the chosen

so there's this personal phenomenon i'm experiencing, and i'm wondering if it's a broader experience than just my own. i think someone, somewhere should do a dissertation on it.

first, let me explain the title of the post. "the chosen" refers, in my mind, to the handful of "gifted" people of color in this country that are given passes, through a variety of avenues, into the white supremacist capitalist patriarchal system. they/we are the trespassers, the ones that slip through the gate in invisibility cloaks of test scores and "correct" speech. we are the ones that dominant culture seeks to blot out by cleaning us up. if intellect like ours was left to itself, we might actually think up a way to take over the whole damn show. so they co-opt us. it works pretty well. it's a very clever way to keep us confused and wondering about who we are and what we deserve.

it's also the realm in which i exist. the definition of the group, while interesting, is only tangentially related to the question i have. the question i am asking is, does being part of "the chosen" mean that love can only be found within the group? as i move through the world, seeking to build a life, i find my love options being limited. i wonder, though, if i am limiting myself, or if one of the unwarranted side effects of my elite membership card is this difficulty in relating. or is the level of difficulty relative to how early the system found, tagged, and co-opted you?

i was taken over pretty early. at the age of four i was marked as gifted, and i haven't seen a neighborhood school since. the "good" and "bad" parts of me were tagged for the world to see, and i memorized their locations, their meanings. i have spent the better part of my life navigating my way through different settings, and the results are shoddy. not a surprise, considering i started my journey as a toddler. i had very little time to put together a cohesive sense of myself before the tags arrived, and now, 21 years later, i am on a search to find people of the opposite sex that can fill my myriad needs and i constantly come up short. hard to find someone with as confused a journey as mine.

everyone i have ever spoken to about my taste in men has the same reaction: "joy, you really have a type, don't you?" or, "little bit snobby, eh?" i have questioned my taste in men, but at the end of the exploration all i've ever found is a long, plain corridor pointing me back to "the chosen." i'm afraid there is no escape.

so, what's the dissertation topic, you ask? here goes:
are members of "the chosen" really served by their chosen status? does gaining membership in this group really afford more options in terms of the personal/emotional as opposed to the professional/economic/social? are we happier than those that are "left behind"? and what about love? what does being chosen do to our ability to find matches? are "the chosen" most likely to find love within the group? or do we find love outside of it, with people that define the dominant culture? or is love found in all sorts of different places, with no definite trends?

quantitative research. that's what i want.