It’s never just about the “microaggressions.” Daily aggressions derive their political and emotional meanings and are legitimized inside of the larger contexts of dehumanization. When the white male professor down the hall accused me of stealing his little measly stuff, that happened at the same time that I watched, over and over again, Eric Garner tell NYPD that he couldn’t breathe. They killed Garner anyway, for standing on the corner with some loosies. Though the inability to even walk down the hall at the college where you work without being perceived as a thief is not the same as Garner’s murder, a singular social system justifies both. When I was questioned by a hyper-privileged white administrator about my academic credentials, as if I didn’t have them, that happened at the same time that the initial jury wouldn’t convict Michael Dunn of first-degree murder of Jordan Davis. It took TWO TRIALS to rule against Dunn, a white man shooting at a vehicle with 17-year old Black boys in it. Again, my experience is not similar to Davis’s murder but the trial made the aggressions I faced all the more unbearable. The microaggressions that are sure to come as soon as school starts will be happening alongside countless other incidents: like white people, mostly white women, calling the cops when they see a Black child mowing someone’s lawn or selling bottled water . . . when they see Black folks having a BBQ in the park . . . when they see Black folk _____. When school starts, we will be fighting today’s current fascist regime to get Brown children out of cages at detention camps. When school starts, we will still be marching against more theft of Indigenous land and more police shootings of unarmed Black men and women. There’s only one thing you can do in the midst of all of this when you are a college professor and work in the academy. GET. OUT.
You’ve got to take your mind back. The microaggressions that you face everyday on campus and living your life in light of what is going on in the world will mess with your mind. And that’s what Fridays are for in a week in the life of a black feminist pedagogy. Honestly, you gotta take your mind back everyday, but by Friday, it gets real official for me.
Though we don’t always talk this way: as academics, we are also fundamentally scholars … writers … and researchers. You need inspiration to maintain that. I am talking about something different from self-care. I mean something IN ADDITION to self-care. Yes, you will need to know how to protect yourself from endless requests on your time and energy, long lines of folk who need something from you yet again and give nothing back, and just the general, never-ending drains on your time and energy. You have to learn how to replenish, rejuvenate, meditate, and calm your spirit for the work that you do. But you also need some intellectual inspiration and when it comes to radical theory and praxis where it relates to race, gender, etc, I have never found that at any university where I have worked. Like I said, you have to GET OUT or your ideas will be as compromised as the folk who tout justice and perpetrate microaggressions like in the campus examples that I opened with. While my students certainly inspire me, I still need to get away from the classroom at times. When the weekend comes, I’m out. It’s a struggle with errands and family but it’s hard to come back to work on Monday to more meaningless, inane, or violent situations unless you refilled your mind with something worthy of your people and your history beforehand.
You need intellectual inspiration in droves if you want to think new things, write in new ways, and research unexplored corners about anti-Blackness and radical futures. And so when T.G.I.F. comes, I hit the road and get far, far away from my college. I have even arranged my teaching schedule to accommodate my T.G.I. Intellectual Fridays and weekends.
Many colleges are lenient when faculty cancel classes, especially for professional travel. Unlike every other college where I have worked, my current institution does not play when it comes to canceling classes though. You better have that cancelled day of class on your syllabus with a detailed assignment that students can do and understand on their own. All kinds of other mess slides for college-level expectation at my college, but cancelling class does not, at least not in my department. I appreciate this vigilance on the part of my unit. My students are not busting their behinds for a college degree to have professors who do not bother to show up or just let TAs do the job. This means that I only teach on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays and get the service work done by Thursday. I front-load the week so that come Friday, I can be out. This way I don’t have to cancel classes and disrupt the flow of my teaching. Allowing Thursday-Friday-Saturday for travel and other intellectual excursions is a lifesaver for my thinking. Even when I don’t travel, I try to attend some kind of event in New York City to get my mind out of the mess my institution makes of it during the week. It seems simple but I need to be vigilant with my time and energy too ….otherwise, I will hand over entire weekends to meetings, emails, or phone conversations coddling grown folks who dominate your time because they refuse to figure out meaningful lives for themselves. You have to fight for the time and space to think and be.
Faculty colleagues of color are not something you can count on either. There are either too few of them or the ones who are there are too busy soothing white egos and catering to white comfort. I have no patience for them and am REAL CLEAR that this does not belong to the Black Intellectual Traditions of our ancestors . One of my colleagues of color told me that they were warned not to fraternize too closely with other Brown and Black faculty (i.e., sitting next to one another in a department meeting). I’m not shocked that senior white faculty and administrators would articulate and execute these kinds of slave codes to Brown and Black professors (reminder: slave codes prohibited the enslaved from assembling without a white person present). However, I AM surprised by how many faculty of color comply so willingly with these campus-plantation rules. You won’t miss out on any real conversation or interaction of political depth with these Sambo types though. This is why you need to always fellowship with the radical Brown and Black academics across the country and form a circle that extends well beyond your campus. Like I already said, I front-load the week so that come Friday, I can be out.
I attend many conferences, but only those that theoretically and politically inspire me and that have folk of color in large attendance. I refuse to be mesmerized by attending an intellectually-mediocre conference because, like so many academics that I see, it is the only place that makes me feel famous and important. I also give many talks where I get to meet graduate students and faculty and hear more intimately about their work. This also lets me see what other universities are doing and keeps me from the provincialism that would suggest that the way my university does something is the only or most contemporary way. Other times, I am just reading a set of articles or a book that pushes me to see, think, or write something in a different way. I resist the academic rule that you need to read solely or mainly in your discipline. You won’t grow intellectually that way— you just join the old boys’ club. And if you are of color, you don’t have the luxury to be so closely wedded to any one field or discipline anyway since none have your people in mind (even ethnic studies often looks for its legitimation today from neoliberalism). So on T.G.I. Intellectual Fridays, I am reading and learning. It seems like working at a college, learning would automatically fill my days. Strangely, it’s not that way. You have to plan your week around thinking/ learning in order to take your mind back.
People often ask me about my experiences teaching a 3/3 and 3/4 load as a tenure-track, full-time college professor. It should come as no surprise that teaching fewer (and smaller classes) makes it much easier to publish, the holy grail of the academy. But the 3/3 load and large class sizes are not what dominates my time at a teaching college. I wish it was all about the classroom. It’s not. It’s all about the service.
I have met a lot of graduate students in the past three years: at national conferences, at talks and workshops that I have given, from personal emails/DMs, and in the classes that I teach. I wish I could stay in touch with ALLL of them. I have seen graduate students from seemingly every corner of the humanities and social sciences, and even some from math and science education. There is one thing that they all have in common at this historical moment: THEY. ARE. MAD. AS. HELL. I love it and hope with every connected fiber and tissue related to my being on this earth that they STAY MAD… MAD AF!
I know this is a radically different era because it diverges so sharply from my years in a PhD program (2000-2005). By the time I started dissertating, my advisors— Suzanne Carothers, Gordon Pradl, and John Mayher— supported and trusted whatever creative move I tried to make, regardless of whether or not it ended successfully because they valued my process. However, getting to that point was a LONG journey. My very first graduate seminar in my very first semester, a required doctoral course, was the worst class I have ever taken. I remember it vividly. I was simply cast as the antagonistic loud-mouth. No one wanted to make waves and jeopardize their future opportunities. This meant that no one had a intelligent critique of anything. It was a curriculum theory seminar and it didn’t matter where you landed on the political spectrum, this class taught you absolutely nothing. Because I worked part-time and did consulting as a full-time student with four classes per semester, I chose my coursework quite deliberately. I just did not have the time to waste on useless reading and writing. This class pissed me off every week! Many of our required readings came from the Brookings Institute. I was the only one who brought that up in class as an issue as, of course, the antagonistic one. Most of the students in the class did not consider themselves conservative or right-wing like Brookings and yet they did not flinch or ask a single question about the relevance of this to our work. After all, being down for the go-along eventually produces silence, complacency, and complicity. Internet search was a REAL thing back then (though google search was still a baby) but my peers had not even bothered to do that because they were determined to obey. If you asked most of them today, they couldn’t tell you what Brookings was/is or that Mickey D assigned so many readings from it (Mickey D is what I called that professor because he was about as real and deep as McDonald’s). There was only one required reading all semester about race (from Brookings) in a class about curriculum theory and nothing from a Black author. No one said a word against it. Not once. The class was so bad that even if you were a conservative, right-wing Republican, you wouldn’t have learned a thing, certainly not enough to get you taken seriously by Brookings. Issa all-around failure. Mickey D wrote on my final paper that he was not interested, as a white mainstream man, in my ideas regarding race, hegemony, dominance, and whiteness (his exact words) and gave me an A-. I got an A in the course but still stomped my way to the dean’s office on his basic Mickey D butt. My fellowship required me to present and publish annually and I so insisted that this would not be possible if I had to sit in submediocre classes that did not reflect current research trends. From that point, I got out of every required course in the program and only took the courses I wanted to take. It made no sense to me, as someone who studied language, to have to sit in classes taught by folk like Mickey D when someone like Ngugi was teaching across the street. I fought for myself and won that battle… and I was the only one in my cohort and program/school who took classes with Ngugi, who taught me more about teaching just from his presence than anyone I had met.
The biggest complaint I get from my students is that I assign too much reading and writing. I heed this complaint only to the extent that I check myself that I am not being unreasonable with students who have to work to feed and clothe themselves and am not, thereby, making a college degree outside of their reach. Other than that, GAME ON!