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My Fraught Relationship With the Notion of Twice Exceptionality
I long for a better descriptor.
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Not too long ago, I had a conversation with a friend about the connotations behind the concept of giftedness. We both had a rather intimate set of encounters with its legacy as a social construct. I’ve spent a lifetime giving people wildly conflicting and contextual impressions of my intellect, as well as having done what some would consider “gifted people stuff”, like skip grades, hit various milestones early, rub elbows with a bunch of children of STEM professors in a selective K-12 extracurricular math enrichment program, and briefly belong to an organization that claims to serve “the top 0.1 percent”. He has a sibling who at one point got quite a bit of press as a child prodigy with savant syndrome who also ended up skipping grades.
Both of us agreed that the whole idea of IQ as it currently stands, especially with respect to designating certain folks as “gifted”, is steeped in white supremacy and promoting racial and class segregation in education, at least in practice most of the time. One thing that was always obvious in the exclusive, stringently gatekept opportunities I occasionally got access to, was that I was one of very few, if not the only Black…
