I remain amazed that Black History Month oftentimes still celebrates decontextualized people and events. If the context were the substance, however, we would be promoting new thinking and radical action. Hardly seems a coincidence that we have one model and not the other. Today I find myself thinking about Sojourner Truth and the ways that my students have talked about learning from her. This is a post that I wrote last spring that reminds me today of what Black History compels us to really do and understand. _________________
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In my first academic job as an assistant professor, I was not allowed to choose what classes I wanted to teach, what times or days I would teach, or ever permitted to create a new course. There was a level of toxicity that began already in the first semester. Because the other newly hired assistant professor and myself taught at a critical point in the program where assessment data was vital, the chair and her two flunkies senior administrators once sat we two newbies down under the pretense of a “meeting.” It was just my first two months at this job and here we were, literally yelled at like misbehaving children: we needed to learn to do what we were told was the gist. The senior faculty, of course, were left alone. I started to get real heated and, at one point, started rising up from my chair. I don’t know what I was planning to do but as far as I was concerned, I was a grownass woman so sitting there obediently listening to an incompetent chair and her flunkies senior administrators (the chair made 100K more than I did) so violently weasel her way into getting two, new assistant professors just out of graduate school to do HER work for her was just… TOO… MUCH (she called this feminist collaboration). I was a brand-new assistant professor but I wasn’t THAT kinda brand-new. The tirade, however, abruptly ended when my fellow junior colleague started crying (as I have already described, white women’s tears always fulfill this function.) That was my very first semester as an assistant professor and that ain’t even the half; each semester only worsened, putting the H-O-T in hot mess. Needless to say, there has never been a single moment in my professional life where I have missed or thought fondly about this department or its leadership, a department that is pretty much defunct now. I do, however, deeply miss the sistafriends I made at that college.
As soon as that “meeting” started, I noticed the peculiar way the chair and her flunkies senior administrators were looking at one another. I knew from jump that this meeting had been pre-planned and that something real foul was afoot. I am also someone who loves language and discourse; though I am not always quick enough on my feet to interject rapidly and cleverly, I will often commit a conversation to memory and this “meeting” was one of those times. Who talked first, second, and then the turn-takings were so memorably awkward and poorly performed that I just KNEW this “meeting” had been pre-orchestrated under the chair’s tutelage (she was good cop; the other two were bad cop). In fact, in these past nine years as a professor, I have learned this to be a common form of discourse maneuvering in academia with white administrators. When I suggested to my fellow-misbehaved-colleague that this was a premeditated homocide, she didn’t fully believe me. It was many months into the schoolyear before she realized just how unethical this chair was. Like with this moment, I have remained perplexed by my many colleagues, especially those of color, who can’t seem to gauge the petty politics, backstabbing, scheming, lying, theft, and violence that is being waged against them behind closed doors until it is much, much too late. In direct contrast, when I described the turn-taking of that chair’s “meeting” to my sistafriends at that college, they pointed out even more slippages that I didn’t catch. You see, these are women who read men and nations.
These women of color on my first campus as a tenure track professor were phenomenal and though I knew they were dope when I was there, I never fully realized that having a set of sistafriends on your campus to lift your head is a RARITY! Notice that I said: women of color who are sistafriends. That is NOT the same as having women of color on campus. I am not talking about the kinds of women of color who come talk to you in closed offices but never speak up in public settings, a strategy often learned early on because it is so handsomely rewarded in graduate school. These women might say they keep quiet because no one is listening to them but, more often, they choke their words to not lose favor with those in power, not ruffle white feathers, not take any risks, or not lose their token status (and many times go home to wealthy, breadwinning, and/or white husbands). They are, in sum, passing for white. I ain’t talking about THEM women of color.
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I am talking about the sistas who read their environments openly, those who will read the institution out loud with you, the sistafriends who read institutional racism AND patriarchy. Talking up institutional racism does not always come with talking up patriarchy and misogyny and I mean something more than talking about public spectacles from the likes of male rappers (these are easy targets). I am talking about the women who also criticize the day-to-day workings of men in our workplaces— white men and men of color. My sistafriends at my first college didn’t just co-sign misogynistic black male colleagues who were actin the fool (dropping their “seed” anywhere, meeting with female students “after class”, texting/ calling/ closing-the-door with female students, etc); nor did we leave our feminism at the door and blindly support the campus’s white patriarchs and their violence like the white women on campus did. Like I said, I have learned the value and rarity of these kinds of sistas in these past years. You see, these were women who read men AND nations. They are the legacy of someone like Sojourner Truth.
”I don’t read such small stuff as letters, I read men and nations” are the famous words of Sojourner Truth, the famous African American suffragist and abolitionist. Elizabeth Cady Stanton described Truth making this statement to her in a 1867 visit. I have pushed myself to think deeply about this phrase because it is one that my students continually re-mix throughout a semester— always noticing how the black women who we have studied were reading their social environments! “Reading” someone is, of course, a popular African American verbal expression and usually means telling somebody about themselves after an extensive, head-to-toe assessment of who and what they really are. I imagine this is part of the reason students of African descent gravitate to this expression— they already recognize it. Remembering Truth, however, means we must take this expression much further. Reading men AND nations is about the ability to analyze and navigate white supremacy (nation) AND patriarchy (men). I can’t think of a better way to describe what my circle of sistafriends was doing at my former college than with Truth’s statement: a present-day iteration of a historical reality and necessity.
My students’ reverberating references to Sojourner Truth also compel me to be a different kind of teacher-researcher. Part of me is responding to a tendency of mostly white teachers to describe mostly white students who reference a litany of white authors and novels in the course of classroom discussions. This gets marked as intelligent and well-read and I do certainly agree. However, within the scope of these parameters, I have never heard any black student be referenced in the same way for knowledge of black cultural history and persons (and what passes as KNOWLEDGE of people of African descent, even at the graduate level, is often so dismal that I am utterly embarrassed for all parties involved). At best, when undergraduate students of African descent reference black cultural histories, these are treated as personal connections, not literate connections (as if white students describing white authors is NOT also about personal connection). Alternatively, black students might be seen as activating their “prior knowledge” which is admirable and tolerated but that is not the same as regarding these moments as sophisticated analyses. So I push myself to see recurring themes and issues related to black female cultural figures as articulated by students of African descent as literate connections and sophisticated analyses: to, in sum, treat black students’ ruminations as seriously as white students’ get treated.
Today, when I celebrate, recognize, or honor someone like Sojourner Truth, I must remember to do more than study her life. We should all be pushing ourselves to analyze the world the way that she did. That would, indeed, be a different kind of Black History Month!
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My first day was staff development day. I had to attend various sessions like everyone else but, as the new teacher that year, I also had to pick up my keys and set up my classroom. As soon as I opened the classroom door, a rat the size of a terrier dog ran across the room and behind the coat closet. I was horrified (I don’t do rodents, insects, OR snakes!) but for some reason, I didn’t flinch. I moved the coat closet and saw a hole the size of a dinner platter in the wall. I went outside to the public pay phone, called my father to ask him the easiest way to plug up a hole in the wall (without needing sheetrock), went to the local hardware store, and bought steel wool, chicken wire, and plaster (I also bought roach spray since I have always seen roaches and rats travel in pairs). The local hardware store owner did not recognize me and so I introduced myself and my dilemma. He gave me a 50% discount on the materials and so I went back to my classroom and plugged holes. I had seen enough at my interview and the “teacher development” sessions to know that no one there would help or care.
Now some 21 years later, I wish I could say that things look different in my life as a college teacher, but they don’t. Not at all. The only thing that is new is the way that our newest technologies figure into just another one of them things that racially subordinated, working class/working poor students supposedly should not and cannot do. Same rats, new holes.
I have always worked at schools that serve large or ONLY serve working class, first-generation, working, and/or racially marginalized students. And for as long as I have worked there, I have gotten editorial and peer responses across the board that question how THAT student population, or how the university where I work, is relevant to the kind of classrooms most compositionists see— white middle class kids. The problem is that this is a lie. White, middle-classness is not what MOST colleges and universities today look like and it is not going in that direction either. 
As I seem to always stress, my father’s working class status and disposition have never meant intimidation or lack of confidence, as many seem to associate with working class folk of color. As a heating and A/C specialist, he works in many homes/churches/companies to install heating ducts, central air, etc. If it has a motor, engine, or some such, he can fix it …BUT if you start telling him what he should do when it is obvious that you have NO knowledge or scientific background with the task at hand, he will nod, tell you to do it yo-damn-self since you know so much, pack up his stuff, and walk right back out the door. If you can’t see that he has knowledge and a skillset that you NEED and do NOT have, he ain’t dealin with you. Ever. If you don’t know how to talk or respect someone like him, well then he ain’t gon give you the time of day. He will watch you freeze to death, quite literally, without a morsel of regret. It should go without saying: I think this is one of my father’s greatest attributes. I aspire to be like him each and every day!
As a child, I often went on jobs with my father. Yes, I enjoyed when he would get mad and leave because, then, I could do my special dance on the walk to car: a bop to match our walk, quick pause every now-and-then for an “in yo face” side-to-side head bap, and then bop to the car door some more. On the occasions where we stayed, I loved that too. I got to sit down and read Ebony, Essence, and Jet magazines and, since I was appreciative of the content, I was always given access to the stash of back issues that were always stored somewhere close by. No one threw these out— they were archived as data of our lives. And, yes, I consider these archives, NOT collections, ones that were freely accessible. What was the point of collecting black wisdom if you weren’t going to share it? I loved flipping through the well-worn pages and seeing which articles were the most read. That’s where I would sink in. Of course, those times do not match the politics of these magazines now, but they once offered dynamic polemics of and representations into black life.
