Bri Lee is a lawyer and writer. Her books include the award winning Eggshell Skull and Beauty. Her latest is Who Gets to Be Smart.
Who Gets to Be Smart begins in Oxford. Bri Lee is visiting a friend there on a Rhodes Scholarship. As she wanders the lanes and cobbles of Oxford’s campuses Lee thinks back to Virginia Woolf decrying the iniquity that sees Women scholars living in relative squalor compared to their male peers.
Woolf wrote about this iniquity, positing the solution that women needed A Room of One’s Own, and five hundred pound a year.
Nearly a century later Bri Lee realises that this is not enough. That equality within the system does not address the systemic privilege and bias that props up the system, creating a framework of elitism that maintains power in the hands of a few. Where Woolf worries about the lack of money for women, Lee questions where the money comes from. In the money and power that prop up the colleges she finds a system of institutionalising education that reinforces the very systems that fund them.
Who Gets to Be Smart challenges the rationale of the academy and its stranglehold on so-called intelligence. The books takes the reader on a tour through the racist legacy of Cecil Rhodes and his bequest that founded the Rhodes scholarship, through to the contemporary parallel of the Australian Ramsay Centre. The Ramsay Centre’s mission to fund scholarships in ‘western civilisation’ highlights that tertiary institutions are not simply neutral spaces of so-called higher learning, but active participants in a process of consolidating power through ideas.
Lee asks the reader to consider the the concept of Kyriarchy and Kyriarchal systems. Now there are multiple wonderful, much better qualified explainers of Kyriarchy including Bri Lee and Omid Tofighian whom Lee engages with (Read them if my examples make no sense). My understanding of Kyriarchy is that it is interrelated systems in our social world that work to keep us off-balance and subservient, and thereby controlling us indirectly. Kyriarchy plays on your job insecurity and worries about getting a home loan, even as you strive to have an Insta-perfect life and send your child to the best school. And Kyriarchy relies on multiple, intersecting systems that worsen as you move away from my white-bread example above. Kyriarchy is particularly cruel if you do not follow the dominant religion, speak another language and don’t look like your neighbour.
Who Gets to Be Smart explores the myriad ways in which knowledge is held and denied and at its heart is the way that systems of power work to keep us always further down, while looking up. It asks to question why we are so fractured, viewing potential friends and allies as competition, while raising up our oppressors as paragons.
Throughout Who Gets to Be Smart Lee explores the various mechanisms of centralising power through smarts. We are treated to the dubious history of ‘intelligence’ and intelligence testing, a system that has sought to simplify a complex system and sort us all into our places. School systems and the ongoing battle for funding in Australia comes under the microscope.
As the training grounds for the type of institutionalised thinking the book discusses they are incredibly unequally served. Lee gives us the numbers on this iniquity and explores how a country that prides itself on having an egalitarian spirit will also commit to Olympic level mental gymnastics to justify this inequality.
Who Gets To Be Smart is an important book for a world that feels forever to be dividing itself along ideological lines, because it seeks to examine how those ideologues got where they are and what maintains their status. It puts in the readers hands a guide to pulling back the curtain.
Book Club is produced and presented by Andrew Pople
Want more great conversations with Australian authors?
Discover this and many more conversations on Final Draft every week from 2ser.
