First-gen in the eyes of me

  He is a first-gen, that explains it. 

Are you a first-gen? 

Two statements (a statement and a question to be accurate 😂) you definitely heard if you studied in the US at some time.

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Positioning yourself in a world so diverse and has a history like the US when you are a foreigner is such a complicated task. From the start of filling out an application where they ask about your race, Black, Hispanic ... etc? 

Am I Black? Am I North African? Am I something else that is not listed? 

The question of identity is obviously not an easy one but coming to the US makes it even harder. You lose your old context and you have to re-position everything again with respect to how they categorize it, and sometimes you simply don't fit anywhere. 

The way I am approaching this right now is by defining myself as simply "not from here", so these categorizations and whatever implications that come with them do not apply to me. Having to identify as "someone of color" is a concept that you are forced to adopt here in the US because everything is built around it. What does that even mean? isn't white color as well? 👀 It took me some time to get used to that. 

But something that I am still not getting used to is the concept of being a first-generation student. My ignorance prevents me from saying much about it, but it clearly has its historical justification of education being a tool of social mobility in a society built on segregation, slavery, and the accumulation of wealth at the ultimate version of it.

However, when you are coming from a different place with different history and different social structure, those concepts stop working.

I was talking to my friend and she suddenly asked: are you a first-generation student? Oh, you were speaking about your mother's college a while ago, so that means you are not a first-gen. 

Okay, but what does that even mean? 

In the US context, (if my understanding is correct) having parents who went to college is a predictor of many things, it means that you have more access to resources than someone whose parents didn't, in addition to the social and psychological burden this brings to you, feeling disadvantaged or having to prove yourself more and work harder. 

The term “first-generation” implies the possibility that a student may lack the critical cultural capital necessary for college success because their parents did not attend college. 

from https://firstgen.naspa.org/blog/defining-first-generation 

Attempting to apply this term to my context (Sudan) I came to realize that the social structure in Sudan, a collectivistic community in which people lived in extended families, doing most of their activities together, raising children together, eating together, ...etc. It just doesn't work like that there. I remember studying with many people whose neither of their parents went to college and who were never different than anyone else and most importantly we don't even talk about it. It just doesn't matter there. If only one person in the whole family had access to something it will likely be available to others as well. Another explanation could be that "most people there are first-gens" but that's not true from my experience and it was never a strong predictor of anything. 

Nonetheless, we could all be first-gens from the perspective of resources though. An underprivileged country whose social structure could greatly be described as collectivistic, would basically mean that any similarity between people in Sudan regardless of their predecessor's education is much more that the imagined similarity between a non-first-gen student in the US and their counterparts in Sudan (and by Sudan here, I mean the "Sudan" I know and lived in).  In other words, uneducated parents in Sudan could provide the same resources to their children as the educated ones in that same context, while both could possibly have less access to good quality resources than an uneducated person in the US. Likewise, the psychological measures that make a first-gen student a unique case apply to a student coming from abroad, especially from a 3rd world country, even if they don't relate to the definition of being a first-gen. This is what makes defining yourself by these terms who are extremely common in the US disturbing! 

I will keep thinking about this for a long time I expect. But I couldn't help but notice how easy it is to define yourself by your language or religion. It seems to me like the most robust identifier for us as Sudanese to see ourselves as Muslims and Arabic speakers, everything else is confusing. 

Another concern I have is how much representation sociology has of our societies. I am not involved in that conversation when it comes to sociology, but at least I am quite sure of how psychology is built on one perspective of the world and efforts need to be made to change this, I could "guess" the same goes for other humanity fields as well. 

At last, these thoughts could all be reduced to one simple problem: living abroad, having to live in a place where you don't speak the language, you don't understand the jokes, you don't taste the food, and you don't find men attractive 😛 😹. 

https://dailytrojan.com/2016/01/30/being-a-first-generation-college-student/

https://theithacan.org/opinion/editorial-first-generation-students-should-have-program/