We Were Taught to Be Useful Before We Were Allowed to Be Human

by DeLisha Tapscott, Ed.D.

I learned to be useful long before I understood what labor was. Long before I had language for work, worth, or expectation, I understood that being helpful mattered. Being capable mattered. Being low-maintenance mattered. Those traits were praised early, offered as signs of maturity and goodness, folded into what it meant to be loved. No one explained them as lessons, but they arrived all the same, carried through repetition, reward, and the quiet understanding that ease often made you safer.

Growing up, I was often called an old soul, described as “mature,” dependable, and easy to be around. That maturity showed up in legible ways. That maturity showed up in small, observable ways. I listened more than I spoke. I noticed when adults were tired or tense, and adjusted myself accordingly.  I learned how to read a room, how to anticipate emotions, and how to adjust myself so others could remain comfortable. Over time, that adjustment began to feel less like a choice and more like instinct. 

Much of what I learned came through watching my mother. The attentiveness, restraint, and emotional awareness that marked me as “mature” were learned first. Watching how she navigated institutions, how she translated herself, how she carried what had been handed to her by the generations before. She taught me what she had learned, not through speeches, but through practice. She taught me that being useful meant being chosen, that being chosen meant being responsible, and that responsibility was often mistaken for love. These lessons were gendered long before I had language for them, taught as expectations placed on girls rather than traits embedded in boys.

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As a child, usefulness meant anticipating needs before they were voiced. It meant helping without being asked, adjusting without complaint, and learning how to be competent without being demanding. It was taught as foresight, as doing what was necessary to keep things moving smoothly, and the care embedded in those lessons was real, even as the constraints shaping them went unnamed.

No one called this inheritance, but that is what it was. A survival strategy passed down without ceremony. A way of moving through the world that had worked before and was offered again, not as burden, but as wisdom. To be useful was to be relied upon. To be relied upon was to be expected. And to be expected was to be loved, not in the way love holds you freely, but in a specific way that depends on you.

For the women who came before me, usefulness was never abstract. It was shaped by limited options, by constant scrutiny, by systems that offered little room for error. Being useful could mean keeping a job, keeping a family afloat, and keeping yourself from becoming disposable. These lessons were not failures of imagination; they were responses to conditions that required vigilance and adjustment. Therefore, much of what we inherit arrives through watching and repetition, teaching us quietly the understanding that certain ways of being make life smoother, if not easier. 

School was one of the few places where that containment loosened. I grew up in a predominantly Black neighborhood, attending schools where most of my teachers were also Black. I was louder there, more expressive, more willing to take up space. School felt different, not because it was freer, but because the adults there were responsible for me, but we did not belong to each other. Their attention was divided among dozens of children, their authority was temporary, and I learned I could test boundaries there in ways I could never at home as an only child. It felt like a kind of freedom, even when I knew it would bring consequences. Outside of those walls, usefulness required restraint. It required composure. It required knowing when to perform maturity beyond my years and when to make myself small enough not to disrupt the order of things. Moving between those worlds taught me that usefulness was situational, something to be calibrated depending on who was watching.

But that calibration was never framed as an obligation. It was framed as care, as preparation for the real world I would one day have to navigate. I learned it through tone, through praise, through correction that arrived disguised as guidance. Certain behaviors were favored. Quiet compliance, emotional awareness, neatness, and knowing when to help without being asked were all rewarded. While others were quietly redirected. Things like hesitation, frustration, or visible need were met with raised eyebrows, tightened voices, reminders to “act right,” or the subtle withdrawal of warmth. Over time, those patterns settled into me as common sense.

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Part of that common sense lived in my body. My hair needed to be neat at all times. My clothes ironed and specific. These lessons were reinforced through reminders, corrections, and the quiet insistence to “come back home,” an instruction to return whole and safe to my mother, as she had been taught herself. Those moments where, in her mind, I was dangerously close to not straying too far away from that expectation. So I learned how to move through space in ways that prioritized whiteness and respectability, not because anyone named it outright, but because the consequences of not doing so were always present. These were not arbitrary expectations; they were instructions shaped by experience, carefully passed down, often lovingly.

Usefulness travels this way. It settles into the body and becomes instinct. It looks like competence. It feels like responsibility; it rarely announces itself, and that is how it follows Black girls into adulthood. The same traits that once kept us close to care become markers of reliability in school, at work, in leadership, and in community spaces. We are trusted because we have proven ourselves capable. We are depended on because we have learned how to hold things together. Over time, usefulness begins to look like opportunity, like recognition, like being chosen, even as it hardens into expectation. 

Inside institutions, usefulness becomes infrastructure, and there Black women are often relied upon to stabilize conflict, translate harm, absorb emotional fallout, and keep things moving forward. This labor is framed as professionalism, as leadership, as commitment, rather than as the labor it is, while the reward is often more responsibility rather than more protection. What makes this pattern difficult to interrupt is how closely usefulness becomes tied to identity. When being needed has been reinforced since childhood, stepping back can feel like failure. Rest can feel like negligence. Uncertainty can feel like risk, and it becomes easy to believe that indispensability is the same as belonging.

There is pride in usefulness, and there is also grief. Pride in being capable, in knowing how to respond, in being someone others can count on. Grief over what that capability has required, over how little room it leaves for confusion, for softness, for visible need. Usefulness narrows the range of acceptable emotions and demands steadiness even when things are unsteady.

But questioning “usefulness” does not reject the people who taught it, nor does it dishonor the conditions that made it necessary. Interruption does not have to mean abandonment; it can begin as a question about what we no longer want to carry forward, about which strategies no longer serve the lives we are trying to build.

I do not have a clean answer for how to undo what has been learned so early. I only know that usefulness should not be the only language we inherit. It should not be the sole measure of worth or the primary condition of love. If survival was once organized around usefulness, then perhaps the question now is what else might become possible when being human is allowed to come first.

And that’s a question I still hold inside.

DeLisha Tapscott, Ed.D., is a writer, researcher, and cultural worker whose work examines digital culture, kinship, and Black womanhood and girlhood through storytelling, education, organizational leadership, and analyses of race, gender, and power. She is the co-founder of Black Girl Narrative, a cultural production hub that produces storytelling, research, and archival projects centering Black women’s lived experiences across digital, visual, and narrative forms. Alongside her cultural work, she serves in executive leadership at an international feminist organization, where she focuses on strategy, systems, storytelling, and organizational care. She is also a co-editor of the forthcoming book Black Doctoral Students’ Experiences in Academia: Narratives of Collective Responsibility, Community, and Care.