On Learning to See Race

Finally. It’s here. The final semester of my MA program. Although it doesn’t really feel that way since my PhD aspirations are keeping me in this thing for at least another 3 years. That being said, I’m almost there! And it feels damn good to say that.

And as I’m going to be in this thing for another few years, and (prayerfully) teaching after that, there’s still so much work I need to do. Particularly in terms of how I deal with race and racism in the classroom. As a student, it’s difficult – but I at least have the protection of being a student. As a professor, it will be even more difficult a task. And what kind of protections will I have then? Especially if I have to adjunct my first few years after graduation?

I’ve thought about these things at regular intervals over the last few years – managing race and racism in academic spaces and how that shifts depending on your position within the academy. It wasn’t until recently, however, that I really thought about (was confronted by?) how race and racism looks to white people.

I know, I know – bear with me.

Class began for me last week. And in my very first class, about 2 hours in, the only white woman in the class (besides our professor) informs us that she “never really saw race,” which is something people of color have heard hundreds of times before and tend to have a similar reaction to:

• If you don’t see race, well…what do you see?
• Is it that you never “saw” race or that you lived in predominately white spaces such that the only other race you saw was white and, thus, you didn’t have to see race?
• And, also, are we having this conversation about why claiming to not see race is an issue again?

She continued that it wasn’t until she dated a Black man that race really became something that she saw. And, of course, she had to inform us that she and her boyfriend got more shit from “the Black community” than from elsewhere.

You can imagine my admittedly internal response.

She continued that she “wasn’t raised in ignorance,” etc, etc, and therefore race wasn’t something that she cared about.

I tire of these conversations. Primarily because liberal-minded folk often think that because they don’t see people of color and launch into the behavior they associate with those kinds of white people that this somehow means that they are not capable of racism. What they don’t realize, however, is that in saying these things they limit racism to hurtful language and ignore how they can perpetuate the system that is racism – even in the midst of their so-called liberal “we all bleed red-we’re all people-can’t we all just get along” bullshit.

My being Black is never, will never be, has never been the issue. So when I hear “I don’t see race” I hear, “I don’t have to see race,” or “I don’t acknowledge that race exists,” which translates into “I don’t acknowledge racial issues.” I say this because, if you can’t, won’t, or don’t see me as a Black woman, then how can you see the issues I face specifically as a Black woman? Because to understand the differential treatment one faces as a result of race, one must necessarily see and acknowledge that race exists.

But my prof’s response to her also got me thinking when she nodded and said “I understand.” And because I trust this professor, and have trusted this professor for a number of years, it gave me pause. It me rapidly consider my own approach to the phrase “I don’t see race” and its accordant responses.

And I realized that there is a moment when white people learn to see race. As much as I understood that it is a privilege for white people to maneuver through life with the belief that they occupy raceless bodies, I did not understand  that in the midst of that presumed racelessness, they needed to actually learn to acknowledge race. That there is something of an epiphany that occurs in which they realize that they can no longer approach the world as if race does not exist.

For some, that lesson translates into learning to see race as a systemic issue that needs to be addressed in myriad ways. Learning about their own privilege, for example, and how racism infects everything from how we buy houses to education to medical treatment. It is, I believe, an uncomfortable lesson, but one that puts them on a path to realizing that the racial deck is largely stacked in their favor. And, for bonus cookies, it helps them understand how to decenter whiteness.  I think this was the case for my professor’s awakening.

I do not, however, think that was the case for my classmate, whose racial awakening seemed primarily to stem from the fact that she got shit from “the Black community” for dating a Black man. It seemed in her brief accounting that race became an issue for her because she was confronted by her whiteness in way she’d never been confronted by it before. She had to think about it in a way she perhaps never had to before. Sadly, for some white people, learning to see race is an extension of their own whiteness. It is not that white people come to understand the various issues that people of color face in this world as a result of their raced bodies, but that they come to see themselves as white. And they experience what they view as a marked kind of hostility that they believe is directed toward them simply because they are white. And that is an entirely different thing.

And so, in that evening class, I saw two sides of the coin in a way that I’d never seen it before. And I think the lesson I learned will help me in my future approaches to conversations on race and racism in academic spaces.

On Being Black at a PWI

I read this article over on the Chronicle of Higher Education that had me fighting not to cry. It’s a photo essay of sorts featuring Tavaris Sanders, a young Black student who’s attending a PWI. He narrates his experiences through a series of photographs taken by Jonah Markowitz.

First year I was more lonely than ever. I really didn’t have no friends. I began to get depressed. I didn’t feel accepted here at all. I had a hard time working because I started to get in that mode, like, I don’t care anymore, people don’t understand me, why should I do any work. My grades started falling off, and I got on academic probation the first semester.

In this picture, I’m confused. I just got home. I was planning on dropping out — I’m not even gonna lie to you. I wasn’t even gonna tell nobody. But I’m like, Yo, this is not the same. I don’t feel the same at all.

Though it seems like he’s fitting in now and doing better academically, the pain he articulates mirrors so much of my own. He is the reason I’m still in school at 28, pushing myself so hard to get a PhD. His need to be seen, to be heard, to be taken care of, to be seen as a student worth someone’s time – took me right back to my time at my first doctoral institution. He writes about how starkly different his weekend recruitment visit was from his actual experiences as a student at the institution.

When I came here, they had a lot of things going on, so, like, you really didn’t know what was going on, ’cause it was only two days. I decided to do early decision. They gave me an interview, and I told them my story, and they said, OK, we’re accepting you, and they gave me a great scholarship, like almost the full amount.

And I got here and I was just devastated. The two days I was here was nothing like the first week.

I nodded along with his words. My own weekend visitation to my first doctoral institution was perfect. Made me feel like the school was a place where I could learn and grow into a better scientist. But that wasn’t the reality. My first weeks there were fraught with feelings of isolation, that people didn’t understand me. I nearly flunked a class and, though I pulled together enough to manage a C, I couldn’t figure out why I was doing so poorly – even after asking questions and going to office hours. I had to drop a class my second term because I just wasn’t getting the material. It’s frustrating knowing that you don’t understand something, but not being able to articulate why you didn’t understand it. It wasn’t so much that I felt unintelligent as much as I felt inadequate. And that is an awful place to be – feeling like you aren’t good enough. My own situation mirrors so much of Taz’s own.

I am by no means saying that our experiences are exactly the same. However, his story, my story – they look like the stories of so many other students at PWIs that are not equipped to help students of color manage the transition into a space where it’s a rare occasion for them to see someone that looks like them.

I read Taz’s story and thought about the sit-ins and protests taking place at college campuses all over this country and my heart melted. Taz’s experience is his own, but it is not unique. There are far too many students that experience what this young man has experienced, and it doesn’t have to be that way.

I am by no means an activist (though I wish to death that I was), but academia – even as a space that is hostile to me – is where I feel I belong and where I can have the impact I believe I need to have. I am so sick of going to class. I’m tired of writing papers solely for deadlines. I’m tired of cranking out assignment after assignment in a class that I’m only taking to fulfill a course requirement. And everyone from strangers on the street to my grandmother knows how bored I am in my assistantship. I mean…I can feel my brain cells dying.

But it won’t always be like this.

Eventually I’ll be reading what I want, writing what I want. Regardless, I have to get through it so that the next Taz, the next me, has someone who can walk them through, who can guide them, who can encourage them, who will hear them, who will see them. And who will do everything in their power to lift them up remind them day after day after day that they will make it. And that they matter. Always.

 

 

On Stepping Away

I have been meaning to write this post for at least two weeks.

October was a hectic month. Projects, deadlines, campus fellowship responsibilities, on top of duties as the co-president of an organization. And, ya know, class and work. It was non-stop. And I stopped taking care of myself.

I wasn’t working out, which is my go-to natural medicine for depression and stress. I wasn’t managing my (slight) gluten intolerance well and eating, well, everything which was impacting my overall day-to-day well-being. I wasn’t maintaining my weekly date nights with my husband – the one night of the week that is exclusively his. I wasn’t sleeping well, some times waking up after only 4 hours with my to-do list racing through my mind.

Courtesy http://www.giphy.com

I finally realized that I wasn’t being supported in the ways that I needed to be supported to continue at the pace I was on with the organization I was a part of. I couldn’t keep tabling deadlines to work on more immediate organization tasks because those deadlines wouldn’t loom in the future forever. I couldn’t keep shouldering the burden of work that others chose not to perform. I needed to excise some things.

As a firm type-A, it was a difficult decision I had to make, but things that were important to me, my mental health, and my personal life were being ignored in favor of other things that, while necessary, I couldn’t carry on my own two shoulders. I take my responsibilities seriously. Too seriously at times. But I try to be the kind of person that follows through on what she says she’s going to do. So I hate to walk away. But, I learned the hard way a long time ago that walking away isn’t giving up. It’s protecting yourself and caring for yourself. You just have to know when to say enough is enough.

So here I am, a week before Thanksgiving, kicking myself and wishing that I’d examined what I needed to walk away from far sooner. Two half-assed fellowship application submissions later, I’ll be lucky if I get either. I told myself that it was better to submit something rather than nothing at all, but again – Type A. Everything has to be my version of perfect. And these applications weren’t my version of it.

I wonder how much better the last month and a half would’ve been had I just not been so stubborn. When I stepped away from certain roles, my life fell back into place almost immediately. Date nights returned, workouts popped back on schedule, my diet is back on track. I’m sleeping better.

Graduate school can be a place that fosters the sense that it is normal to be overburdened with work. It isn’t. It is okay to say no. It is okay to walk away, even if that sometimes means you can’t follow through on something that you’ve committed to. We have to take care of ourselves first before we can devote energy into taking care of other people or other things. And if those other people or other things are sucking the energy out of you and turning you into a goblin, maybe re-evaluate?

I thought I’d learned this lesson already, but apparently it’s one that needed to be updated.

On History, Erasure, and That Damn Suffragette Film

“So in terms of memory, in terms of contribution and actually being here — people are often erased…that means their existence is not acknowledged.”

Renée Mussai made this statement in a CNN article highlighting an exhibit that she curated with Mark Sealy featuring photographs of Black Britons in Victorian England. Photographs that no one had seen for well over a century.

One of the things that I focus on in my research is the erasure of Black women’s work and experiences from history. Sure, people sometimes know we were “there” in any given historical period, doing something in the background apparently. But other times, people truly believe we weren’t around. Too often what we were doing isn’t deemed relevant or important enough to the “real” story at hand or, my personal fave, our presence just isn’t “historically accurate.”

We got that reminder when people spoke up about the lack of color on Mad Men – which takes place largely in New York City in the 1960s, just one decade before the “end” of the Great Migration. We were told the same thing in reference to Game of Thrones overwhelming whiteness  – which has dragons, a woman that can walk through fire, a witch that gives birth to a weird murderous ghost thing, and ice zombies.

Game of Thrones Season 5; Historically Accurate

Most recently, Suffragette director Sarah Gavron has said the same thing in reference to why women of color were not included in her film. Now, of course, Gavron didn’t write the movie – Abi Morgan did. And I have no idea how much say Gavron had in terms of story line. But, the fact remains, women of color (Indian women, Black women, etc) were once again erased under the guise of “historical accuracy.” By Gavron’s own words:

We interrogated the writ and photographic evidence, and the truth is, it’s very, very different picture from the U.S. The U.S. had a lot of women of color involved in the movement, some who were excluded, some who weren’t excluded. But in the UK, it wasn’t like that, because we had pockets of immigration…it was later, around the war, around the fifties, that really the UK shifted and changed in a really wonderful way to produce what we have today.

Let’s just get this out of the way now. People of color were in England long before the 1950s. Does it really need to be said? Does it?

Her statement implies that there were too few women of color in the UK during its women’s suffrage movement, let alone actually involved in it. But she then points to Sophia Duleep Singh, an Indian woman who she says was excluded from the narrative because she was an aristocrat, and not a member of the working class on which they were focused. Singh’s history is a bit complicated, and a bit much to get into for this post (I intend to revisit her story at a later date), but I doubt very seriously that Singh’s membership in a certain class saved her from experiencing British racism and sexism. Especially when you consider that any land that she may have been heir to was “annexed” (in other words stolen) by the British Empire. (Cue the imperial march.) Her class standing certainly didn’t afford her the right to vote.

Gavron also highlights other Indian women (including Roy, Mukerjea and Bhola Nauth featured in the photo below) who fought alongside white suffragettes, but says that she chose not to include them because they weren’t a strong part of the movement during the years upon which the movie primarily focuses, 1912 and 1913. The photo was taken in 1911, just one year before the movie begins.

Photographer unknown. Photograph courtesy of http://www.museumoflondonprints.com

So, they examined the “evidence.” They read some things and looked at some photos and ignored some people and ultimately came up with another story that whitewashes history. Having recently read Vivian A. May’s book, Pursuing Intersectionality, Gavron’s comments grate just a touch more than they normally would. Especially as they relate to what May and others have referred to as historical gaps and silences. May states that one strategy of pursuing intersectionality is to engage those silences and to figure out why they exist in the first place.

The problem is that too often people look at dominant historical narratives and take them as the only source of historical truth. People, especially cis/trans women of color, get left out of history deliberately. People, especially women of color (trans women of color even more so), are actively erased. Consider,for instance, academic programs that tell their students not to research a particular person or subject because they or it is not worth dedicated study? Or the continued dearth of scholars of color in the pre-dominantly white academic spaces that create these so-called historical records. Or the relative absence of film-makers and writers of color from film-making industries? What kind of women’s suffrage film would Ava DuVernay or Jennifer Phang or Dee Rees have created? What kind of historical gaps would they have probed to uncover the untold stories lurking there?

Let’s stop participating in the erasure of women of color from historic spaces – from stories of slavery, from the UK’s and the US’s suffragette movements, from histories of feminism, from the Civil Rights movement, and on and on. Let’s instead ask ourselves, why aren’t these women in these photographs or these history books? Why weren’t we included? Because, trust me, the answer is much larger than “we weren’t there.”

On the Struggle Transition

I had a talk with two beautiful people on facebook yesterday. I will, of course, not name them, but they know who they are. In any case, I was reminded of my time in small town, Midwest America and how difficult those days were. Especially as I transitioned from an HBCU that regularly affirmed me to a PWI that was well….not as supportive as my HBCU.

A bit of background, I have been in some version of college and higher ed since 2005. I started off at an HBCU in biology, which I entered into because the Liberal Arts would have me “working at McDonalds,” but which I nonetheless loved. I liked learning about how our bodies worked, about the “disgusting” stuff, about why we sneeze and what our immune systems do when we get sick.

I was particularly fond of working in the lab. Give me a pipette, a question, and my iPod, leave me alone for about 6 hours and I’ll get you some preliminary results. Seeing the results of my experiments always excited me, even when I did them wrong. I was particularly fond of my ability to hold a bottle in the palm of my right hand while twisting the top off of it with my thumb and forefinger while simultaneously pipetting something with my left.

It probably makes no sense to you if you’ve never done it – but trust me, it’s a good skill to have! Comes in handy in the kitchen.

In any case, I was lucky enough to get into a PhD program and work toward my dream of having my own lab and teaching and mentoring and doing all the things my HBCU did for me. I’d probably still be there, in the lab, listening to my tunes and answering my questions if a PhD in science was merely just lab work. But there are other people in labs. Sometimes those people are peers, sometimes they’re superiors. And sometimes they bring their (thinly?) veiled racist and sexist garbage with them into the garden of Eden that was supposed to be my lab space.

It was that garbage that made me quit. That garbage, and not having the language to talk myself through said garbage. The constant “reminders” from a researcher I desperately wanted to work with that the work would be hard (no shit, it was PhD program. If PhD’s were easy, we’d all have them). The attempt to ward me off because time trials would require me to come in late at night…The professor that barely covered up a scoff when I said I (who had never taken a neurobiology course) did not know the anatomy of the brain. The anonymous student who, when I took to my former blog and revealed how lonely and sad I was, took that as an opportunity to tell me that program peers had tried to engage but that I seemed stand-offish.

All of that, and feeling utterly and completely isolated in a way that I never was at my HBCU. When you’re depressed, and you’re facing an environment where people subtly suggest to you that you do not belong – it wears and you feel alone even though you may not be. I wish the few bright stars I encountered had been enough (shout out to Laurie Parker and R. Matey and R. Matey’s friend!) I wish I’d known what microaggressions were then and why those seemingly “small” isolated events that added up over time culminated in me living in my bedroom and watching Mad Men for over a month.

Mad Men just isn’t that damn good.

I think I’ve worked hard to build stronger and better relationships since leaving the-school-that-shall-not-be-named and science altogether. I think I could’ve made that place work if I had leaned more on certain people. I don’t know why I didn’t lean on them  more when I was there. Maybe part of me felt like they didn’t want to be bothered with me. I don’t know. You can’t go back, as they say, but you can learn from your mistakes and move on.

My friend said yesterday that the Humanities have been safer (or something to that affect), and it resonated with me. The interdisciplinary nature of the English programs I’ve been in for the last few years gave me the language I needed to speak and write through what I’d experienced in small town, Middle America. And while I still deal with people who think they can or should put me in my “place,” I know how to combat that now.

For instance – asking men who interrupt me if they somehow didn’t hear me talking.

Or asking people who expect me to be the one to teach them things about Black culture if they’d, perhaps, tried researching it on their own.

Or not backing down when someone insists that I must be wrong because I don’t read something in the same way that they do and go out of their way to demonstrate to me why they are right.

I don’t do it all the time, because some days the energy just isn’t there. But I’ve gotten better at it. And I do feel safer here wrapped in a cocoon of Black women’s lit and Black Feminism and post-colonial theory (which I am only just discovering) and critical race philosophy.

I miss the lab and I miss science. But I wouldn’t trade what I do now and where I am now for anything in the world. Well, maybe a billion dollars, but who wouldn’t?

[The next post will be peppier. I promise.]