Changing Expectations

You know, being 30 years old is a mixed bag of emotions. For some of us, finally being out of our 20’s is a breath of fresh air. You are probably out of school and almost out of debt. Maybe you have a job that will lead to your eventual career goal. Or maybe you are like me, and you don’t have any of those things going on in your life. You feel the pressures of your impending adulthood weighing down on you like lead bars strapped around your wrists.

My name is Brandon Young, and I am a 30-year-old, six foot tall, visually impaired, bald, black male living in the San Francisco area of California. I mention all those things about myself for a reason: those are the things people notice when they first meet me. And it follows that these are the things that I am judged on; the expectations that our society places on an individual like myself are so low as to be virtually nonexistent.

As a legally blind person, the world has one set of expectations. They think either you are a musical genius or you are a useless sector of society that has no ambition except to move from the couch to the kitchen and back. As a black male from a single parent working class home, the world has a different set. Either I am supposed to be on my way to jail, in jail, or dead. Add all that together, and you basically get negative probability of success. This thought process can be summed up in a quote that my father said to me more than a few times when I was a teenager, “You’re black and you’re blind. That means you’ve already got two strikes against you.” That is a tough thing for a fifteen year old to hear. Truth be told, I believed him, and still do to this day. I feel like if I ever make one mistake, the world will say, “see, we knew all along that he was worthless, and he just proved it, who’s next?”

My life to this point has been all about defying stereotypes, or for the purposes of this article, defying expectations. I feel that stereotypes and expectations are synonymous with one another in our society. I have done things which are completely contrary to what is expected of me. As a teenager in my home town of Philadelphia, I had the opportunity to pick which high school I wanted to go to. I decided to go to W.B. Saul High School of Agricultural Sciences, or as we called it, "the farm school". The school district of Philadelphia did not think that was such a good idea. They did not want me to go to that school and fought to keep me out. I wanted to go to school to be a landscaper. How many low vision landscapers do you know? I, with the help of my mother who also has low vision, fought back, and eventually I was allowed to attend "the farm school". My life is full of stories just like that one which I will begin to share with all of you.

Throughout the next few months, I will be sharing my new experiences of defying expectations. Wealth building as a black male—a visually impaired black male, at that—certainly was never in the cards for me. I never thought I could, and I was never told that I could. I don't rap or sing, and I am to skinny and weigh too little to play basketball or football. I have friends and family who have done the selling drug thing, so I know where that path leads. I receive SSI, and I don't have a college degree. So being wealthy was, and still is, not something I ever expected. But apparently I am wrong and there are ways to make my own version of the American Dream come true. I will be writing over the next few months about my experiences going through a financial literacy course. Financial literacy is the way for someone like myself to begin to build wealth. I have no idea what it will be like or what to expect, but I do know wealth building is the freedom to move beyond expectations.