It certainly fucked up my life for sure.

http://www.thenation.com/blog/174040/how-honor-roll-cheats-students-and-divides-schools

For me, growing up in an environment being a boy, and a visible minority speaking a primary language that itself was a minority within a larger majority, there was this pervasive feeling all the time: everything you did was being watched. If you stumbled or fought (or worse, were shown to be wrong by saying something considered stupid), if you didn't keep yourself cleaner, if you didn't run faster, didn't climb higher, and so on, you were scrutinized and brutalized and shamed and embarrased and pushed around and mocked by every grown-up around you, and the kids in school would ostracize you. In this environment, people thought with their eyes - they judged you first by what color you were, and because that color wasn't their's, you were instantly on edge and on alert.

The only defense in that regard; the only way to rise above this was to get better grades. This was a way to define oneself away from all that. For the longest time, I tried and succeeded because I found things like homework and so on easy. But after awhile, I couldn't do it any more, and when you've got nothing else to fall back on, you become a social pariah. That's how high school ended up for me, as did college, and university.

Now let's be clear - I have no one to blame but myself for this. My perception of things was skewed, only I didn't realize it.

How many times do I recall my parents telling me about some other brown kid in another school who was able to succeed when I couldn't even though I tried my best? And of course they were usually girls, so naturally I felt worse.

But the central message I got from that wasn't to motivate me to try harder in school because I had to. For me it was interpreted as - you cannot do better so accept that your life will be miserable.

I can't help but think that kind of life goes on for many kids like me - who could do well enough to survive if I was the same color and judged equally, but that was never enough. You had to do better than everyone else because your skin color and gender will always be used against you.

So for me, being on the honor roll was the only metric I was measured by, and how I measured myself because I wasn't an athelete, I wasn't popular or witty, I wasn't a musician, I wasn't an actor, and so on. And when I lost the ability to focus and concentrate, when things got too hard, rather than find ways to aid myself and continue, I got lazy.