Thank you to Crystal Belle and the organizers of the Trayvon Martin Effect Conference at Teachers College for this weekend’s events and for inviting me to attend!
What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence?
—Audre Lorde, Sister Ousider, The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action
The stories that I am telling here all began with the image that you see above of Trayvon Martin, Jordan Davis, and Emmett Till. When I pieced the images together, all I could hear in my head were the words of Pete Rock and C.L. Smooth from their 1992 album featuring T.R.O.Y./They Reminisce Over You, dedicated to their friend Troy Dixon. It’s the end of the first verse and C.L. Smooth’s last two bars that propels the stories that hits what I think is at stake when we let everyone know that we refuse to forget Trayvon or Jordan or Emmett or any black boy:
Déjà vu, Tell You What I’m Gonna Do
When They Reminisce Over You, My God!
It is the way that CL Smooth hits that last bar, the way he uses sound of his voice to achieve the emphasis he wants to make. He is making a promise to the world that the weight and impact of this death, via the reminiscence, will be felt for generations to come… because you see, for me, that weight and that re-remembering is exactly what I think schools quite actively and deliberately keep us from doing.
I once had to mediate a complaint against a teacher who failed a student’s paper because it was plagiarized. The student had lifted entire segments of each page from websites and the professor had a policy against this on his syllabus. The student insisted that the professor was actually implementing his policy only with her because he disagreed with her political beliefs. That’s a difficult thing to prove so she was out there on a limb with that one. Because she was contesting her final grade (she was insisting on an A and that a B+ was the lowest grade she could ever accept) and not the plagiarism, I had to read the plagiarized paper and her corpus of work (most often lifted from other sources). Her writing was stunningly weak, riddled with the most anti-black racism I have ever read from a college student, and strangely misinformed all at the same time. In one section of a paper, the student wrote a rather lengthy diatribe against affirmative action and used, as her evidence, that Columbia University’s undergraduate student population is 40% “black”…”Colored” is what she called them. She argued that Columbia had accepted all of these unqualified “Colored (i.e., black)” students over the white valedictorian of her class who was denied admission. I was confused, to say the least, and thought she meant a different Columbia than the ivy league institution housed in New York City. Columbia’s students are 40% black? When the hell did that happen and why ain’t I workin there? Thass that hotness right there. I did get excited for a minute when I read her words but then realized that I was being foolish for listening to such a foolish student. That just ain’t what Columbia has EVER looked like! She did have a (cut-and-pasted) section from Columbia’s website in her writing. The charts, graphs, and language did, in fact, show that Columbia was reporting 40% of its undergraduate student population to be OF COLOR (the majority population in that number is Asian). I was astounded that the student clearly did not understand and had never really seen the term “of color” before. She seemed to think it was referencing those old Colored Vs. White drinking fountains where “Colored” meant black. Her white male professor looks like the first person who actually confronted her ideas and writing ability and she saw him as a race traitor of the John Brown variety, insistent on lynching him! It would be funny if it weren’t so damn tragic. There are no surprises here though. This was a Christian, conservative white female at a Christian, conservative white-run college who had attended a Christian, conservative white high school. Imagine my surprise though to hear the exact same language from SOPHOMORE students of color at a “minority-serving” public college who attended predominantly Black and Latin@ public schools! They too had never heard the term “of color.” The same white political continuum operates in how they have been educated.
Like always, I had students say things like they don’t think they are or can ever be intellectuals because English is not their first language or because they have an accent. These are actual quotes from last week’s class. And, of course, I have students, young black women, who unpack a discussion after class rather than in class because they don’t think they have a voice that people will hear… they will just be cast as that loud black girl in the corner again. That’s a quote too. Despite my early onset of racial battle fatigue, I realize that I need to sharpen my critique on the privileging of decontextualized grammar instruction. I don’t centralize grammar instruction in my course so for many folk, this means that I do not teach it all. If I thought grammar would alleviate the social and educational injustices that my people face (or even impact the students of color who I have described here), I would do it all day long. But at what point in my people’s history did a grammar lesson ever resolve systemic oppression, institutional racism, and education inequality? I mean, really, who thinks this simplistically? If all black folk needed was a grammar lesson for equality and social mobility in education, don’t you think we woulda BIN done that? There is a real vile disrespect happening in this construct.
Like most black women who I know, I was really upset this weekend when I saw the news coverage of beautiful, 7-year old Tiana Parker, a straight A student, as she shed tears when her school officials castigated her hair/locs!! If you ever thought black hair could be politically neutral in our social world, then you may never truly understand these kinds of tears. After being continually harassed, Tiana’s father was forced to enroll her in a new school because her charter school banned all dreadlocks as inappropriate, calling Tiana’s locs a distraction from learning/thinking.
Here’s what I mean. At my first tenure-track job, I designed a college-credit-bearing course for high school students that would use the history of African American literacies and education within an intensive, rigorous reading and writing curriculum. The idea was to get students so caught up in what they were learning that I would take that momentum and build in intensive college-readiness reading and writing competencies. I had an elaborate multimedia, project-based curriculum with tutor trainings fully planned out. The upper level administration offered full support while my lazy chair and disaffected colleagues offered, at best, lip-support and questions on how I would incorporate math (Yes, math, even though I am a literacies and composition researcher; even though no one else was expected to cover materials outside of their expertise). On one occasion, I was supposed to meet with my chair to go over the project details before my presentation to the vice provost. She straight didn’t show up because her dog was sick and so couldn’t bark and wake her up in time… yes, this is what $160,000-per-year for a chair can look like (
Here’s an example. At a recent interview, I was asked repeatedly if I could teach something other than African American content. In my eight years as a tenure track professor, the majority of classes I have taught have been broad and in the seven years before that, still broader. So in 15 years of college teaching, I have, unfortunately, taught very few Africana-centered classes as clearly shown on my CV. Given these obvious facts, I saw this as a request to de-blacken myself in an incredibly lily-white faculty space. I was also asked questions about whether or not I could accommodate the specificity of their curriculum and yet no classroom that I visited was doing something that I saw as challenging for the 21st century or to my own teaching abilities. I was questioned about whether or not I would actually do the commute but why would I go to the interview if I weren’t interested? (I suspect a white male colleague in my field told some of the interviewers these things, but if those interviewers thought this white man could ever know ANYTHING about me or any black woman, then that’s just even more offensive and stupid). I was the first choice candidate and the offer was amazing but in the end, it IS like a relationship: you can’t be with someone who does not see who you are, does not really want YOU, and squashes the fullness of who and what you are/do/think. They seemed to need someone like me to forward their specific agendas, but they never really wanted me. Don’t be fooled by people and spaces that seem to be saying the right thing, but not meaning it.
Put most simply, there comes a time when you need to just get up and leave a bad situation whether that is a relationship or a university position and you gotta be ready to leave it all behind. After the abuse and neglect, don’t expect apologies or acknowledgement from these folk, that’s not who they are. If they had valued you, were interested in doin you right, you wouldn’t have raised on up out of there in the first place. Cull a lesson from my past mistakes: I left my first job very angry. I had every intention of taking a photo of my naked behind and mailing it to everyone in the department with a detailed description of what they could kiss. A friend, however, explained that this could qualify as some kind of punishable crime so the photos were never mailed. Banned from that possibility, I never really healed and landed at a second job that I grew to hate even more. This time though, I am getting my own closure otherwise I will miss new opportunities in front of me. If you don’t know what I am talking about, just go to youtube and read the comments section on love songs (I visit these uploads often to get music that is not mainstream) and you will see grownass people begging for the return of their babymommas/babydaddies/ex-lovers (with Maury Povitch-styled paternity issues in full tow). After getting dropped on their heads (and wallets), these stupid fools be out here publicly professing a never-ending, undying love…online… youtube-dedicating or posting various renditions of “Don’t Leave Me” or “Lost Love” about an ex-partner’s “Dark side” who, in fact, was nothing but an affront to all humankind anyway (“you are my heart, my soul, my inspiration… I will miss the passion… you were the one… my guiding light” ). Why would anyone say these things to their predator/oppressor? The same goes for the new job: you can’t hang on to old abuses as something that was ever real or ever about you or ever about real intellectual work or social change.
