Towards a Black Composition Studies: BLACK AS GRAVITAS (PART II)

This is a year where I am listening and looking closely at those who really step up to the plate or miss the moment as has happened at every past Black Protest moment in my field. I am especially working towards framing composition studies as a place that does dynamic, on-the-ground work to transform the what, how, and why of university curriculum and instruction towards radical, anti-racist, intersected, Black feminist, fugitive goals.

I began the first part of this post arguing that my entry into university spaces has happened on the backs of young Black people.  It would be an erasure of and betrayal to them to act as if my arrival was predicated on my own talent or the goodwill of my colleagues.  I work hard to make sure that I don’t erase or betray and when I do worry, it’s only about whether I have gone far enough in truly rupturing white practices.

Many non-Black faculty at each of these tenure-track positions that I described in my previous post insist that it was their own consciousness and strategies for change that brought me to their campus.   The truth though is that these folk were at their wit’s end on what to do with their angry Black students and the larger public reminders from Black communities that they are as stunningly racist today as they were in the past.  No one will ever credit Black resistance this way because whiteness always attempts to take credit for moral convictions it has not achieved.  Today, the special journal issues on racism, Blackness, and anti-blackness will try to cover for their racist, exclusionary histories for which there is still no reckoning. New criticism and outrage will simply receive the same, canned response: this is just how the organization works (as if this justifies unfairness on the part of the people who choose the organization). White scholars will include a BIPOC author here and there in their publication or reference an example of Black suffering in the media (cuz there are, after all, so many to choose from), but still offer a racist and/or white-racialized framework; reviewers won’t notice and editors won’t intervene. White schools will cherry-pick the least resistant BIPOC students (who are also least attuned to Black radical practices and the intellectual works from the Black Radical Tradition) as their spokespeople. I say these things, not as prediction or sign of hopelessness, but as real-life examples of what I am noticing everywhere right now.

I am clear, however, that I am here because of a sustained Black Challenge by Black college students and communities.  It hit real different too when you locate your Black presence and pedagogies in young Black people’s and Black community revolts. 

You more loose with the tongue in your discipline’s ongoing silences,

you get more irreverently confident, even in the departments that never really wanted you,

you are less prone to low self-esteem despite the systems that always doubt you,

and a whole lot less likely to want to be centered/recognized in white supremacist/academic values. 

More folk should try it because I swear it’s good for the mind, body, and soul.  

Black Studies— Blackness, Black youth protest, and the Black Challenge to the western academy and knowledge—- is the most fundamental intellectual project in western thought as we know it. I learned this quite literally sitting at the feet of Sylvia Wynter who reminded us that we are unravelling an entire episteme, not simply a policy or institution.  If I spend the rest of my academic career achieving her realizations in and with Black studies, I will have done my work here.  I was an undergraduate student when I met her and so this is what I have understood from her since then:

Black changes everything.  

In entertainment/popular culture and sports, this has been obvious. I do not mean this in the bourgeois sense of Black exceptionalism but in the sense of the way that Black changes the whole game: from the style of the uniform, to the way audiences participate, to the range of new participants, to the new skills and uses that are deployed and centralized as the new practices, to the force of the critique of the theories presented as all-encompassing. Think about academia here.  Think Black Feminist Thought.  Think Black Queer Theory.  Think Black Trans Studies. Think Black Digital Humanities. Black Pain. Black Struggle. Black Diaspora. Black Love. Black Lives Matters. Black. Black. Black. Black.

Black is not an adjective or identity marker but a whole force field that shifts the gravitas.  

Today I align myself with another particular gravitas:  BLACK… COMPOSITION… STUDIES. 

As a compositionist, I should be in the perfect field to get at and rupture all these anti-Black compositions of the academy.  As it ends up, this discipline trades in pennies with a white academic marketplace so instead, I reach for a Black Composition Studies: 

  • a radical disposition and praxis that attends to racial processing and composing in, within, and against the academy and schooling as its very own kind of literacy and education project
  • a vision of Black studenting in the academy— undergraduate and graduate— that locates the histories of Black protest’s profound, radical interventions and future inventiveness
  •  a commitment to research and pedagogy that works in tandem with Black activism— in content, FORM, and style— and disrupts what education is for, who is at center, what it looks/sounds/feels like, and what it does   
  • a conviction and audacity in knowing that Black will turn this field all the way around until it sets itself right.

As a Black Studies Compositionist, directing my attentions and vision towards a radical, alternative and futuristic purpose of literacy and education is the only option.

Towards a Black Composition Studies: BLACK AS GRAVITAS (PART I)

Thank you to Spark: A 4C4Equality Journal for publishing the earliest version of this reflective essay in their Volume 2 dedicated to Black Studies edited by Sherri Craig & Karrieann Soto Vega. I will be building on this essay throughout this year as part of a new project. This year is a crossroads for composition-rhetoric so I am listening and looking closely at those who really step up to the plate or miss the moment as has happened at every past Black Protest moment for this field. In the coming weeks, I am especially working towards framing composition studies as a place that does dynamic, on-the-ground work to transform the what, how, and why of university curriculum and instruction towards radical, anti-racist, intersected, Black feminist, fugitive goals.

I am a professor in the academy today because young Black people burnt off all of somebody’s edges to get me here.  Once upon a time, I was out there edge-snatching as a Black college student too.  It’s a Black intellectual inheritance.

Black studies and an ongoing radical Black presence in the academy are not the result of a conscientious and interested hiring committee, a department’s desire to represent African American content, a university’s commitment to a multiracial university, or a profession’s/professional organization’s vision of radical democratic relevance.  None of that truly exists in the academy.  Only the adoption of a bourgeois, white, cishetero, masculinist individualism would cause a Black scholar to think that they are here because of the quality of their work or their uncanny skills at navigating white supremacist institutions.  We are here because young Black people and their radical allies demanded it in cities and hamlets everywhere, burning it down when they had to. I am certainly talking about current contexts but I am also historicizing this all way back to the activism related to new visions of schooling in post-emancipation, ongoing into the early 1900s with the New Negro Movement. The Black college student protesters of the 1970s are legendary in how they heralded the multiracial diversity that we see at places like the City University Of New York and other universities today with racially/ethnically diverse student bodies.  These student protesters were the political heirs to Black students at HBCUs who designed their own practices in the Civil Rights Movement decades before.  These 1950s HBCU students can trace themselves back to the major wave of Black student protests at the HBCUs in the 1920s when their colleges’ administration and faculty were mostly white. These historical lessons have been well documented now by many scholars across the K-16 education spectrum, including myself, so I won’t delve deeper.  The point is this: If any aspect of what we do is not in alignment with this foundation on Black youth, then it ain’t Black studies.

As I reflect on the role of Black students in the academy here, I interrupt my own alphabetic text with Black undergraduate students’ visual work in my most recent classroom, Introduction to African American Rhetoric.  The class was interrupted by the Spring 2020 school shutdown under the Coronavirus resulting in a revised syllabus that I called The Spring 2020 Corona Remix. Many mainstream white students across the college were complaining that they wanted more synchronous access to everything and everyone, despite the fact that their socially marginalized peers were self-proclaiming that they were having issues around income, health, housing, food security, wifi access, and disability and so needed alternative accommodations.  Meanwhile, my own Black students were mailing visual projects to my home (an option rather than just digital assignments) that marked the Blackness of an engagement with COVID-19 in ways that will always stay with me.  Their work is centered here visually so that I can see them as I reflect forwards.  Visual work is always critical for me because Black Visuality is more than multimodality; it is an affective and spiritually redemptive space that continually re-processes the dignity of Black Life in a world that insists upon Black Death.  Such student work in my classrooms guides my visions of a Black Composition Studies for an anti-racist university.

Every university assignment that I have ever had is the direct result of these students’ Black insurgency which is always visible for me on the paper, canvas, and screen. Each of my tenure track jobs has given me a valuable lesson about the role of this Black insurrection and white colonization, lessons that form not only my intellectual and political relation to Black Studies and Black youth but also my daily reality. I relay these lessons here as a foundation to realizing a Black Composition Studies. Composition studies in the university today is fraught with a colonial history on so many levels. We are most often housed in English departments that overshadow our labor and intellectual work. We still most often function as the illegitimate stepchildren of literary theory which often imagines itself as the only critical space that only rethinks the world and as the only frontrunner of English studies. With literary studies lost in its own elitist self-delusions of bourgeois grandeur, composition studies inherits the daily legacy of what English departments actually do: maintain the colonial legacy of the English language. I could write books on the white settler colonial logic that I hear daily in English department to describe teaching (or rather, lecturing), students’ abilities, language variation, writing assignments, etc. Put most simply, composition studies is the space that focuses on language, particularly the teaching of writing while our cousins in communication studies (who left English departments long ago) focus in on speaking— in its most simplistic point of origins (we all do more than that). Together, we and our cousins confront the dailyness of communication systems in the western world that have annihilated non-white languages and therefore ways of being that do not conform to whiteness. We and our cousins therefore always sit at the crossroads: automate colonization as an institutional pedagogy and rhetorical apparatus… or overthrow it. Black composition studies goes for the latter and, as such, our close proximity to the non-compliant racial protests of Black students has to always stay central.

These are notecards that I received in the mail last spring as a reading response to the course assignment.

When I first began writing about insurgent Black students, I distinctly remember essay reviewers, especially men, arguing that my ideas of Black college students were romantic and essentialist.  In their minds (and ostensibly pedagogies), only they seemed to possess the answers to and practices of a radical protest and scholarly vision in the university.  This ongoing imagination of a university without Black students’ presence (or where they are merely the passive receptacles of the “expert” scholars of Black Studies and/or Composition-Rhetoric Studies) is an egregious form of white supremacist education.  Black students stay at the center of my presence in the academy and in the theoretical work that I do here, not as metaphor or cross to bear, but as the purveyor of a radical, literate/language alternative to who and what count here.

Here’s my first story that gets at more of what I mean. My first, tenure track job was at a Colonized State University in 2005.  They needed someone who could bridge what they called “developmental” writing, urban schools, the distrust of the surrounding Black community, low enrollments of students of color in the major, and attitudinal Black graduate students who were, at best, bored.  Them white folk at that college had been dragged so bad that they had to do something and so they hired me. I learned there that white racist resistance in universities takes the form of really slow or non-moving processes.  White faculty were always: scheduling meetings for discussions on how they feel, scheduling meetings to gauge their collective “temperature,” scheduling meetings to read the agenda out loud, reading the bylaws (most often out loud in meetings), revising the bylaws (read out loud all over again), thinking things over, looking into things, talking to you about your ideas and concerns, and planning to get back to you about your questions (which usually resulted in apologies for non-information and/or more unforeseen delays).  Every process took forever and ultimately went nowhere because white supremacy always takes up a whole lot of time, effort, and policy to stand still and stay the same.  These are not processes that are driven by Black folx or a vision for hiring them; it is Black protest that speeds up time and resets the energy in the academy. None of them meetings and discussions produced change and worked to stall Black freedom more than anything else. All of them folk at the Colonized State University are out here somewhere today, still meeting, revising them same bylaws (and probably still reading them out loud), discussing, thinking, looking into stuff, talking— yup, still doing all of that, and still accomplishing nothing of value for Black lives.  It’s not an accident. Black composition studies always recognizes the micro and yet overdetermined white supremacist processing of our schools and programs and imagines time, space, and possibility differently.

My next tenure track job was at a Colonized Religious University.  Before my arrival in 2008, the Black graduate students had showed all the way out, especially on online discussion boards I see you, Jessica Barros and Todd Craig, then and now Them white folk didn’t know what to do there either, except to hire me.  I learned about the racism of writing program administration there.  I also learned that I would walk alone in my field because I didn’t know a single professor in my profession who I would have truly called an ally or even friend back then.  It was a hard and lonely lesson, at first, but one that I am forever grateful for because it sharpened my lens on whiteness in my discipline.  The levels of anti-Blackness that I witnessed at the hands of my fellow writing program administrators (WPAs) were disgusting and no one— and I mean no one— was willing to even notice it, much less talk about it.  Anti-Black faculty were rewarded, awarded, buddied up, and promoted to next levels without hesitation. No one in my department—especially not the self-righteous, self-proclaimed-radical literature faculty, the dean’s office, or the provost’s quarters would address any of it.   And no one in the field was even acting like anti-Black racism was part of WPA.  It ain’t a coincidence that the WPA-Listserv remained so white and so racist for so long.  There is actually a whole stain of scholarship that suggests that WPAs are activists because they act in defiance against university systems that oppress student learning.  I read that stuff and can only ask: whatchu talmbout Willis? I have never witnessed such a WPA when it comes to anti-Black classrooms and the writers of those very same theories are as anti-Black as anyone else in the racist institutions that permeate the U.S.  Racist WPA work is not the kind of programming that is relevant to Black youth literacies or the work of Black education; this is not a space that prioritizes the hiring of folk like me either.  WPAs are only now getting called out and still today you simply need something labeled an anti-racist grading system or rubric and you too can continue to mete out anti-Blackness with your WPA work. It’s not like any of this is hidden from view or political dispositions, unless, of course, you refuse to see. Black composition studies is about a disruptive kind of vision and envisioning for schooling.

My next position was in 2013 at a Colonized City University with a student population that was 75% Black and Latinx.  It remains the whitest department I have ever worked in, with an incredibly self-righteously empty rhetoric of diversity and justice, often administered by a supra-white-wealthy elite.  They catch the heat, every once in a while, for all that whiteness given the history of Black and Latinx student protest in that system. And so they hired me.  I saw colonization most thoroughly there: a predominantly Black and Latinx student population with an abysmally low percentage of Black and Latinx tenure-track faculty.  It was a complete cocoon of whiteness.  Black presence was the pen-ultimate evidence of an awe-inspiring progress for which you were required to feel grateful, no matter how you were treated or marginalized.  When you were asked to do something by white administration, you were simply supposed to obey and sacrifice your own well-being because “these communities” needed you (never mind the fact that you and your family are “these communities”).  In my first year, the department even held an end-of-semester party to celebrate the retirement of two white women who study long-dead white people in Europe. The faculty came together in corresponding costumes and presented a well-rehearsed flashmob dance (that is what they called it).  There I was, in the middle of the city with the largest Black+Latinx population in the country, with the largest Latinx college student population in that area of the country (predominantly Dominican), with non-Black/non-Latinx folk dancing their hearts out in recognition of two white professors while dressed as Old English wenches, royalty, and fairies.  I’m not suggesting here that this event was evil.  Ridiculous?  Yes.  Harmful?  No.  The purpose of the event was certainly playfulness and jest, however, the spirit and politics of the mean-white-sorority-girl ethos from which this event was framed permeated the college. If nothing else, whiteness was quite steadfast.  These are not the bodies that centered my universe of being in the academy, not even for casual socializing or humorous encounters; it was the history of an alternative Black student universe that got me here.  At Colonized City University, whiteness remained centered (and often ludicrously so) no matter what else was going on around it. Black composition studies knows that white affect in schools is not neutral, safe, or accidental and so centers alternative embodiments and enfleshments.

And now?  As of 2019, I am at a Colonized Southern University where I see all of my previous colonial experiences cross-pollinating. Young Black women, both undergraduate and graduate, have been slicing and dicing white power everywhere they go on this campus. The penultimate expression is a lawsuit today that names all the names, insists on a trial, and will make history in ways the campus does not foresee.  The Black graduate women in the lawsuit are from my department and so, yup, they hired me (before the lawsuit, that is).  I don’t know exactly what is to come here, but I can certainly guess. I only know that I have learned the following rules about whiteness in the academy:

It will always put Black lives, urgency, and compensation on extended pause.

It will always be awarded, tenured, promoted, praised, compensated, elevated.

It will always present itself as right, just, and progressing forward (and sometimes even call itself critical and allied) for which Black folk are supposed to show gratefulness and awe.

It will always remain steadfast in how it centers itself everywhere all the time.

It will always ignore the deep damage and social deaths it causes.

It will always be contested.

It will always be unwritten.

It will never stop us.

I have yet to see anything different here. Black Composition Studies gives me this lens and critique but it also gives me the audacity to speak, fight back, and imagine an alternative way of thinking, being, and acting in the academy, in my classrooms, and especially in my field.

I am not suggesting that Black Composition Studies is only for Black folx. However, it ain’t for appropriation by folx in my field who continue to do stuff like write a Statement for Black Lives Matter in their departments and programs and not reference a single Black compositionist. Yall ain’t nowhere near ready and Black composition studies is here to let you know it. Black composition studies is not exclusive… but it is rigorous in the mechanisms and politics of its inclusions. 

Stay tuned for PART TWO…

For Black Feminists Who Have Considered Solidarity/ When the Academy is Enuf

Dedicated to the seven Black women and author, Ntozake Shange, of For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf… and the five Black women who have come forward as TCU’s Jane Does.

I skipped a department meeting this week.  There’s nothing particularly urgent about this fact since such meetings are usually futile in their ability to accomplish actual tasks anyway.  This time though, I just couldn’t bear the performance of non-Black faculty or graduate students, who are not usually even invited and were even once barricaded from entering a department meeting by a dean.   Somehow all have discovered a new political voice in relation to instructional requirements under the Coronavirus… and have been deathly silent when it comes to the abuse faced by Black folk.  Yes, this is a new resistance of a sort, but it is solely in the service of whiteness for whom danger and death under COVID are newfound, daily realities.  I plan to keep chanting #BlackLivesMatter because I know we are not included in this rage against new white precarity.

This meeting that I skipped was with an administrator who started at the university less than a month ago.  And, yup, you guessed it: a woman of color.  And, yup, you guessed it: from all reports I have heard, faculty and graduate students piped up in ways they have never publicly done when white leadership was at the helm (even when it locked them outside of the door), and especially not when Black pain was the topic of discussion. 

Black pain is not an abstraction in this space.  In FACT, you can read all about it below in the 215-point STATEMENT OF FACTS of this lawsuit. I am pasting the whole thing here because this text needs to be required reading for those who are interested in anti-racist teaching, the racial history of higher education, and especially the brutal experiences of Black women-identified undergraduate and graduate students today. 

Doc-38-2020.06.10-Jane-Doe-No.-1-et-al-v.-TCU-et-al-Second-Amended-Complaint-2

This is what higher education looks like for Black women across the country, and these five Black women— called Jane Doe #1 (read pp. 30-66; pp. 94-99), Jane Doe #2 (read pp. 67-74), Jane Doe #3 (read pp. 74-78), Jane Doe #4 and Jane Doe #5 (read pp. 78-94)—  are making history today.  They faced abuse, ridicule, and neglect at the hands of their peers, faculty, and administrations in ways that would have us in uproar if they weren’t Black.  The lawsuit details the ways that these women filed complaints with leaders of programs and departments seemingly everywhere, with any kind of faculty member who seemed they might listen, and with every Title IX-ish type of office designed to officially investigate such claims.  NO ONE—and I mean NO ONE— ever helped or protected them. Honor and recognize these women in the ways that their campus hasn’t.    I plan to keep chanting #SayHerName because I know we are not included in this rage against new white precarity.

Even though it’s summer time and technically, educators have the summer off (unless teaching summer courses), every week is some new foolishness in my inbox.  It’s like school is still in session.  So let’s REALLY get in session here and stay mindful of who we are as Black staff, educators, researchers, and students in this moment.  Remember the stories of the Jane Does above and show some courage. It’s what they deserve. We are not going to change the academy overnight, but we can most certainly control how we act upon it RIGHT NOW:

  1. All kinda folk need a Black friend or colleague to co-sign or advise them right now. Black advice and guidance are now the Golden Fleece of the Academy.  Do not participate in these informal discussions, ad hoc committees, or free consultations.  Your ideas will be plagiarized by people who do not have their own (this has always happened, but expect it to escalate).  White feminists will especially call this collaboration.  It’s not.  Folk of color will try and milk your ideas for their own white favor and visibility too. It’s all just plagiarism without the Turnitin.   Call them on it and steer clear. Stop needing to be needed. The closer you are to these vampiric people, the more you are implicated in their violence.
  2. Let’s stick with #1 a little more here: All kinda folk will need you on their new committees, task forces, programs, mission statements, or suddenly conscious projects Take notice when a group of BIPOC faculty is gathered together and led by a white (usually male) leader (or a person of color acting for a white leader).  You are there to help the white leader who will get the credit.   You are like a corporate silent partner, except without any remuneration.  Don’t be fooled into thinking that whiteness values your thinking all of a sudden.  The closer you are to these inauthentic projects, the more you are implicated in their violence.
  3. If white administrators and leaders have been accused of racial harm and do not voluntarily step down from their positions, know that these are NOT allies.  At a time of a global pandemic that is targeting Brown and Black peoples during unprecedented racial protest in every state of the union, an administrator who has not practiced real anti-racism and has caused harm to Black people is INCOMPETENT for the tasks at hand. IN…COM…PE….TENT.  This ain’t something a workshop, apology letter, or deep meditation can fix.  They must step down.  If they do not, do not work with them, do not support them, do not sign on to their ideas. Monitor AS VIGILANTLY as you can how many of their meetings you must attend, how much of their policy you must implement, how much time you must spend with them. Keep your distance as best as you possibly can. Stop taking their classes and attending their workshops (contest it if it is a REQUIREMENT). The closer you are to these harmful administrators, the more you are implicated in their violence.
  4. Notice the close friends of the white administrators and leaders who have been accused of racial harm. Their friends are NOT allies either.  These are friendships based in white nepotism and advancement, a value system a real ally would forego.   If you are a friend of a white administrator or leader who has been accused of racial harm, hold your homie accountable and if they refuse, get yourself some new homies.  The closer you are to these anti-Black campus leaders, the more you are implicated in their violence.
  5. For the folk who do step down (see #3 and #4), notice whether or not they actually STEP UP when they step down.  I have never witnessed a white administrator step down and repair their harm.  What I have always gotten is a lunch request where the only thing being served is gaslighting.  For starters, the people who you have harmed do not want your lunch, coffee, or phone call so back off.  We are also not interested in your life-story, list of Black-based volunteer activities as proof you are not racist, white tears, or convictions of how YOU perceive our misunderstandings of racism.  Stay away from these lunches and excuses.  And be wary of the warm, fuzzy, and congratulatory good-bye letters listing the outstanding accomplishments of demoted folk accused of violence. These writers are not allies either.  Do not be lulled into this white complacency touted as sympathy for abusers. Wanna know what I call people who have made significant accomplishments for which they were never credited or recognized?  BLACK FOLK! The closer you are to these fake apologies, the more you are implicated in their violence.
  6. Black folk will be in high demand on thesis/ dissertation committees now. Ask yourself some questions. Are you the token? Has the rest of the committee (or at least some of them) perpetrated anti-Black harm?  Does the dissertation center white theory and then merely pepper-sprinkle Black scholars on top and without deep analysis?   Can you see trends in the racial politics of thesis/ dissertation committees across the country right now? How many students of a perpetrator have been hired in your field and department?  How many graduate student assistants of a perpetrator have been hired in your administrative ranks?  How has your department’s graduate program siphoned off its anti-Blackness into the rest of the academy?  The closer you are to these anti-Black graduate students and their mentors, the more you are implicated in their violence.
  7. Don’t trust whiteness when it uses this excuse: I didn’t know this was happening. Ignorance is not a justification for not acting towards racial justice. I have never had the luxury of not knowing when a Black student on my campus was being brutalized, even when I wasn’t actually present on the campus.  Willful white ignorance is not a pass for the racial violence that serves as the foundation on which white institutions (and their white privileged accomplices) rest.

Everyone has somehow found consciousness and mission statements these days but all are still deeply wedded to institutional anti-Blackness. That is the nature of the academy.  If you think your university is somehow better, then you ain’t thinkin right.  If you think working outside of academia saves you, then you haven’t come to terms with the fact that INSTITUTIONAL RACISM means all institutions work within the terms of anti-Blackness, yes even in the non-profit industrial complex (actually, especially there). 

These 7 points are things many of us have always kept in mind as we move through the academy.  The stakes are higher now in a summer that will be like no other.

Call to Action: Stand with TCU Students, Faculty, and Staff of Color

Dear TCU Community,

The time is now to act.

As a group of concerned faculty, we are deeply disturbed at the recent allegations of unchecked racial and gender discrimination and open hostility at TCU. We stand in solidarity with current and former marginalized undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, and staff who are speaking out and demanding an immediate change. We want to affirm our students, who have clearly laid out the changes that they need to see (click here to see the demands). We know all too well that, in times like these, institutional racism quells students’ progressive visions for their education rather than uplifts them. We also recognize that trauma begets trauma; the unaddressed transgressions of TCU’s past have led to this painful present. We speak out today in hopes of preventing future trauma, knowing that our many Black, Indigenous, and other People of Color (BIPOC) faculty are uniquely qualified and ready to lead dynamic and difficult discussions about race. Fort Worth needs healing. TCU needs healing. Let us help.

To students, we stand in solidarity with you and Jane Doe #1 (click here for information about the lawsuit and click here for the text of the actual lawsuit). While we refrain from commenting on her lawsuit as it moves through its own due process, we want to affirm that students of color and students of other marginalized backgrounds HAVE and ARE being underserved and undervalued at TCU. It is not just in your head. We, too, are devastated by your isolation, lack of social and literal physical space, and the infuriating stories you have shared with us during our office hours and in passing about what you experience in the dorms, in class, and while trying to obtain services on campus. We are in awe of your resilience that we wish you did not have to have in the face of routine micro- and macroaggressions on campus; reinforced white supremacist frameworks that you experience daily at the hands of your professors and peers. As faculty, we are invested in helping you navigate processes for improving the conditions in the classroom and across this campus. In addition to bringing to bear our knowledge, we extend our collective and individual support to you in whatever form that may take.

To our fellow faculty members, we must all stand up and be agents of progressive change at TCU for the betterment of our students, staff, and one another. As other recent lawsuits have laid bare, faculty, too, are harmed professionally and personally by long-standing ideologies of white supremacy, fascism, patriarchy, queerphobia, xenophobia, and ableism (click here for information about lawsuit). As BIPOC faculty, we are confronted daily with the gross realities of TCU’s deep-seated history of systemic racism — from unchecked racial terror and hate speech espoused in our own classrooms and on-campus by students and visitors, to being saddled with higher teaching loads than our white or male faculty counterparts that stifles promotion, to unrecognized and uncompensated service work that we are tasked with by administrators to hold TCU together. And, it is apparent that this culture of exploitation and negligence has made it grossly difficult for TCU to not only recruit and retain students of color, but faculty of color, too. We must stop with the band-aids, and be brave enough to put forth and implement bold, holistic and transformative prescriptions for eradicating the systems of oppression that have a grip on our workplace.

To the administration, we continue to be committed to eradicating the various obstacles that students of color, especially Black and Brown students, face at this institution, but we need your expeditious and explicit support. In order to advance equity and justice on-campus in the best interest of our students, strengthen the university’s academic profile and reputation (a stated goal in the Vision in Action Strategic Plan), and ensure the recruitment and retention of BIPOC faculty, we call for:

❖ Joint hires, cluster hires in the research areas of Ethnic Studies (i.e. Asian American, Black, Native American, and Chicanx/Latinx Studies)and Gender and Sexuality Studies,

❖ Immediate investigations into salary gaps in and across departments and colleges, and a public commitment to closing those gaps and ensuring pay equity across all units,

❖ More transparency about salaries and start-up packages across the university, including digitally published and regularly updated classifications and pay scales,

❖ Better workload standards across departments and colleges (i.e..2-2 standardized teaching load for all faculty, 1-2 for new faculty),

❖ Clearly defined and quantifiable criteria for tenure & promotion across departments,

❖ The recognition and compensation of invisible labor—i.e. mentorship of historically marginalized students, departmental service work, and other duties that often go unaccounted for in faculty annual reviews and tenure & promotion,

❖ The creation of a university ombudsperson’s office and the development of fair and transparent processes for filing and resolving complaints (i.e. Title IX, EEO, Dispute Resolutions, etc.), including the annual reporting of received Title IX complaints and greater compliance with other civil rights and anti-discrimination laws,

❖ The hiring of much more student affairs and academic affairs staff to meet the personal and professional needs of our students so that faculty, in particular BIPOC faculty, who are not trained to provide those types of professional services, are not left shouldering the weight of student growth and development,

❖ An end to the ongoing slashing of faculty benefits, which disproportionately harms junior and BIPOC faculty; we need comprehensive medical care (including mental health care) that is culturally responsive, accessible and affordable and more medical health providers on campus who reflect our state’s demographics, and

❖ Daycare services and after school programs provided on campus to support faculty, staff, and students with children.

You have heard from an abundance of students (as well as BIPOC faculty that have left TCU after having similar experiences), who have offered accounts of their experiences of systemic racism on this campus. Do know that these stories are not surprising to us and many of them we have personally supported students through. Our students’ trauma directly affects faculty productivity and well-being, both of which can lead to burnout. If TCU is truly committed to being among one of the best places to work in the nation, as often touted, we feel strongly that mechanisms to address structural racism operating on campus need to be implemented and/or enhanced without delay. The cultural deficit discourse that frames marginalized students goes regularly unchecked at both graduate and undergraduate levels. Diversity is not an obstacle to be navigated in our academic and professional careers. It must, instead, be a transformative core value of this institution.

We see, affirm, and offer our support to the vision of the students, faculty, and staff, who are working towards a truly transformative education here at TCU.

Signed,

Carmen Kynard, Ph.D. – English
Brandon Manning, Ph.D. – English
Jeanelle Hope, Ph.D. – Comparative Race and Ethnic Studies
Rima Abunasser, Ph.D. – English
Jane Mantey, Ph.D. – Comparative Race and Ethnic Studies
Melanie Harris, Ph.D. – Religion
Brian J. Dixon, M.D. – TCU-UNTHSC School of Medicine
Hanan Hammad, Ph.D. – History
Stacie McCormick, Ph.D. – English
Santiago Piñón, Ph.D. – Religion
Adam McKinney, M.A. – Dance/College of Fine Arts
Eric Fisher Stone, MFA— English
Jason Helms, Ph.D. — English
Sarah Robbins, Ph.D. — English
Ann George, PhD — English
Brad Lucas, Ph.D. — English
Regina Lewis, B.A. — English
Sharon Anderson Harris, Ph.D. — English
Charlotte Hogg, Ph.D. — English
Carrie Liu Currier, Ph.D. — Political Science
Jessica L. Fripp, Ph.D. — Art/College of Fine Arts
Gabriel Huddleston, Ph.D. — Curriculum Studies/College of Education
Suki John, Ph.D. — Dance/ College of Fine Arts
Max Krochmal, Ph.D. — History and Comparative Race and Ethnic Studies
Nino Testa, Ph.D. — Women and Gender Studies
Linda Hughes, Ph.D. — English
Wil Gafney, Ph.D. — Brite Divinity School
Lori Boornazian Diel, Ph.D. — Art/College of Fine Arts
Lauren Mitchell, Ph.D. — TCU-UNTHSC School of Medicine
Jennifer Martin, Ph.D. — Social Work and Comparative Race and Ethnic Studies
Babette Bohn, Ph.D. — Art/College of Fine Arts
Angela Towne, Ph.D. — Women and Gender Studies
Breinn Richter, MBA — Management and Leadership/Neeley School of Business
Neil Easterbrook, Ph.D. — English
Claudia Camp, Ph.D. — Women and Gender Studies
Rebecca Sharpless, Ph.D. — History and Women and Gender Studies
Annette Wren, Ph.D. — TCU Writing Center
Alex Hidalgo, Ph.D. — History
Kurk Gayle, Ph.D. — Intensive English Program
Layne Craig, Ph.D. — English
Gene Allen Smith, Ph.D. — History
Sylvia Mendoza, Ph.D. — UTSA and Comparative Race and Ethnic Studies
Bonnie C Blackwell, Ph.D. — English
Shweta Reddy, Ph.D. — Fashion Merchandising/College of Fine Arts
Sara-Jayne Parsons, M.A. — Art/College of Fine Arts
Rhiannon G Mayne, Ph.D. — Environmental Sciences
Jill C. Havens, Ph.D. — English
Jessica Zeller, MFA, Ph.D. — Dance/College of Fine Arts
Mary Twis, Ph.D. — Social Work
Katie Lauve-Moon, Ph.D. — Social Work
Lynné Bowman Cravens, MFA — Art/College of Fine Arts
Sheriee Parnell, B.S. — TCU-UNTHSC School of Medicine
Matthew Pitt, MFA — English
Margaret Lowry, Ph.D. — Women and Gender Studies