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Not New To This/True To This: Black Language, the Internet, Southern Roots, and the Failed Entrenchments of Whiteness

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I wish somebody had told me that teaching about Black Language in The South would be this smoove. I’m almost scared to say this out loud, because some of yall will bring your sorry butts down here and mess this up. I remember when I told folx I was moving to Texas and they swore they would never move here or anywhere South. There is no such thing as a space free from white supremacy in the USA, so suggesting otherwise is just stupid… especially given all of what you must ignore to equate the Midwest, NorthEast, Westcoast, and all points on the compass with racial/political progress.

I grew up in the Midwest, my family is from Alabama, I went to college in California, and I spent my adulthood in the Northeast. Today I teach college in the South. I started teaching in 1993 in the Bronx, NY which marks my very first experience of teaching about Black Language as a classroom teacher when I introduced my high school students to Geneva Smitherman, including her foreword to the book, Double Snaps (where she contextualizes what we then called snappin inside of the Black Language tradition of signifyin). It was the Golden Age of Hip Hop and my BIPOC students were “South South Bronx” all the way through… and they were as anti-Black in their ideas about Black Language as any white supremacist out here. I had to go to WORRRRRRKKKK to get them to think through their internalized anti-Blackness. As dope as those students wore, it took even more work to get them off the side of white supremacy during the Ebonics “Controversy” in 1996. They came around… eventually.

Centering Black Language in the college classroom– where I have taught courses spanning gender studies, composition, Black studies, rhetoric, and education— ain’t been easy either. Not in Queens. Not in the Bronx. Not in Harlem. Not in Brooklyn. Not in Newark. Not in my 26 years of teaching in those places. These are spaces steeped in Blackity-Black Black Language and yet far too many Black folx don’t want to claim it. At a Black college in Brooklyn, many of those students complained about my focus on U.S. Ebonics, Hip Hop Nation Language, and Caribbean Nation Language. I actually scared many students right out of my classes. For some students, it would take something drastic to get them to come to the light. In one instance, one woman was insulted that a college class and a college professor like me would even mention Ebonics and she let everybody know it (usually using Black Language herself)…. that is, until her son’s elementary school tried to put him in special education because of language issues. I went to bat for her and that little boy and kept him out of special education, but that was what it took for her to change her tune. I’ve written about these moments extensively, so I’ll just chalk it up here: I could tell dozens of stories like this. Granted, it wasn’t everybody, but it was always enough to make me almost lose a professional disposition.

2019 was my last year teaching and living in the Northeast. I vividly remember my last undergraduate class— a small capstone that I treated as a writing seminar. Those students’ final projects were fabulous (see here for their collections), but a few were very vocal that they did not want to hear anything about writing and language that intersected with narrative, translingualism, Black Language, or non-essayist literacy. That got shut down pretty quickly when they realized that all that white school language that they had mastered for the majority-white and very traditionalist faculty at that CUNY college (City University of New York) was not something that would get them a multiracial audience who would listen to them. It was 2019. And they was still working my nerves. I do miss those students dearly— their vibe, their rhythm, their flow, their language, their loudness, their daily aesthetic… and even the way they made me get in they asses about their negative attitudes on Black Language. That said, the South is dope. I had to re-learn how to teach about Black Language. Cuz it’s a whole other world here.

Because there is no dissent.

Not even a little.

No hesitation.

No questioning.

It’s just full steam forward… like, yeah, let’s get this. All of the time.

By my fourth semester of centering Black Language in my undergraduate courses here in Texas, I really got it. After years of resistance, I’ve learned how to teach about Black Language on the offensive. But I ain’t really learn how to teach it on the offense and WIN! At first I thought it was a fluke, but by the fourth time, I was like, naw, they open AF. They write notes on the evaluations, to my email, and in my DMs thanking me for lessons on Black Language. Like, what? I done died and gone to Black Language Heaven?

I’m tellin you right here: It’s the South.

From September 1993 all the way up to May of 2019 in New York and New Jersey, I faced some kind of resistance in the classroom to Black Language. Three months later, I landed in Texas and the tide shifted. It ain’t me. I ain’t change THAT MUCH in three months. And it ain’t cuz a new Black liberation cultural movement emerged in three months either.

This is the South.

And we winnin.

I decided that we would rock out a little different this semester and create our own Black Language Workbook that future semesters will build on. This semester seemed like I had the perfect course to do this work: DIGITAL BLACKNESS.

Like always with real Black learning and intellectual work, when you ain’t fighting and pleading and explaining the legitimacy of a Black thing, you can get down to the actual nitty gritty of the thing and do and think some new fire into it. That’s what teaching now is like. We hit the Black Language theme unit somewhere in week six but by week five, one student, Josulyn, had already presented, telling us that what many call internet slang is really Black Language that racism won’t let be fully credited as such. By the time we started creating the Black Language Workbook, we understood that there is no such thing as Black Digital/Black Internet Language. The digital makes its meaning through, with, and because of Black Language. It’s like the technology today is only now catching up with 100s of years of Black Language and that’s only because Black folx are training social media to do so!

Black Language is future-oriented in the way it does Language; it’s like it was able to predict the needs of current digital communication long before it was even available to us. The hallmark discursive features of Black Language are the foundation of such digital communication today, all of which my Texas students defined in the workbook below (hit the arrows to go forward):

Black Language is alllll about…. the creative play on words, image-makings that make the text come alive, metaphors everydamnwhere all the time, quick wit on even the seemingly mundane, lightning fast comebacks, exaggerated language that drives home a point, call-and-response to get audiences involved, signifyin on any-and-everythang, semantic inversions that can flip the meanings of any word, tonal semantics that make the words sound the way you mean them, mimicry that will clapback by just imitating you, narrative sequencing so that multiple stories can tell a main story, directness AND indirectness, proverbial statements that make everyday feel like a Sunday school lesson….. and just willlllld creativity all the time with morphology and syntax.

That’s like the WHOLE ASS internet.

Yup, it took coming South to learn and understand all this (I am arguably in the Southwest though, not the Deep South, but still South). It makes sense though, since The South is the home of Black Language in the United States as we know it. I remember way back when I would share with my students something one of my graduate school professors, Robin D.G. Kelley, talked to us about in class. He talked about the “accent” of the Deep South as Black Language as that “accent” developed in the parts of the United States that held the most enslaved Africans. This goes against the “commonsense” suggestions that Black Language was developed from the accents of Southern whites (as if white Southerners are homegrown vs. new settlers and as if slavery didn’t last for 100s of years for Black folx who imprinted the South everywhere). Kelley flipped all that to say, naww naww, the accents of Southern whites developed based on a proximity to Black folx that Northern white folx didn’t have. White supremacist relationships to slavery simply re-center whiteness in linguistic politics and so suggest otherwise. Granted, Kelley did not talk like my crude paraphrasing, but the message is still there. When I told students in the North all this, they disagreed and I had to check them real quick in their anti-Black assumptions that they knew more than a brilliant Black historian like Robin D.G. Kelley based on something their majority-white high school teachers told them. Fast forward to 2019 when I share the same thing here and you know what the students say? I remember it like yesterday, cuz a student from Augusta, GA (and Augusta stay tearing it up) raised his hand and said something like this: Oh, yeah. That makes so much sense. I knew white people like me talked different for a good reason. Ain’t heard a dissenting voice yet. Good reason, indeed!

Other times, well, they just say what’s on their minds.

While I’m having the time of my life, I think most of my students are actually just pretty chill, like it’s just another day for them, or, like maybe I shoulda been teaching in the South all along.

I am so glad I am a rhetoric-compositionist because this is the work I get to do in classrooms every week, every month, every theme unit, every semester. And as a researcher and scholar, I write about these things, examine language/writing politics closely, and situate classroom learning in the historical and current contexts of racism, education, language, and literacy. We have decades of research on Black liberatory /anti-racist/anti-colonial/ intersectional teaching and learning that connects me as a writer-teacher-scholar to an entirely different community of thought and action. This allows us to move in ways that go against the opposing whiteness of the school, department, district, and/or campus which is often hell-bent on re-centering whiteness no matter that even white students are asking for something different. Like now.

My current context (yes, where my first-year and second-year college students do work on Black Language so brilliantly) recently decided that one of the categories of specialty for a new hire for composition classrooms would be: “Argumentation and Propaganda Analysis.” Foolish on so many levels!! Those of us who are “PhD-trained” as rhetoric-compositionists know that this is not even how speciality and expertise in the field are named in 2023. The wording comes instead from the title of a course that looks like it has been on the books for a while. A year ago, the then-administration asked me if I would teach this class. I declined explaining that the course is not something that I would ever put on my CV. I also questioned why the course is still in the curriculum given that every organization, conference, and journal in my field is facing a serious reckoning for the kind of white indoctrination that such a curricular choice represents. It goes in the opposite direction of what I communicate to my students as 21st century rhetorical study and is too deeply rooted in an exclusionary traditionalism that has worked as its own white “propaganda” (ironic that whiteness sees propaganda everywhere but in itself). Now fast forward to a year later and they wanna hire someone in this defunct category— and name it as such on a public-facing, national ad. It’s not even even giving a contemporary white supremacy tea— it’s just some old 1950s Cold War retrograde stuff designed from the perspective of a white male bourgeoisie (it ain’t, after all, W.E.B. DuBois’s or Aime Cesaire’s perspectives). Meanwhile, folx act surprised at the racist backlash that we see from someone like Ron DeSantis when white retrenchment like that is clearly present everywhere. The professors who center their work in rhetoric-composition studies did not propose this category; the literature faculty did. There was even an almost-unanimous vote on this white racist construct— I was the SOLE ONLY vote of NO— but it passes anyway because white curriculum is considered democratic and faculty-governed when voting this way. In the end, the professors in rhetoric-composition studies will be blamed and thrown under the bus when graduate students and folx on the national scale call out this white supremacy for exactly what it is ….and the perpetrators will, like always, gaslight their way out of it. It’s as colonial of an enterprise as you can get.

And it’s easy to see and decipher.

But then again: I belong to a Black Language Legacy that sits at the intersection of the Black Radical Tradition. Like my students can even show you, we do and think real differently over here. White retrenchment never wins. Listen to Black Language and you hear all the evidence of that. We ain’t goin nowhere and neither is the Black Language that will always deconstruct you.

Related posts:

Towards a Black Composition Studies: BLACK AS GRAVITAS (PART I) On Graduate Admissions and Whiteness: A Love Letter to Black/ Brown/ Queer Graduate Students Out There Everywhere For Black Feminists Who Have Considered Solidarity/ When the Academy is Enuf Towards a Black Composition Studies: BLACK AS GRAVITAS (PART II)

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

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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.

Related posts:

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

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

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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…

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Letter to My Former College President and Provost: Why I Left

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Dear College President and Provost,

I hope this letter finds you both well.  Since spring 2019 was my last semester, I am writing to share some of my experiences with the hope that my insights might offer you a different perspective of life at the college for BIPOC.  Since my campus interview in 2013 up until my departure, I worked under two presidents, three provosts, three deans, three chairs, and four program directors.  To say that the university was unstable in those six years is obviously an understatement, so I admired the peace that you were trying to instill which, in turn, motivated my decision to reach out to you here.  I am not expecting a response to this letter, but I felt it was imperative that I write it anyway.

My sincere apologies that I could not write this letter sooner as family issues got in the way.  I never had any intention of choking my voice and always planned to offer you an image of the structural oppositions that people who look like me face in the predominantly white and hostile departments and programs that permeate the college.  In my inability to write this sooner, I fear that yet another dominant, racist white narrative at the college has gone unchecked: namely, the willful ignorance surrounding the racial delusions that my departure, as well as that of other folk who look like me, was rooted in the simple desire for better resources and prestige elsewhere.   You must know better than this.

You must know better than this!

For far too long, the conversations about retaining BIPOC faculty at the college have centered on support for tenure.  This logic assumes that tenure and promotion are something difficult for us. I assure you that this has not been the case for me or my peers.  My generation of successful Brown and Black professionals are a mobile generation and the most decorated amongst us do one thing when an institution continually devalues us: we leave.  This is as true for academia as it is for law, medicine, and business, especially for successful Black women, as I am sure you are both well aware given the ready availability of such statistical data.  This is also especially true for people like me who worked for six years at a salary much lower than male counterparts when their comparative CVs did not justify their higher salaries.  While there were no attempts to correct this wrong against my labor and intellect, there were plenty of ploys to get me to do MORE uncompensated work far beyond the scope of what would ever be considered reasonable or equitable.  All of this is just to say that Brown and Black faculty are not out here struggling with tenure and promotion requirements; none of us would have made it into and out of PhD programs, racially exclusive and hostile as they are, if we were struggling with research and writing processes.  Like most places, the college excelled in: 1) the continuum between outright neglect and layered silencing of BIPOC faculty; 2) shrouded guidelines and continual shifts around tenure and promotion requirements; 3) unacknowledged exploitation of uncompensated BIPOC labor towards service and away from scholarship (resulting in a white-racialized structure of who is supported materially and symbolically as a serious researcher/ scholar/ writer), and last, but certainly not least; 4) the chronic mismanagement of hot-mess departments that couldn’t direct somebody through empty traffic much less a university procedure.  When my former colleagues and administrators claim that I left the college because this is just my personality, you must know that this is merely a cover-up for all that is wrong with them.  When top administrators feel emboldened to declare that a Black woman professor is only leaving because that’s her personality (that was said to me), that is a sure sign of the institutional incompetence in retaining them and will require a radical facelift in the colleges’ rogue team of untrained/untheoried leaders who have vacated a research expertise of their work.  I have only ever left a university when I found its racialized exploitation, anti-blackness, organizational incompetence, and misogynoir intolerable.  Any discourse about my departure that deliberately ignores the hostile and inept environments that make a place unbearable for faculty of color like me obfuscates the college’s failure to develop effective recruitment and retention models for BIPOC and promotes the racism that the institution sustains. After teaching at multiple universities in the NJ/NY area, my experiences at your college remain the whitest and the most alienating.  Any explanation for my departure outside of these terms is just another example of routine gaslighting or, to quote Mary J. Blige, some real basic hateration/holleration in this dancerie.  When non-Black faculty and administrators insist that positive, racial change has arrived to campus and yet struggle to recruit and retain Black, tenured faculty, the empirical evidence is simply not on their side.  I share these experiences to contend that a university which does not value we high-achieving Brown and Black scholar-researchers is not a place that can ever critically educate students who look like us either. 

Real basic hateration!

The fact of the matter is this: being a professor at the college meant career and financial sacrifice.  Even the difference in the larger contribution that my previous university made to my retirement funds (though I worked at your college longer) was SIGNIFICANT.  For sure, we do not choose the City University of New York (CUNY) to become rich and famous; we know that the resources and salaries will never be competitive.  And truth be told, with the exception of those who have wealthy spouses and/or family backgrounds (a significant percentage of the faculty, by the way), employment at CUNY cannot financially sustain even basic housing in NYC today.   When I look at all of the professional and financial sacrifices, just to be at a place where I was ignored, disrespected, and marginalized, I have real questions about the institution’s commitment to diversity and equity and why any BIPOC stay. The most strong-willed will leave or, when that is not physically possible, find a way to do the work they are called to do in scholarly communities far away from the campus.  Attrition rates do not even begin to convey what you have really lost.

It is not my intent here to run a discursive style that might sound like I am singing an old Lou Rawls tune: You’re gonna miss my lovin.  Institutions pick up and go along as if we were never there, but they do so at the grave risk of repeating past mistakes and never truly moving forward.  My experiences as woman of color/Black Feminist/first-generation college-goer/working class Hip Hopper/AfroDigital Humanities teacher illuminate more mistakes than successes.  Though my negative experiences have been countless, I will share a few instances here.

More than attrition!

I’ll begin with my last semester at the college as part of the Gender Studies advisory board who attempted to revise the undergraduate major in Gender Studies, particularly those parts that promoted horribly whitewashed and white colonized historical content.  In fact, the history curriculum in Gender Studies was more Western European in its content and racist in its outlook than anything I had witnessed in schools, even going back to when I began teaching in NYC public high schools in 1993.  The response to our curricular revision in Gender Studies was met with such hostility from white faculty and administration that I felt the need to address the issues in a letter to the dean (that letter is attached here… click and read this mess).  After learning of our proposed changes to the Gender Studies curriculum, history faculty secured letters from faculty across CUNY (with the HIS chair praising their efforts) about our work in Gender Studies.  The most prominent CUNY faculty who wrote letters in support of HIS faculty rescinded their support after learning what these HIS classes really entail.  That formerly supportive faculty also informed me that the HIS faculty themselves wrote the prose, merely asking faculty across CUNY to cut and paste their words into an email to the Dean. When they began quoting from these letters, they knew that they were, in fact, merely referencing their own words.  When the advisory committee withdrew the revisions to the curriculum, the HIS department then sent emails to their original letter writers thanking them with the following message: “we accomplished our goal.”  The only thing that they seemed to achieve was a bullying of the faculty who volunteered without any recognition or compensation to run an interdisciplinary program and the maintenance of a recalcitrant white colonized curriculum.   This kind of curriculum, pedagogy, and discourse are quite literally rewarded and protected at the college and it is an embarrassment.

This particular instance with Gender Studies serves as an example and not an exemplar. I arrived exhausted by the battles and racist attacks that I had witnessed and fought at my previous colleges.  Your college only added new dimensions and taught me that I can trust no institution to treat BIPOC well and hence I no longer expect it. That pessimism is, in fact, the only gift that your college gave me.

It was simply routine for faculty of color to describe senior white faculty who had reprimanded them for congregating with other faculty of color in the physical spaces and meetings of the college. I am not sure what shocked me most: 1) that POC faculty obeyed these plantation-styled surveillance regimes; 2) that the university does not face more discrimination law suits, or; 3) that the college has chosen these same white faculty as administrators today.  I mean, really, this is the kind of stuff that made Marvin Gaye write songs like “What’s Going On” because this kind of madness needs its own whole melody.  The outrageous behaviors of hostile faculty against BIPOC went unchecked in all of my encounters, especially in the first semester of my arrival with a dean and chair who remain the most unsupportive of any that I have encountered.  I tape-recorded the discussion of my first classroom observation and, unsurprisingly, the tapes revealed major discrepancies between what was said and what the administrator recorded as evidence of the discussion. I secured a lawyer to review my legal options given the egregiousness of the encounter and the final record.  I only decided to forego pursuing the obvious legal breaches so that I can present and write freely and openly about the events on a national stage.  Since then, I have advised countless Brown and Black faculty to consult their state laws about recorded conversations and their allowance in court rooms, a lesson courtesy of my experiences at your college where a routine classroom observation did not follow basic, ethical employment guidelines.

In my time at the college, I was further accused by a white faculty member of stealing his property.  My mail was opened and damaged on three, separate occasions.  Since these three items included a paycheck, an honorarium, and a contract, it seemed obvious to me that my mail was targeted. On yet other occasions, when I would, for instance, inadvertently leave a text on the photocopy machine in what was then a locked room in the department (that only faculty could access), my papers were shredded with careful attention paid to ripping words and sentences that represented racial critique by BIPOC.  I have actually kept these pieces of paper so that I can show national audiences exactly what macro-aggressions look like for BIPOC. None of these events are particularly surprising or new, but these kinds of routine experiences call into question the college’s market campaigns about “educating for justice” with a predominantly Brown and Black student body in a city with the highest concentrations of Black/Brown populations in the country.  To keep the old skool R&B playlist running here, I’ll go with Keith Sweat on this one: “sumthin, sumthin just ain’t right.”

…Sumthin sumthin just ain’t right!

As a discourse community, the culture was further troubling.  I heard, on countless occasions, faculty and administrators describe their desire for administrative work in terms of being able “to get out of the classroom.”  When I arrived, I had left an administrative position with a 1/1 load, then turned down a more competitive offer at a state university campus with a 2/2 load and smaller classes, just so that I could get back into the classroom.  I chose the college for the heavy teaching load and for its students and ended up traveling all over the country to cull and share research-based ideas and theories about 21st century Brown and Black classrooms because there was NO such intellectual exchange at the college. To say that I was disappointed would be a compliment.  It was also incredibly difficult to listen to faculty talk about minimizing their time in Brown and Black classrooms while performing a self-congratulatory righteousness that they were doing the greater good by racking up years of course releases with their “service.”  A very specific language was consistent and repetitive: doing administrative/leadership work meant getting out of teaching and being able to pick up one’s children in time from school (and in each of these instances, the speaker meant an expensive, private or parochial school).  I heard so many public, paternalistic pronouncements about us doing “the best that we can” from faculty who sent their children to elite and/or private schools and colleges (even expending extra endowments to them) that it became nauseating.  What does it mean to celebrate doing “the best with what little we have” for what education scholars call “other people’s children” when you would never call those same things good enough for your own children (or the children in your segregated neighborhood)? I share these re-occurring instances as an indication of the kind of toxicity experienced by a woman of color who had to constantly hear the students of color and people in her communities discussed in this way.

It also became increasingly more intolerable to hear faculty comments about the allegations of sexual misconduct that were investigated in 2018-2019.  I appreciated the Climate Review process but did not feel safe in attending a focus group with faculty given the nature of many of their attitudes. On multiple occasions, faculty initiated conversations with me defending the actions of the male faculty members who were investigated.  Most often, faculty insisted that each of these three men, naming each of them separately as longtime friends/colleagues, had consensual sexual relations with the undergraduate students who filed the complaint. I did not solicit these conversations and yet these were the so-called “facts” presented to me.  I heard very little sympathy for the accusers, but all manner of excuses for the accused. I didn’t know what to say to my faculty peers other than to simply insist: my momma taught me betta than that.  At one point, the lawyer of one of the accused emailed countless faculty, explaining that the accused did research in poor and Black and Brown communities and learned to mimick these people’s lingo and affect for greater street-cred; students, in turn, merely misinterpreted the casual, street vibe.  As someone who comes from these po folk and these very same streets, I can assure you that we do not look and sound anything like what this lawyer suggested and we most certainly were not groomed to commit acts of violence to people under our care as representative of our “street lingo.”  Like I said before, we were taught betta than that. Listening to all this became, in of and of itself, another form of violence.  It should come as no surprise that for someone on the outside of the old-crony gangs that roam the college, and as someone on the outside of the mainstream/ whitestream ideological apparatus that seemingly dominates all space there, the campus climate just became more and more unbearable.

It deeply saddened me to leave the young people at the college who gave me life for six years.  My entire career has been dedicated to the education of Black and Brown youth so it was an honor to do part of that almost 30-year career work at your college. Though it was difficult to leave them, it was more difficult to watch institutional actors refuse to see or match students’ brilliance in ways that are commensurate with a culturally-sustaining and critical education rather than the current colonial, rudimentary-skills-based, vocational training that racism and white settler logics have designed for them.  My only salvation today is in knowing that the communities and ancestral heritages that myself and BIPOC college students represent have sustained far worse and will survive and thrive despite these new colonial regimes. 

My heartfelt wishes for the work ahead of you!

Warmest regards,

Carmen Kynard

p.s. You should know that I plan to go public with this letter (of course, omitting all specific references to the college) in the hopes that my unsilencing helps other BIPOC faculty out there somewhere.  You should also know that when my former colleagues reach out to me to assuage their white guilt or racial complicity, I have no intention of responding to or comforting them. They have done enough damage and will no longer have access to my mind, body, or spirit. I have refrained from using the names of the perpetrators who I have catalogued here because they simply are not important enough (they are merely generally representative and not especially individual in their routine acts of violence), but should you ever want to know who I am referencing: I will be more than happy to spill that tea.

A BLOG NOTE: Part of my desire to write this letter has also been to add to the archive of Black and Brown feminists who have taught at CUNY.  There is increased interest, for instance, in the archives of Black feminists like June Jordan, Audre Lorde, Barbara Christian, and Toni Cade Bambara who started their teaching/writing/activist careers at CUNY.  We learn important things from these archives: 1) that radical Black feminists were treated with disdain and disregard in their time at CUNY, despite the public celebrations performed for them decades later; 2) that radical Black feminists left behind a record such that their critiques and larger visions could never be appropriated without the truth behind their experiences; 3) that radical Black feminists worked with their students, often in isolation, to imagine alternative definitions and processes for a transformative, critical education for Brown and Black youth.  I aspire to follow in their footsteps and also leave behind my own record. I hope that CUNY will someday end up on the right side of history when it comes to a radical Black feminist presence. It didn’t see it in my time there, but I remain hopeful that CUNY’s students might one day experience a culturally-sustaining and critical education.  In the meantime, we can get real about what stands in the way.

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