about it, Mrs. Adams is probably why I have always loved blunt, honest feedback, whether positive or negative. Like in Queens College, when Professor Mitropulis gave me a C- for a paper, he left a message that echoed Mrs. Adams – “Come on now, you can do better than this!!” – and he was right.  I had hung out until way too late the night before, and had handed in a well-written but half-assed paper, one that he immediately recognized as not being up to the quality of discussion I normally brought to class, and so he held me to task. Again, constructive and blunt feedback – and in the end, I aced that class, exactly as Mrs. Adams and Prof. Mitropulis expected.

I used to find it confusing that not all people appreciate bluntness like I do, but I’ve since learned from my wifey and my therapist that people don’t control their emotions the way I do, and as such, feedback can feel like an attack to them. For me, as I grew older and realized certain facts about myself and the way my brain worked, I realized that I didn’t care about other people’s feedback unless it made sense to me. If so, I’ll think about incorporating it; if not, I discard it and keep on keeping on. There was no emotional weight to it at all for me.  But, since that’s not the case for others, I often try to start with what some people call the “sandwich” approach – making sure to give feedback in between complimentary statements to ensure that the person understands that it’s not a personal attack, just something that may help.  Even then, not everyone appreciates the sandwich approach – some have told me it’s pandering, insulting, and in one case “pulling the rug from under them” – and so I’ve learned other methods, like the “STAR” or “SBI” approaches, which are more focused on results or behaviors rather than the specific person.  Personally, I’ve had success with a forward-looking approach with my work subordinates, since it tends to minimize the problems of my normal communication style – accidentally insulting them by not registering their emotions – and also allows me to teach by direct examples rather than pointing out mistakes that might upset them or make them feel bad.

When I was six years old, a friend came up to me and showed me a game.  He said, “Slap me five!” and I did.  He then flipped his hand, said a word I won’t repeat followed by the word “side”, and so I flipped my hand too and slapped him five again.  At the time, I had no clue what any of that meant, but it was new, so I dutifully repeated it to my good friend Ayanna Cherry. She did not appreciate it the way I had, and I was sent to the principal’s office for the first time.

What I did not know back then was that I’m neurodivergent, and as such, I often don’t understand the social ramifications of my actions. Another great example of this is when my friend Eric was talking about his apartment burning down – I immediately said “Awesome!” and tried to slap him high five, since my house had burned down when I was eleven.  As with Ayanna, my sentiments were not appreciated; this time, I was left hanging, literally and metaphorically, wondering why we were not connecting over our shared experience.

That’s the problem, though, isn’t it?  Shared experiences.  How can anyone judge whether something is shared when what we see, how we act and how we react are all tied to an unknown history?  I grew up in a neighborhood of mobsters, watched them all pack up when Gotti got arrested, and within the year my neighborhood switched from Giuseppe Verdi to blasting Wu Tang and Despacito at all hours of the night.  Who can truly share my experience? 

And who would guess that experience when looking at me?

I’m a fifty-year old white-passing male-presenting individual who speaks fluent slang, loves Latin food, and has been arrested multiple times. I scan every room I enter for threats before I even register where the light switch is.  I ran errands for cigar-smoking made men and ran for my life from a set of crowbar-wielding maniacs in the same year that my voice changed.  Those influence every thought I have and every decision I make, and yet all that people see is a clean-shaven white male with a European name. Even when I take my headphones off, KRS-One blasting through the speakers, wearing my Hawaiian bone necklace my wifey scoured the internet to find for me, eating arroz con pollo with a side of maduros, they still see the same thing – just with new qualifications.  “He just likes foreign food.”  “I wonder why he likes that music”.

It’s a weird thing – this rewriting of who you are with what people define you as. I’ve been accosted by police more times than people would guess based on my skin color (but perhaps not my size, manner of speaking, or zip code), and I’ve even had police draw their guns on me as a kid. At the same time, I’ve walked away from those situations with no real legal or physical repercussions – something that is decidedly a “white” experience. Being considered simultaneously sinner and saint in the legal system is an irony not lost on me, although accepting that duality did allow me a measure of freedom to decide my own path. 

And honestly, isn’t that what we all want in the end?  The ability to choose who we want to be, what we want to do, and how we want to do it, without people’s preconceived notions, judgements, economic status, dress codes, food choices, or arbitrary facts or decisions altering the entirety of our lives? Maybe it’s other people’s brains that don’t work right, because I’ll never understand what makes someone deny another person a job, or a seat at the table, or an apartment simply because of their name, or their skin color, or their culture.