The Gifted Rainbow in Sociocultural Context

Psychology and other scientific fields are not neutral repositories of knowledge but have been unduly shaped by various forces including the social and political.

This has implications for how we understand giftedness and how gifted individuals who occupy different social locations experience giftedness.

Below are 5 key themes to consider:

⭐  Race

In the western world, racist rhetoric has had a significant impact on how the intelligence of members of various racial groups have been understood. For example, blackness was formally and falsely associated with lower intelligence in the work of Lewis Terman, a founding father of gifted education, who helped to popularize the IQ test. Black individuals who exhibit intellectual giftedness thus face significant additional challenges including being chronically disbelieved, ignored, and perceived as inherently inauthentic or pathological. Due to the myth of the model minority and other forces, many gifted Asian Americans may be subjected to expectations of academic excellence that conflict with their individual constellation of gifts (e.g., emotional, spiritual, kinaesthetic).

⭐  Nation + Migration

Race and parallel social signifiers do not have single, stable meanings across place and time. Thus, gifted Black people who hail from different parts of the diaspora and/or whose families have undertaken recent migratory journeys have life experiences imbued with particularity that exceeds the category of race. Attending to different histories of colonization, enslavement, and war as well as contemporary differences in sociocultural landscapes are critical ingredients for deepening both self-knowledge and insight into the gifted journeys of people shaped by other national contexts.

⭐  Gender

The gender roles and related assumptions that prevail in a society have a significant impact on many gifted people’s experiences. For example, a common challenge that gifted women face is exuding intellectualism, leadership ability, and intensity that conflict with the longstanding patriarchal contract within which women are expected to function primarily as receptive, subordinate sidekicks to men. This has led to women’s intellectual curiosity being overtly labeled pathological in the past. A common challenge for gifted men is exhibiting greater sensitivity than the average man that may undermine his ability and/or willingness to perform stereotypical forms of masculinity. Gender-related norms have the potential to challenge all gifted people, though with different consequences according to positionality.

⭐  Class

Class or socioeconomic background can have a significant impact on an individual’s experience of giftedness. In working-class communities, for example, an individual who exhibits an unusually large vocabulary, unusual interests that arise from solo learning, and atypically high aspirations may be seen as highfalutin, insubordinate, rejecting of one’s roots, and even anti-egalitarian. For gifted people from wealthy backgrounds, their gifts (e.g., greater emotional + intuitive activation) can lead them down paths that elicit resistance from their families and communities.

⭐  Indigeneity, Colonization + Spirituality

Among the multiple impacts of settler colonial violence, genocide, and dispossession on Indigenous peoples, one that is not always highlighted is the violent imposition of colonial metaphysical systems—one key mode of domination that is relevant to how we understand and identify the presence of intelligence and (in)sanity. Some individuals within (and beyond) Indigenous and colonized communities may inhabit worlds characterized by different metaphysical presumptions than those that prevail in Western science (e.g., divergent understandings of the nature of reality; the processes through which knowledge arises and its sources; and the origins and ultimate fate of humanity and the universe). Though some people may recognize divergent attitudes in these areas as manifestations of spiritual giftedness or cultural differences, other people may conceptualize such orientations as evidence of mental illness. Thus, the manner in which we come to understand intelligence, giftedness, and the difference between mental illness and revelation cannot be understood outside the context of social history, and the broader struggles that shape the production and marginalization of knowledge itself.

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