Category Archives: The Life/Work I Want to Live/Do

Protest, Mourning & Remembrance (Personal Notes on Thanksgiving)

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“Well, here we go with another holiday that America loves to celebrate, Thanksgiving Day. I know this has been said numerous times by many Native people of this country, but it is just not a day for many of us to celebrate. Although some things have improved on some reservations, there are an overwhelming number of us that have nothing to celebrate. These are the people who still have my concern, my hope and my love that things will get better. I’m talking about the people of Big Mountain, some of whom have already received their eviction notices. It’s about the Western Shoshone, about the people all over this continent who are fighting for their treaty rights and sovereignty. It’s about the people in Chiapas, the people in Central and South America who are being tortured and slaughtered every day. It is about the people whose stories we do not hear. The people who are resisting by simply surviving the “third world” conditions that they live under in the wealthiest nation on Earth.

As you gather today at this historic spot, remember those who struggled and gave their lives before you. Remember those who are in prison and those who are being tortured and denigrated today. Remember those who gave you the teachings that were handed down generation to generation. Remember as you continue the struggle for justice and equality in this land that is ours to caretake…Thanksgiving is every day. Wake up and thank the Creator for a new day every day.” ~Leonard Peltier, 1998 Thanksgiving Statement

Thanksgiving is a tricky concept for me.  On the one hand, the moment of pause, reflection, and gratitude that the concept suggests is one that I support.  On the other hand, we have enshrined yet another European celebration/manifestation.  The National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) actually offers a short lesson plan and extended curriculum for grades 4-8 that help classroom teachers begin to dig deeper into the ongoing imagination of the Indigenous people breaking bread with the  “pilgrims” at the “First Thanksgiving” in what is now Plymouth, Massachusetts. Certainly, Indigenous nations have designed systems for giving thanks to the earth but the trope of Thanksgiving that we often celebrate is actually a mixture of Puritan religious practices and  European festivals of Harvest Home (which included sports, like our current marriage of Thanksgiving with football), and that incorporated the Indigenous foodways that we take for granted.  All of this information is widely known and accessible and yet most elementary kids will still come home with the same things that were used to teach me about Thanksgiving more than 30 years ago: sketches where you trace your fingers and make that into a turkey; some sort of headband with a paper feather; and/or drawings or texts that enshrine pilgrims in that classic black and white attire.  I can walk for ten minutes, in any ethnic direction, through the segregated neighborhoods of my Hometown-Brooklyn and tell when there are small children in the home: these textual representations of the myth and dominant fantasy of Thanksgiving are glued everywhere to front windows and doors this week.

I don’t think I can afford to ignore these tensions when the United American Indians of New England (UAIME) have declared Thanksgiving a Day of Mourning since 1970.  Instead, the UAIME marks this day as one of remembrance and spiritual connection alongside protest of the racism and oppressions that Indigeneous Nations experience NOW. This year’s 43rd Day of Mourning is dedicated to the political prisoner and artist, Leonard Peltier (all artwork on this page is by Peltier). I see the UAIME as letting us know that we all have some mourning to do.  And even though I won’t be attending the Day of Mourning in Massachusetts this year, I recognize, in both my head and heart, the remembrances, spiritual connections, and fight against oppression that the UAIME represent.  I also recognize, in my head and heart, the very gift of seeing the new day, the Thanksgiving everyday, as Peltier suggests. So this Thanksgiving will mean doing some small-scale recognizing of events and people in my individual life alongside the large-scale work of recognizing and mourning human loss under oppression.

As corny as it may sound and as trite in comparison to the history I have talked about here, I want to remember my closest friends and family, making sure that I recognize who they are and what they bring to my life.  I think about a girlfriend with a family, home, exacting teaching load, heavy service expectations at her university, administrative assignments, and publication demands who never, never once, put me aside when I needed to think through some piece of writing or idea I was working on, though her schedule doesn’t easily accommodate the time and depth we usurp for our emailing alone.  I will never consume her real-time support and spirit and then dissolve her presence by comparing/juxtaposing her with someone else.  That kind of consumption would only mean that I have sacrificed her collegiality, friendship, and loyalty to the forces of oppression in an inability to recognize her true, unique value.  As simple as it seems, maintaining friendships and the value of human lives outside of the patterns of exploitation that permeate everything is quite radical: that’s how I understand the remembrance that UAIME asks of us.

I think about my mentors who, just in their letters of reference, took the time to craft words that offered such vivid descriptions of me that I sound like no one else and who, in turn, made me see who I am.  They seemingly transformed even a bureaucratic and bourgeois process so that I would not be another woman-thing in the academy to be institutionally-exchanged, discussed, dissected or claimed as an object of ownership, desire, or tokenism.  I recognize their ability to stand outside of the current econo-cultural climate and really see and do.  I think about my real friends and family who let me be BOTH weak and strong, loud and quiet, scared and bold, focused and confused and who never conflate my achievement of professional success with my experience of joy and pain.  I think about girlfriends with whom I mine the darkest depths of trauma and hurt— both theirs and my own— without letting that dictate a negative path and spirit for our conversations and very foundations of friendship/soulship.  Living one’s life past/beyond oppression is no small task but, at least amongst one another, we have offered one another our whole selves with realness, clarity, and vision.

That we have survived is a feat in and of itself. When it comes right down to it, it’s about connection and remembrance… and sustenance through the material, everyday practices of what we say and do.  Although the culture sets us up to alienate the very real labor of maintaining friends and family in our daily lives, we do not have to abide by that culture.  That’s the kind of Thanksgiving worth having.

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Radical Feminists of Color & Composition Studies: Contradiction in Terms?

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I once received a very curious letter of recommendation when I chaired a search committee for a writing program.  The letter was written by a prominent white female scholar in my field, often praised and respected for her progressive feminist scholarship and perspectives on race, class, gender, sexuality, oppression, et al.  The letter was written for one of her white male graduate students.  This particular composition-rhetoric scholar took it upon herself to offer a lens into the caliber of his teaching (his dissertation involved literary theory so the scholar had not, in fact, seen any of his scholarship, only his teaching, as she was the teacher of record for his required teaching practicum in the Ph.D. program).  The letter was pretty much the standard, praise-full candidate letter but then she switched it up: she began comparing this man’s teaching to the “great Hollywood movies on teaching” (yes, this is an exact quote that I have never been able to get out of my head) like Freedom Writers.  She compared his ability to get students excited by traditional lectures to what Michelle Pfifer’s character does in the “great movie,” Dangerous Minds.  And she described these movies and this man’s teaching with deep awe and admiration.  Now everybody who I know/read who sees themselves connected to critical literacy/radical pedagogy has criticized these movies for their depiction of white women as the saviors of the savage, natives in the urban schools of the big, bad, dark, ghetto jungles.  Everybody…. I…. Know.  And yet, somehow, this woman, someone considered a progressive feminist rhetorician, missed the whole damn message.  I mean, really?   Even  Mad Tv gets this:

Now I don’t mean to suggest that the field has only produced and/or rewarded the kind of white feminist scholar who I have described.  She is not the stand-in for all, for sure, thank goodness.  Nonetheless, I still got some questions.

This memory was triggered for me this week while I was attending the National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA).  As it so happens, I was really drawn this year to black and Latina women who talked about the paths they have taken as scholars/activists/intellectuals/feminists.  I was also really drawn by these women because they had once been connected to my own field, a field which none of these women remain linked with, a field in which I get letters like the one I described above from someone widely respected as a “feminist.”

My ears first perked up when Beverly Guy-Sheftall began to describe that she started her career the same way I had: teaching remedial English/writing classes, in her case, at Spelman.  Though I was not at an HBCU like Guy-Sheftall, my experience at an urban college with classrooms 100% black and Latino/a, more than 25 years later from Guy-Sheftall’s start, was no different than what she described: an unyielding white, male, racist, patriarchal curriculum and structure.  She went on to describe how she and students organized the takeover and kidnapping of trustees until they agreed to elect, for the first time ever, a black woman as president of Spelman; she told this story alongside tales of Toni Cade Bambara teaching black women’s literature courses in her home, non-credit-bearing, because the university would not allow Bambara to teach such courses.

Later in the conference, I was stunned even further to hear that both Ruth Zambrana and Bonnie Thornton Dill had worked as open admissions administrators at the City University of New York (CUNY). For all that I have read and heard about open admissions and “remedial education” at CUNY, I have never heard the names of the black and Latina women who made those spaces livable for the first large wave of black and Latino/a students to get college degrees in New York at universities that never really wanted them there.  Never!  And yet, here they were right here, telling their stories.  I had not known any of these histories of Guy-Sheftall, Zambrana, or Thornton, but more strikingly, it reminded me of something I DID already know: that the field of composition had written the history of open admissions, “remedial”/basic writing of the 1970s without a SINGLE utterance of the work of black and Latina women/radical feminists of color.  And these women were, of course, there all along, women who, as far as I am concerned, did not get taken along and/or did not want to be as the field moved “forward.”

At the conference, I had a conversation with a woman who I had never met who said that she feels more energized and politically engaged at NWSA, given her focus on issues of social oppression and repression, than she does at the major composition conference that we both attend.  I agreed with her and, in fact, told a good friend today the same thing, inspiring me to write this post, after I described to him the solidarity I felt at NWSA.  Like I already said, what seems most relevant for me now is that none of these women whose stories I have chronicled here stayed connected to the field.  I can’t say for sure at this juncture whether or not my fate will be the same.

It was Guy-Sheftall who really took my breath away at the conference.  At the close of her presentation, she described herself as someone who, if she were to die tomorrow, has done exactly the kind of work she wanted to do and lived exactly the kind of life she wanted to live: one that was never dictated by the name of the school she taught at, her salary, or her reputation, but by the work she could do within the terms of her own self-definition as a radical black feminist.  She challenged the audience of mostly women of color in that room to see to it that they did the same.  I was so inspired by that statement that I gave it its own category here… I intend to live my life, both on and off campus, in the same way.

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Writing New Futures

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Recently, Dr. Suzanne Carothers, my advisor for my doctoral dissertation, asked me some key questions to think and write about as I re-imagine and re-direct this phase of my life in academia.  I thought the questions were particularly poignant and critical and so I share them here.  I imagine myself often returning to these answers and re-addressing these same questions as I way to keep myself in check and move forward with what I say I want to be and do.  I thank Dr. Carothers, the most exquisite writing teacher I have ever had, for always prodding and always teaching me!

Tell me three of your accomplishments that you are most proud of since finishing your dissertation. Given all you have done and do, why do these three stand out for you?

(1) I am proud that I have chosen to always be a critical educator, that I have not seen such work as simply the necessary evil of being a scholar, writer, researcher, and academic, though this has certainly been the message I have been given after graduate school.

(2) I have also never backed down from working at colleges where the students are predominantly working class and of-color.  I refuse to use the bodies of people of color as a marketing tool to promote diversity, the prevailing (and sometimes only) acknowledgement of people of color that I have seen at such institutions.  This means that I have never had (and, thus, am willing to forego) teaching assistants, research assistants, start-up research funds, significant financial rewards/promotion, publishing/professional opportunities, sabbaticals, time, updated technology (at those few places where I have had a current computer, it didn’t work for very long), and other resources that come from prestigious and/or well-endowed research universities.  It’s not that I think these material things compromise people’s work (nothing is ever that simple).  However, these are the privileged spaces that new faculty like me are supposed to mark as coveted where I can, for instance, write about working class black folk but never actually see them in any of my classes. That’s not the route I have chosen. I like this path and I am proud that being on path and being on purpose are how I have chosen to navigate my life thus far.

(3) I am most proud of finishing my book (what was once my dissertation). I don’t so much mean the final product. I am just proud of hanging in there, never backing down from or giving up on my ideas despite the disagreements I had to face.  It would have been quite easy to give up on the book and publishing altogether given the resistance that I face from many circles— especially this notion that things are so much better, a sentiment that I have heard from black scholars too, or that I must make myself more palatable (i.e., marketable and auction-block-able) to wider audiences.  I wonder who these fools are talking about— certainly not the black masses where every measure of structural racism tells us that we are living a Neo-Jim-Crow? I like that publishing means that I have more fully realized my ancestral legacy: the one where we know we have to always keep on pushin.

 

When you think about the teaching and learning environments you create, what makes them work?  What’s central to that dynamic for you? And, how do you know when you have achieved it?

I think classrooms are meant to bring the content of what students are learning and reading full circle.  I think here about the class I will teach in spring 2013: African American women’s rhetoric.  Here, for instance, we will read Ida B. Wells and ask ourselves how she affected the world for all of us by her ways with words.  As the teacher, I ask myself: what does it mean to bring Ida B. Wells alive in this classroom?  What would an Ida-B-Wells-pedagogy look like and do?  It would mean not just talking about her but talking with her!   I want students to fight, and fight hard, come hell or high water, for what is right, notice the racial subjugation of the people around them, and fight for those lives as if it were their own life they were fighting for.  This means I am looking for students to talk about more than just the content of Ida B. Wells’s life and work.  I look for students to engage their own intellectual and political purposes, in their own time and place.  Essentially, I hope they can achieve what Fanon suggested: “each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfill it, or betray it.”  I may not be able to ensure the fulfillment part but I can certainly move students in the direction of discovery, that’s what teaching Ida B. Wells would have to do.

 

Finish these thoughts:

Scholarship for me is  . . .   and 

My scholarship matters because  . . .

Scholarship for me is slipping through the cracks, digging deep down, and unearthing the voices and visions that can sustain us.

My scholarship matters because the world we live in requires a level of thinking and creativity that moves beyond what we are used to.  Scholarship can do that work if we treat it as something more than static words, bling, and status.

 

What is it you want to do in and beyond the academy?

Both in and out of the academy, if I could achieve my heart’s desire, I would want to be like Parliament and “make my funk the P-Funk… I want my funk uncut.” I like the way they named their collective and their music (Parliament Funk as P-Funk) but also that P-Funk meant that they were intentionally examining and exploring Funk at its highest levels of expression and possibility, as a thing/thought of its own kind and genius.  Though I may not have the right words to explain that here, that’s what I would want writing, teaching, and envisioning myself as a black woman to feel like.  They weren’t claiming to invent funk but they were claiming that they could insert their own version and vision and encourage the world to do the same.  I can’t imagine a better way of being one’s self in and beyond the academy.

 

What four adjectives would you use to describe yourself?

…principled, creative, unapologetically black-centric, and always evolving!

 

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World-Historical People

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I attended a conference this summer and though many of the researchers and presenters left a lasting and positive impression, there was one graduate student who I still just can’t get out of my head.  I don’t know her name but I found her absolutely entertaining to observe, albeit somewhat horrifying.

I was standing outside of a room, waiting for that session to end, when I overheard this woman talking with other graduate students who she had obviously met at the conference.  She explained a very specific conference strategy: she attended the sessions of the most famous scholars, made sure to sit up in front, ask really smart questions publicly in the session, and then go talk to the individual presenters after the session.  This, according to her, was how you get the “famous people” to notice you, remember you, work with you, and help you forward your career.  I found this conversation absolutely fascinating so I did the inevitable: I watched her… because when someone doesn’t see you, you’d be surprised at just how much you can see of them.  She did not disappoint.  In every feature session, there she was: all up in the front, asking a question with little regard for whether or not it actually contributed something to the conversation, and then there she was on the que waiting to talk to folk afterwards.  I was wildly entertained, I will admit, but I am, at the same time, sympathetic to her cause.  She was only mirroring  the  kind of superficiality that academic culture sustains today, a culture that is telling a young black woman grabbing at a Ph.D. that groupie-stalking is what it takes for her to survive and thrive in the academy, not a serious engagement with ideas and thinking.  While this young woman’s practice might seem, well, a bit CRAZY, what was more astonishing was the actual response from the “famous people.”  They ate it up like famished souls where only this kind of attention could satiate their hunger.

These are the moments when I often think of Professor Wynter, when I am reminded that the work one does is the WORK one does: the way you live out your life is the way that you live out your words on the page too. They are not opposing forces.  What concerns me most about the young woman who I have described is that the reality she describes for being noticed was not a hallucination on her part.  It served her to good effect at the conference and it might also serve her to good effect in her larger career.

Meanwhile, every chance Wynter gets, she reminds her audiences to think past the epistemic boundaries of a given world/social order and reach out past it, as evidenced even in a letter she wrote to the Centre for Caribbean Thought.  Even in only a letter, she talks about what it means to be “world-historical people” who have no choice but confront “the imperative of the effecting of a profound mutation in what is now the globally hegemonic Western European, secular, and thereby naturalized understanding of being human.”  It becomes wildly absurd then to imagine trying to get the attention of famous people at an academic conference in the context of Wynter’s call that we begin to completely upturn the “naturalized, now biologized, globally homogenized, homo oeconomicus understanding of being human” so that we can finally displace its referential system with its “now internet-integrated planet of the middle class suburbia/exurbia/gentrified inner city ‘referent we, on the one hand, and on the other, that of the rapidly urbanizing ‘planet of slums.’ ”

It makes sense to me that Wynter does not call the “Crisis of the Negro Intellectual” in this historical moment ONLY the product of white liberalism and racism in the academy.  She loads that crisis with the processes and products of what black scholars themselves have created in the quest to replicate the very models which had ontologically, intellectually, and aesthetically excluded them in the first place, fully incorporating all of its cognitive closures and impediments to radical social change.  That’s more than a notion right there!  I also see Wynter’s points here in the very way that she enacts her scholarly identity.  I am often amazed at how connected I feel to other scholars who deeply engage her work, a connection I had never once even articulated to myself because it just seems so self-evident.  But even this aspect of her scholarly identity points to the alternate space in which she does intellectual work. I am often stunned by how graduate students, for instance, of a specific scholar will go above and beyond to “market” themselves as the heir of that advisor  (i.e., which can quickly become the “auction block” code for which plantation provided the best skills) and/or do their best to patrol who and how their advisor is referenced (making the example of the woman I describe all the more believable).  Scholarship in this mode becomes a kind of white property to be maintained and sustained by measuring its exchange value against other properties.   I no longer think it is a mere coincidence that the folk I know who engage Wynter do not unleash these kind of beasts/pseudo-intellectual pathologies.  In fact, it seems safe to say that Wynter herself would not allow it!

I certainly don’t mean to harshly castigate the young woman who I described at the beginning of this post.  Like I said, I am sympathetic and very concerned for her cause.  At this point in my life and career, I find myself most drawn and interested in those black thinkers and scholars who are really interested in liberation rather than bling, status, and attention.  I think this is why I have become so much more deeply grateful for the model that Sylvia Wynter offers, a model that has lately become a kind of life preserve in this sea I must swim in.

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