Category Archives: Resources

December 4, 2016 · 2:20 pm

Written/Unwritten is out!

It’s been a busy first month for Written/Unwritten and for me. The official release date was the day before the apocalypse, but even before the publication date response to the anthology have been overwhelmingly positive.

At one point in the process of getting the book together I sighed to a friend that it was taking so long that by the time it came out no one would even care about tenure anymore. But when I hear about a watchlist of faculty members deemed radical and dangerous, and listen to faculty of color who feel more taxed as students turn to them for help processing the election results (or are more aggressive than usual feeling embolden by the election of a president who is bringing racists into the White House), it’s clear that this book is more necessary than ever and that the narratives here can help individuals and institutions rethink how they support and maintain meaningful faculty diversity.

I was interviewed in The Chronicle of Higher Education (Tenure Denials Set Off Alarm Bells, and a Book, About Obstacles for Minority Faculty” paywalled) about the anthology:fullsizerender-24

The Chronicle also interviewed me about a reader I compiled with two of my colleagues earlier this year (“A Professor Created a Guide to Police Shootings for Worried Students. Now Her Colleagues Want It” paywalled)fullsizerender-25

In a major victory for all of us, I got “woke AF” published in a piece I wrote for The Atlantic (”What Is Faculty Diversity Worth to a University?”):

The stakes are even higher now. They are higher because service that might have been seen as extra can now feel essential. Black faculty report feeling more vulnerable, and the invisible labor is hyper visible in this post-Ferguson, post-Obama moment. All too often, when deans, provosts, and presidents call for panels, workshops, and university discussions, there’s a faculty member of color who has to wrestle with how to contribute (or with whether or not they want to) while still doing the work their colleagues get to do without the same burden. The stakes are higher because ethnic-studies and women’s-studies departments are being effectively dismantled. Their faculty must take time away from their own research and teaching to fight as legislatures target them and administrators try to cut their budgets or fire the tenure-line faculty in their departments.

Inside Higher Ed published a nuanced, beautifully reported consideration of the anthology (Separate and Not Equal):

Recent anecdotes put a face to the problem. Aimee Bahng, a popular assistant professor of English at Dartmouth College was denied tenure last year, despite strong backing from faculty colleagues, for example, and her supporters said another professor of color was denied tenure the year before under similar circumstances. Other faculty members of color have left Dartmouth of their own accord, leaving one instructor there to declare that “temporary, precarious and disavowed labor of people of color at Dartmouth is their purposeful and intentional diversity solution.” Dartmouth has acknowledged that it has trouble retaining minority professors but denies claims of racism in personnel decisions.

This review in the New York Journal of Books makes clear about the necessity of these narratives in this particular moment.

In today’s corrosive and divisive public-political discourse, the experiences, interpretations, and emotions expressed by the contributors to this volume might be variably termed as overly sensitive, politically correct, or—more crassly—whining. Spun somewhat differently, dissent, critique, questioning, and protest are taken as an outright attack in a crudely polarized political landscape where you are either “making America great again,” or its opposite. These essays are now, more than ever, a timely and courageous contribution to the exploration and critique of the operation of power as it refracts against diverse, non-dominant identities in American higher education.

To top it all off, I visited Barnard and talked about the anthology, specifically its contributors, with faculty of color, faculty diversity committee members, friends, my Montclair colleagues, and my Aunt Carmen, who was very happy that I spoke more slowly this time than I did when she came to hear me give a lecture last year (and was impressed that instead of the four or five people who attended that lecture the room at Barnard was full…sitting on the floor room only).  Jennifer Williams, who I talked to for the chapter “’Cast your net wide’: Reflections on Activism and Community Engagement When Black Lives Matter,” was there too.

Some of my favorite friends showed up: Manu Chandler, Jennifer Clark, Eve Dunbar, Kim Hall, Stephanie Hershinow, David Hershinow, Alison Kinney, Karl Steel, and Joan T. Walrond, who holds the record for buying the most copies of the anthology thus far.

Kevin Browne and Carla Shedd, two of the people I follow on Twitter for wisdom, moral clarity, and inspiration, were there too.

Kim, Stephanie, and Kevin tweeted my talk, and it’s been interesting to see how my comments on the anthology are interpreted in real time. Some of what they tweeted were direct quotes from my talk, but I was most interested in how they extended my ideas, in powerful ways. I’ve gathered those tweets via storify.

There’s been a lot to process with all of this. This is my first book, and I’ve been excited, terrified, hopeful, and relieved that it’s out. The night before the Barnard talk I panicked that I hadn’t gotten one part of the introduction right and that people might think less of me because of it. Then I realized that, to a large extent, the anthology isn’t fully about me, and, by extension, the talk was not actually about me either.  Don’t get me wrong, the day was definitely about me. I know this because my Aunt Carmen, my godfather George Bailey, and my cousin Neil were there. And there were cupcakes and an open bar afterwards. But the talk was really about the rather remarkable people who trusted me with their stories. This was my chance to introduce them.  It felt wonderful to have the opportunity to talk about their work and what they offer the academy. So I actually had quite a bit of fun.

I’m curious to know what’s next—where the anthology will take me and how others will engage with it into the holidays and the new year. To those of you who have bought the book already, thank you so much. If you haven’t bought it yet, UNC press has 40% off all of its books and shipping for orders of $75 or more are free.   Buy a copy for yourself, your dean, your provost, your favorite graduate students…you get the idea.

The book is dedicated to my parents. That’s my mother’s wedding ring and chain I’m wearing in the storify pic.

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April 5, 2014 · 12:44 pm

Clicks and Cliques Part IV: The College Language Association Panel

“It is the nature of privilege to find ever deeper places to hide.”
Elizabeth Spelman

I was in New Orleans last weekend to participate on a panel at the College Language Association’s annual conference. It was magnificent in so many ways. I heard great papers and talks, met academic pioneers, sighed during Edwidge Danticat’s keynote, and ate my weight in fried shrimp.  I danced to someone named Trombone Black at a juke joint in the 7th Ward and wandered around the French Quarter in the rain.  There were beignets.

CLA is not a conference I normally attend.  You’re more likely to find me at the British Women Writers Conference, the annual Narrative conference or, from time to time, NASSR.  But when Janeen Price and Jenice Hudson, two doctoral candidates at Florida State University, asked me to participate on a panel about how women of color navigate the academy (Creolizing the Academic Space: A Roundtable), I said yes.  I wanted the opportunity to put my posts and conversations about what I’ve come to think of as “Women’s Studies Culture” into a more useful context and I wanted to talk about my ideas with a diverse group of women of color from different corners of the academy.  We were charged with sharing our experiences as a way to offer perspectives and strategies for other women of color.  I chose to focus on gender and diversity.

In my thinking about the challenges women of color face when working with white women in the academy, I’ve shifted away from talking about “white women” as a monolithic group and towards discussing Women’s Studies Culture. Not only is this phrase a more precise description of the struggle, it points to a larger systemic problem—one that Jane Chin Davidson and Deepa S. Reddy discuss in their essay “Performative Testimony and the Practice of Dismissal” in Written/Unwritten. It allows for the fact that this struggle goes at least as far back as the eighteenth century when white women like Mary Wollstonecraft appropriated the abolitionist movement to forward their own causes.  My brief comments focused on the larger cultural shifts outside the academy that trouble the waters within it. I titled my contribution to the panel “The Minefield(s) of Sisterhood: Women’s Studies Culture and Diversity in the Academy” and framed my thoughts with a question from Audre Lorde and an exhortation from bell hooks.

Lorde’s question is one I’ve been carrying around with me for the last year or so. She posed it to the attendees of the 1981 National Women’s Association Conference in a talk titled “On the Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism.”   After recounting the various ways that white women place themselves and their feelings at the center of conversations about racism, she asks her sisters at the NWSA:

What woman here is so enamoured of her own oppression that she cannot see her heelprint upon another woman’s face?  What woman’s terms of oppression have become precious and necessary to her as a ticket into the fold of the righteous, away from the cold winds of self-scrutiny?

I offered my advice, my exhortation from bell hooks in her essay, “Choosing the Margins as a Space of Radical Openness”–an idea I’ve written about here and am exploring more fully in an essay for PMLA:

Marginality [is] much more than a site of deprivation; in fact…it is also the site of radical possibility, a space of resistance. It was this marginality that I was naming as a central location for the production of counter-hegemonic discourse that is not just found in words but in habits of being and the way one lives. As such, I was not speaking of marginality one wishes to lose—to give up or surrender as part of moving into the center—but rather of a site one stays in, clings to even, because it nourishes one’s capacity to resist. It offers to one the possibility of radical perspective from which to see and create, to imagine alternatives, new worlds.

Between Lorde and hooks, I laid out four shifts we need to think about in order to understand what is happening at what feels like a a particularly tense time for women of color and Women’s Studies Culture in the academy:

  1. Cultural: We have moved away from the Age of Oprah when the most popular black woman in America built an empire around telling middle-class and upper middle-class white women how to “live their best lives” (without really challenging them to question at whose expense those lives are lived) to a time when the most visible black woman in America challenges racial stereotypes every time she walks in a room. Whereas Oprah—attached to a man but not married and with no children of her own, with her history of sexual assault, and her public weight battle—could inspire white women without challenging their notions of white femininity, Michelle Obama has made the kinds of decisions, primarily to put her family before what many see as a traditional professional career, that make white feminists nervous or angry.
  1. Economic:   The fact that white women have benefited more from Affirmative Action than any other group means that despite broader social inequities, they have more power, particularly in the academy, than they have ever had before and the Anne-Marie Slaughter model of trickle-down feminism (what is good for those at the top will eventually be good for those at the bottom) can make it difficult for many to understand their own privilege.
  2. Institutional: Women’s Studies, or Gender and Women’s Studies, is closer to the center of the academy than it has ever been before, and the closer it gets to the center the more aggressively it subscribes to the same hierarchies that it once challenged, and it does so under the veil of social justice. On this point, I was (and remain) curious to know if the increase of Ethnic Studies departments has meant more and more women of color opting out of Women’s Studies Culture and building their own academic profiles, careers, and, most importantly, agency, largely without white women.
  3. Social—Women of color have more outlets and opportunities than they have ever had before both to express their frustrations and their anger AND, most importantly, to build solidarity. I think that what was once seen as peer-to-peer dynamics has now been revealed to be part of a larger pattern and the narrative of the “angry black woman” who bullies white woman with her aggressive tone is being regularly challenged and the challenge is happening in public spaces.

If you haven’t attended CLA, you might not know that it was founded 77 years ago when the MLA excluded black faculty (in practice if not in policy) from its membership.  This is one of the reasons why it’s a conference that matches the kind of papers, talks, and discussions we seek at these kinds of gatherings with an air of celebration. It is a conference that turned marginalization into a radical and creative act.  Our panel include: Karla Holloway (Duke University), Judy Jackson (University of Kentucky), Theri A. Pickens (Bates College), Rhea Lathan (Florida State University).  The room was pretty full.   Every speaker, from the untenured assistant professors to the mid-career faculty to senior colleagues, shared experiences that resonated with others on the panel and those who spoke during the Q&A.  Well, it wasn’t actually a Q&A session.  It was something else entirely.  As the panel participants shared their thoughts, people moved beyond the academic knowing nod (you know what I’m talking) to actual exclamations and sighs. This spilled over into the Q&A in ways that surprised me and gave me concrete reminders about how important it is to articulate these challenges within institutionalized academic spaces.

I think that if you were to walk up to anyone in that room and asked them if racism and sexism was shaping how they moved through the academy, they would say yes and then inform you that water is still wet.  But it’s one thing to know a truth, to know that microaggression and systemic discrimination are real, and it’s another thing to have your individual experience affirmed. I think it was that specific kind of affirmation that made this more than an academic, theoretical discussion.  After the panel ended, some people came up to ask the panelists for advice. Most just wanted to hug us and tell us their stories.  There are so many, too many.

I wanted to give folks a bibliography they could take back to their home institutions, either to read on their own or to read with whatever trusted colleagues they can find.  Here it is:

Gender, Race, and Feminism
A Short Bibliography

 

Accapadi, Motwani Mamta. “When White Women Cry: How White Women’s Tears Oppress Women of Color.” The College Student Affairs Journal. 2007 (26:2): 208-215.

Daniels, Jessie.“The Trouble with White Women.”

hooks, bell. “Choosing the Margins as a Space of Radical Openness” in Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics. South End Press (1990).

Lorde, Audre. “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism” Keynote: National Women’s Studies Association (1981).

Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity. Duke University Press (2003).

Ortega, Marina. “Being Lovingly, Knowingly Ignorant: White Feminism and Women of Color.” Hypatia 21:3 (Summer 2006): 56-74.

Palmer, Phyllis. Marynick. “White Women/Black Women: The Dualism of Female Identity and Experience in the United States.” Feminist Studies 9:1(Spring, 1983): 151-170.

Sandoval, Chela. “U.S. Third World Feminism: The Theory and Method of Oppositional Consciousness in the Postmodern World.” Genders: Journal of Social Theory, Representation, Race, Gender, Sex (1991): 1-24.*

Spelman, Elizabeth. Inessential Woman: Problems of Exclusion in Feminist Thought. Beacon Press (1988).

Williams, Patricia. The Alchemy of Race and Rights: Diary of a Mad Law Professor. Harvard University Press (1991).

*I’m grateful to Annick T.R Wibben for pointing me to this essay.

 

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December 14, 2013 · 7:32 am

Invisible Rituals: Pre-Graduate School Programs and Developing Diversity

I think we all know that it’s not enough to be “smart” and “hardworking” and a “good student” to succeed as an academic. There’s a skill set that is almost invisible and accrues over time, perhaps over generations. I see this when I talk to second-generation academics, folks who grew up around professors or parents who have advanced degrees. They know the ins and outs of how things in academia work without fully realizing that there actually are ins and outs. A word like “polished” comes to mind, but it’s more than that; it is understanding the invisible rituals that makes the classroom a second home and advanced research seem natural. Even if they are socially awkward, they have an ease about them when it comes to moving around ideas that can be foreign to those who are first-generation college students.

Well-intentioned faculty can spot talent in students who have the skills to succeed in graduate school, but they can’t always offer the view of graduate school that students need to make informed choices about when, or even if, they should go. Raw talent isn’t enough, and there is less and less time in graduate school to learn how the whole thing works.

That’s where programs like the ones organized by the Group for Underrepresented Students in Humanities Education and Research (GUSHER) come in. They offer underrepresented students an opportunity to have a hands-on experience with graduate faculty and advanced graduate students doing the work of graduate school. These programs provide housing and meals and offer a stipend so that students can afford to take time away from work to participate in them. In as much as graduate school wrecks almost everyone’s self-esteem in some way, it can be more terrifying if the processes of it are completely mystifying.

Several students of color I know have participated in some of the programs below, and they have all returned transformed. I’m not being hyperbolic. I see it not only in the quality of their writing but also in how they approach their research and how they understand the challenges of graduate school. This does not mean that they’ve all run off to get their doctorates. In fact, I was most encouraged to hear that the programs help students make informed choices about whether or not a career in the academy is the best thing for them.

For now at least, SILC at Wheaton has been discontinued, and this is truly unfortunate, but there are several other programs that are still running:

• Moore Undergraduate Research Apprenticeship Program at the University of North Carolina (MURAP)

• Rutgers English Diversity Institute at Rutgers the State University of New Jersey (REDI)

• African American Literatures and Cultures Institute at the University of Texas at San Antonio (AALCI)

One of the benefits of encouraging promising students to apply is that it allows for a dialogue about graduate school that happens outside of the pressure cooker of the graduate application process. I’ve taken to sending links to these programs to students who express an interest in graduate school, and even reading about the programs helps them think carefully about what it is that they actually want. Since the deadlines for these programs are in February and March, I send the links out to promising students just before they head off for winter break.

If you are a dean or a department chair, if you are on a diversity committee or work in a development office, I urge you to do the work of developing a program like this at your institution. They can be a powerful contribution to the work of developing and sustaining meaningful diversity in the academy. Good intentions and progressive ideas are great, but programs like this are even better.

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December 1, 2013 · 6:32 pm

Lessons from the Collection V: Teaching While Black (Part II)

It’s evaluation time and students have the chance to offer anonymous feedback about their experience in the classroom. As a tenured faculty member, I’m not required to undergo this process, but from time to time I do so anyway. Even when I don’t arrange for university evaluations, I ask my students for feedback about the semester. It’s always a bit unnerving, and I can never quite shake the feeling that it feeds into the consumerism mode of higher education, but I believe it can be a useful process. This year, as I’ve been thinking of what it means to be a professor of color in the academy for a solid decade, I’m thinking of the daily informal assessments that happen all the time, and I’m remembering the time I told a graduate student to take a seat.

Literally.

I’ll never know exactly what pushed this particular graduate student to stand up in the middle of my Research Methods course and shout, “You can’t lecture me!” He’d been terse and combative from the first day of the term, but it’s been so many years (easily seven or eight) that I’ve even forgotten what we were talking about when he forgot himself. It’s possible that he was angry that I hadn’t paid enough attention to Byron’s use of ottava rima in Don Juan (no, I’m not kidding). I remember being amused when he wanted to know if I knew this pertinent fact about the poem (of course, I did). And when he wanted to explain to me that feminism was a crock because men were responsible for good things like the Sistine Chapel, I remember trying to gently but firmly move the conversation towards more productive ground. I also remember feeling some genuine sympathy for him. Here he was, forced to take a course that was not of his choosing with an instructor he might not ever have chosen to study with. All graduate students in our program must take Research Methods, it’s only offered once a year, and, at the time, I was the only instructor teaching it. He was white and his privilege expressed itself with a stridency I could tell made his classmates uncomfortable. He wasn’t the first student with this habit, but he was the most aggressive.

I don’t remember why this student stood up in a room of about twenty students and yelled “you can’t lecture me!” but I do remember that, in the moment, my gallows humor crowded everything else out; in reply I said, dryly, “well, actually, that’s my job. Literally. I mean it’s in my contract and everything.” I then told him he could either sit down or leave the class. He chose the latter. I don’t remember the rest of the class discussion, but I remember being surprised by how unfazed we all were by the moment. It wasn’t until after class, when two other male students (both of whom were white) offered to walk me to my car in case he was still hanging around that I started sorting through the implications of the moment. I was very new to my department, I was untenured, and I had been asked to restructure the Methods course and made some fairly radical changes to it. I knew I was going to have to explain what happened to both the Graduate Director and the Department Chair, both of whom were white and male.

For those who pay attention to what it means to be a person of color in today’s university system, the common narrative is that we face more service pressures than our white colleagues. We’re called on more often to work with student groups, to diversify committees with our very presence, to do the administrative work of turning ethnic studies classes into programs and programs into departments. These are duties many choose to take on and the savviest parlay that into currency to count towards tenure and promotion. But the disrespect, disdain, and rage we regularly deflect in the classroom bring on a different kind of pressure entirely. If we are the marginalized “other” in departments, balancing research and teaching agendas with internal and external service pressures, in the classroom we occupy two subject positions at once: Authority and Other. It’s a tricky thing to be on the margins and in the center in the exact same moment. The need to protect one’s authority and humanity while preserving the classroom space as a workshop of ideas where students can stumble, experiment, and question is a balancing act that requires more than good intentions on the part of faculty of color. It requires personal and institutional support. In this situation, I was lucky enough to have both.

This moment, this shout is at the most extreme end of the continuum of students behaving badly, but I’ve seen some version of it over my ten years as a university professor. And I know my experience is not singular. In fact, as someone who specializes in the very safe field of nineteenth-century British literature, I suspect I’m having a much easier time of it. Even this semester’s Austen lecture titled “Post-Colonial Theory and Mansfield Park; or is Fanny Price Actually a Sister?” sparked more interest than anger in my Austen seminar, and my students were totally up for the metaphors of race in the novel. They were intellectually skeptical to be sure (that’s what they’re supposed to be) but certainly engaged in the debate. If I taught race in a more modern context as I did in my intro to theory class this year, I’m sure there would be more shouting. I’m sure I’d face more moments like Professor Shannon Gibney is currently facing.

The professor received a formal reprimand:

The reprimand was due to the discomfort of two white male students who said they were being personally attacked while Professor Gibney led a discussion about structural racism in her political science and communications course. These very students interrupted Professor Gibney during the discussion, expressing that it was upsetting to them that it was being discussed at all. MCTC went so far as to identify Professor Gibney’s conduct in the class as a violation of the Non-Discrimination Policy and she was directed to meet twice with the Chief Diversity Officer to learn how to be more welcoming to people of all backgrounds.

Deborah J. Merritt’s “Bias, the Brain, and Student Evaluations of Teaching” begins with this from When Sapphire Meets Socrates at the Intersection of Race, Gender, and Authority:

The complaints are never-ending, voluminous, and contradictory. I talk too loud or not loud enough. I walk too close to people and make them nervous. If I look at students, they are nervous. If I do not look at them, I am picking on them. If I do not call on them, I have a personal vendetta against them…

The black female professor continues:

When I talk to students in an attempt to ascertain what I do that is so different from the other professors teaching the same section of first-year students, they admit that I do no more in class than their white male professors—my class is no more rigorous, no more intimidating, no more work. In fact, they seem to like my class.

Merritt’s essay (which you should read in its entirety) shows that:

The nonverbal mannerisms that drive teaching evaluations bear little relation to learning. Many of the nonverbal behaviors that influence teaching evaluations are related to race, gender, and other immutable characteristics; they stem from physiology, culture and habit. Social stereotypes filter perceptions of these behaviors so that even when faculty engage in identical classroom behaviors, students may perceive those behaviors differently depending on the professor’s race, gender, and other characteristics.

On a larger scale, this seems key to understanding the limits of teaching evaluations in general and specifically how they are used when faculty of color are evaluated. Put simply, student evaluations can be just another form of shouting at professors of color, particularly women of color.

Consider these findings compiled by Therese Huston in her research report “Race and Gender Bias in Student Evaluations of Teaching”:

• Researchers found lower final course evaluation ratings for female minority faculty members, but not for male minority instructors

• Hispanic faculty received the lowest course evaluation ratings. Asian-American faculty receive slight (sic) better course evaluations than their Hispanic colleagues, but their scores were, on average, still worse than the scores of White Faculty.

• Students rate Asian-Americans instructors as less credible and intelligible than white instructors.

• Male non-native speakers received lower evaluations than female non-native speakers.

• Women received lower evaluations than men and faculty of color were judged more harshly than their white counterparts

• When Whites rate the performance of a person of color with the understanding that their judgments would be communicated to a third party for the purposes of evaluation, Whites consistently rate performance negatively

There’s more that I’m sorting through here, especially how students evaluate faculty teaching ethnic studies vs. those teaching in other fields. If others have more recent studies or narratives, I’m happy to read them, but the larger question perhaps is not just that this is happening but what we can all do about it.

In my first post, I offered advice (a script almost) of how white colleagues can support faculty of color in this particular area. My advice was rooted in my own experiences in my current department.

Generally speaking, my colleagues, whether I am with friends with them or not, belong to the “If You See Something Say Something” school of witnessing microaggression. If a colleague in my department witnesses someone treating me poorly because I’m a person of color, they say something and then follow-up with an e-mail or stop by my office to make sure I’m okay. If I share something that happens to me (the shout, pissing someone off because I’ve had to point out, yet again, that I’m not a secretary, hearing that vocal students think I’m a bitch, being told I’m hostile and so on), I’m met with compassion and a genuine attempt to understand what I’m processing. Ten years out, I’ve come to appreciate this and count on it, but when I was new I had no idea what kind of environment I was in and felt I had to defend myself to the Director of Graduate Studies and my Department Chair. I was not looking forward to talking to anyone about what had happened, never mind two white men—no matter how congenial they’d been.

The Director of Graduate Studies called me at home, and his first question was about whether or not I was okay. He then asked what I wanted to do about the student. It was such a simple, collegial gesture. This student had challenged my authority, and, though I had handled it well, I was shaken and worried about how I would save the rest of the term and my reputation with my students and colleagues. His first question about my well-being calmed me immediately, and his second questioned helped me get back on my pedagogical feet (I had no interest in “punishing” the student but didn’t want him disrupting my class). The conversation had gone so well that I was beginning to relax. Then my Chair sent an email that same evening asking me to drop by his office in the morning.

He’s not a loquacious man, and I was a bit intimidated by him. I would come to see him as Lou Grant to my Mary Richards, but after that shout we weren’t there yet. I believed we would come to some understanding about the situation (he struck me as fair), but I was not looking forward to the process. I went in ready to explain myself, to give him “my side” of the story.

He didn’t need it.

He wanted to know if I was okay. More than that, he wanted me to know that he’d had an experience similar to mine with another student and that he could imagine how awful it felt. His point wasn’t to diminish what had happened to me but to let me know I wasn’t alone, that even old pros, with all of the privileges of masculinity and whiteness got kicked around by students from time to time. And that it felt like shit when it happened. That last part was most the most important part. Too often, when marginalized people talk about their struggles, members from dominant communities rush in to point out that the experience is not unique so marginalized people (women, people of color, GLBT citizens, and so on) should just shut up and deal. The better approach, the one rooted in empathy, is the one from my Chair—it made us both human without diminishing my particular challenges as a woman of color. It also taught me to share my troubling or confusing interactions with students with colleagues I trust. They helped me understand the culture of my institution so that I could better respond to what happened in my classroom, to know what was just “normal” and what was deeply problematic.

My students in that Research Methods course were equally generous. I explained that the student wouldn’t be returning to class not because he had questions about feminism (or Byron) but because the classroom space needed to be as free from distracting chaos as possible. They were happy with my explanation and then went out of their way to tell me that he was aggressive in every single class. I was surprised by this fact, but ten years out I wouldn’t be. It’s been my experience that students who struggle with having a black, female professor struggle in other ways. Race in the classroom, whether it’s embodied in the instructor or represented on the syllabus, simply amplifies bad behavior. This is cold comfort (I’ll never get used to what my presence as a woman of color in the classroom can trigger in students…never), but the context helps me keep an important balance so that I can manage the many forms that shouts can take without disrupting my classroom.

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September 23, 2013 · 11:51 am

Lessons from the Collection IV: Teaching While Black (Part I)

Robyn Magalit Rodriguez has put together an impressive list of essays that should be read by women of color in higher education and, perhaps more importantly, anyone who wants to actively support meaningful diversity. Her list covers a range of important issues, and you can see it here, but I’ve pulled out essays that deal with a specific problem that can be debilitating to faculty of color—how students react to them in the classroom. As the essays here evince, and I’ve noted in my conversations with women of color from around the country, faculty of color are judged more harshly than their white counterparts in college and university classrooms. They consistently receive lower evaluations from students, particularly at Predominately White Institutions. In addition to being demoralizing, especially for those who become academics because they want to teach, the institutional implications of such attitudes can have material consequences. Put simply, poor teaching evaluations can damage a candidate’s chances for tenure. They can become part of a narrative to prove that a candidate is not a good “fit” when the real problem might be that the candidate is simply different than those evaluating her personnel file.

What’s tricky about this is that no faculty member wants to claim that their poor teaching evaluations might be due, in part, to race and/or gender. And even white colleagues who want to be helpful might not know how to put this issue in some larger context. As a result, even folks who know the problem exists might not know how to address it. So, if you’re a white academic who knows that racism disrupts the learning processes at your institution how can you do more than nod sympathetically? The answers seem so easy, but I’ll list them here anywhere, as a primer or a reminder.

• Read these essays. Read them. Know the numbers, facts, statistics, and anecdotes.

• Share the essays with colleagues who you know share your investment in developing and maintaining diversity with all the appropriate caveats (“This might not be the struggle that all faculty of color face, but it behooves us to be mindful of this troubling pattern”).

• In any conversation that happens during any gathering of any group that calls itself a Diversity Committee, Committee on Diversity or any permutation of those words or what they are supposed to represent, be the voice that raises this specific issue. Never has the term “consciousness raising” been more apt.

• Build relationships with faculty of color and ask them about their experiences in the classroom. And then listen to what they have to say. With the appropriate caveats (see above), let them know you’re reading essays like the ones below so they know that you are trying to understand what they might be facing.

Agathangelou, Anna M., and L.H.M. Ling. 2002. “An Unten(ur)able Position: The Politics of Teaching for Women of Color in the U.S.” International Feminist Journal of Politics 4:368-98.

Aguirre, Adalberto. 2000. “Women and Minority Faculty in the Academic Workplace: Recruitment,
Retention, and Academic Culture.” ASHE-ERIC Higher Education Reports 27(6):1-110.

Dukes, Richard L., and Gay Victoria. 1989. “The Effects of Gender, Status, and Effective Teaching on the Evaluation of College Instruction.” Teaching Sociology 17:447-457.

Fries, Christopher J. and R. James McNinch.2003. “Signed Versus Unsigned Student Evaluations of Teaching: A Comparison.” Teaching Sociology 31:333-344.

Hendrix, Katherine G. 1998. “Student Perceptions of the Influence of Race on Professor Credibility.” Journal of Black Studies 28:738-64.

Rubin, D. L. 2001. “Help! My Professor (or Doctor or Boss) Doesn’t Talk English.” Pp. 127-140 in Readings in Cultural Contexts, edited by Judith N. Martin, Thomas K. Nakayama, and Lisa A. Flores. Mountain View, CA: Mayfield.

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April 20, 2013 · 4:36 pm

CFP: Blackness Without Race: Essays on the Subversion of Race by Way of Blackness in Literature, Media, and Culture

Posting for a friend:
Submissions and inquiries to Jennifer E. Henton. Jennifer.Henton@hofstra.edu

Blackness Without Race:
Essays on the Subversion of Race by Way of Blackness in Literature, Media, and Culture

 Recent trends in national politics and popular culture suggest that race is now an antiquated or problematic category of human differentiation. Race is currently considered nebulous and ubiquitous, if not a flawed code that hearkens back to an archaic past. Supposedly, phenotypes or genetic material cannot sustain the biological connectivity between humans. Students suggest as much when they don tee shirts that state: “We Are All Africans” (thereby emphasizing that all humans originate from Africa despite their visual classification). Meanwhile, contemporary academic studies reflect the same stance: the category is useless in the face of transgressing experiences of oppression or cultural amalgamation (e.g. Against Race, The Melancholia of Race, and Desiring Whiteness). Yet many discourses emerging from black studies and critical race studies expose such ideals of non-race as a proponent and signal of dominant white culture rather than as an actual liberation from race, and many groups assert and “stand by” their racial category, remaining resiliently vocal about the pleasures of their demarcated belonging. Further, many racial minorities recognize and resist the nuances of aversive racism lurking behind decisive leanings towards racelessness and contemporary versions of colorblind ideals.

Recognizing that the struggle towards freedom from race has merits, this anthology, then, seeks essays that approach racelessness from the vantage point of blackness rather than the standard normative proffered by neutral models that may mask whiteness. Tangled as the topic may seem, transcending race by way of the racialized rather than the race-free or race-neutral—which dangerously places the parameters of discourse within the scope of whiteness—sets this collection apart from other attempts to devolve race. Other approaches may serve to reduce the experiences and pleasures of specific target identity group belonging. Transcending efforts—attacks on affirmative action, attacks on black studies, claims of racial equality met via the Obama-era pact—deny that the characteristics/distinctions/powers of specific group membership carry their own positive insignia. Within the varied contributions of black expression and the distinct responses to historical moments wherein Western European groups relied on and targeted African descendants for expansion/economics/psychical anxiety, black expression continues to firmly refute the race-transgression trend; blackness moves the discourse away from race but maintains the more evasive and elastic term blackness. Many assert that while race is a problematic restriction, blackness remains useful as a means of self-expression, self-recognizing epistemology, and cultural aesthetics.

Papers that pursue how blackness (U.S. and global) can and does exist without responding to or depending on “race” are also welcome. Few studies have explored how race might be quashed while blackness is both culled and intact. Ideas for papers on art, literature, film, philosophy, religion, food, dance, music, and media are invited to exchange ideas about how blackness works in this way.

Deadline for full essays of 7500 words is January 15, 2014.

Please submit word document essays using MLA citation system. Additionally, please submit a 300-word abstract preceding the full essay submission and a brief academic bio of all contributors.

Submissions and inquiries to Jennifer E. Henton. Jennifer.Henton@hofstra.edu

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April 15, 2013 · 1:03 pm

1 job search, 1 tenure-track offer…10 years later

I was recently chatting with a favorite former student about graduate school job searches and sent her an essay I wrote for the ADE Bulletin in 2007 about my approach to my 2003 job search. It’s funny to read about the process this many years out, as I start thinking about an essay I’ve been invited to write for PMLA.

It has me thinking of how lucky I was.

I decided on the career I wanted, and then I went out and got it. Just like that. Easy Peasy. Seriously. One job search, one tenure-track job. And I’m still incredibly happy to be just where I am. Now one could argue that the job I wanted was a fairly easy one to want. In other words, I wasn’t interested in a job at a selective liberal arts college (SLAC) or at a Research I institution.

BUT, what I did want was a job that would allow me to think, write and teach about canonical literature at the same time that I could think, write, and teach about marginalized texts no one had heard of.

AND, I wanted to live somewhere interesting–probably in New York.

PLUS, as I wrote in the essay, at some point during my graduate career my vision for my professional future changed.

Make of that what you will.

One thing I’m struck by is how willing I was to walk away from this position if it meant I had to be a traditional Romanticist (someone who specializes in one of the six major poets of the period). I think one thing I’ve always held close is that while I very much wanted to be an English professor I was also genuinely curious about what else I could do. I figured that having a PhD would give me a lot of different options and that I would figure something out. I really believed that. In fact, I remember leaving one MLA interview and walking around Manhattan daydreaming about what I else I could do with my shiny, new PhD.

I received word on Valentine’s Day that an offer was forthcoming. Seriously. Valentine’s Day, 2003.

The thing that seems crazy now is that I wrote this essay as I was coming up for tenure, with no idea about whether or not I would get it. It started out as a talk I gave at MLA, and the ADE editor asked me to revise it for the Bulletin. I’m also amused by how flat my writing is–not exactly tentative but definitely the writing of a kid trying to figure out what the hell she was doing.

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March 17, 2013 · 10:15 am

Clicks and Cliques: Part III (The THATCamp Converation)

The night before THATCamp, I told Michelle that I didn’t think anyone would come to our panel. Too many people had told me stories of conferences where panels about race and/or ethnicity only attracted people of color. We joked that we might be the only two people in the room.

Our panel was originally scheduled for this room:
photo-15

I got there a few minutes early so I could get my head in a space to have a “productive conversation” about the kinds of “strategies” we (the few I thought would be in attendance) might have around the silences that seem to dominate the conversation about racism and feminism.

But so many people wanted to attend the panel that we ended up moving here (to the main conference room):photo-16
Michelle, who has more experience with public conversations about race than I do, said to me “this is too big” and suggested that we split the group of about 45 women (2/3 of the conference) into smaller groups. It seemed like a good idea, but I thought we could start big and then turn to smaller groups.

I had other ideas about how this could unfold. Michelle did too.

They seem less important this morning than what happens now that we’ve started this conversation, in this particular space.

After the conference, Kim Hall, Michelle, and I met over drinks to discuss, among other things, what could happen next with all of the ideas, energies, frustrations, and hopes that were in that room. I wish I had facilitated the discussion differently (asked a more focused question, started where I ended, invited other participants to begin by sharing their experiences), but I think the Session Notes offer a terrific opportunity to continue the conversation.

I think they provide a fairly accurate account of how things unfolded (it’s great to see other conference attendees still filling in the gaps), and this post is an invitation to folks to read them and share their thoughts and reactions.

In order to keep the Session Notes focused on the conference, it’s probably best to write in the comments section here. Or you might write something on your own blog and link to it in the common section here (or send the link to me via twitter @triciamatthew)

In the spirit of that invitation I’ll share that one thing I’ve been thinking about since the panel was that I talked about wanting “strategies” without clarifying who I had in mind. It really depends on your subject position though, doesn’t it? If, for example, you’re a woman of color navigating this terrain, it might be useful to know about Jay Smooth’s very popular video about how to call out racist behavior (if you’re a white person who struggles with hearing that something you’ve said or done is problematic, this could be useful for you too). It’s a good place to start. What I was hoping for was a similar resource that can be a good place to start for white feminists, something that goes beyond “Unpacking the Knapsack,” that speaks specifically to feminism and racism. I know a few attendees had ideas, so I hope they share them.

Many, many thanks to everyone who attended. I know it wasn’t an easy conversation, but I am encouraged by the number of people interested enough in this persistent (pernicious) issue to attend the panel and thankful to all whose shared their ideas, stories, and questions.

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December 30, 2012 · 6:40 pm

Diversty Round-up: The 2012 List of Books on Diversity

I’ll confess that I always feel a little pit in my stomach when I see that a new book about diversity in higher education goes to print.  I started this project several years ago, and it was slow, difficult work getting it all together, and now it is making the slow journey to publication. It’s difficult to hurry up and wait.  I worry that the narratives I’ve compiled will seem like old news.

Then I remember that an issue as complex and deeply entrenched as this one requires multiple essays, articles, anthologies, and special journal issues.  The goal isn’t to be first but to expand and extend the discussion (it should probably be this in all areas of research but this is especially the case when it comes to diversity).   And I remind myself that more than professional advancement or ego boosts, we need as broad a community as possible to be as informed as possible about this issue.

This is not only a list books that came out this year (Presumed Incompetent) but of books that are important to this conversation that I returned to this year as I finished writing the introduction to the collection.  These are books I looked to as I planned the anthology, and they are books that I think everyone should read—especially white academics who want to do more than just say that they value diversity (or offer the earnest head nod whenever the issue comes up).    And I should say that I am very glad that colleagues in my home department are reading some of these books with me and doing the work to develop and maintain meaningful diversity.

If you know of more good books on the subject, please send the titles my way

(NB: Descriptions are from websites about the books where available).

If you’re going to start anywhere, start with: Deborah Gray White, ed. Telling Histories: Black Women Historians in the Ivory Tower.  Gender and American Culture Series. (U of North Caroline, P.,  2008).

Engagingly written, Telling Histories should appeal to multiple audiences. Taken together, these stories underscore the firm hold of racism, sexism, and classism within American society in general and the academy and history departments specifically. While presenting and often resolving theoretical and methodological questions, the book not only is valuable for graduate students but is also a significant contribution to the field and should facilitate bringing down barriers, both within and outside the academy, that constrain the professorial ranks, stifle voices, and preclude diverse academicians and scholars from writing and teaching without restraint. The contributors’ content is largely descriptive but it also provides analysis about the progression of scholarly trends and instruction in historiography to historians at all professional stages.

Gabriella Gutierrez y Muhs, et al, eds.
Presumed Incompetent: The Intersections of Race and Class for Women in Academia (Utah State UP, 2012)

Presumed Incompetent is a pathbreaking account of the intersecting roles of race, gender, and class in the working lives of women faculty of color. Through personal narratives and qualitative empirical studies, more than 40 authors expose the daunting challenges faced by academic women of color as they navigate the often hostile terrain of higher education, including hiring, promotion, tenure, and relations with students, colleagues, and administrators. The narratives are filled with wit, wisdom, and concrete recommendations, and provide a window into the struggles of professional women in a racially stratified but increasingly multicultural America.

Evans, Stephanie.
Black Women in the Ivory Tower: 1850-1954 (UP Florida 2007).

Evans chronicles the stories of African American women who struggled for and won access to formal education, beginning in 1850, when Lucy Stanton, a student at Oberlin College, earned the first college diploma conferred on an African American woman. In the century between the Civil War and the civil rights movement, a critical increase in black women’s educational attainment mirrored unprecedented national growth in American education. Evans reveals how black women demanded space as students and asserted their voices as educators–despite such barriers as violence, discrimination, and oppressive campus policies–contributing in significant ways to higher education in the United States. She argues that their experiences, ideas, and practices can inspire contemporary educators to create an intellectual democracy in which all people have a voice.

Janis Fay, et al, eds.
Racism in the Academy: The New Millennium.  American Anthropological Association. (2012)

The starting point for this study was through the auspices of our professional scholarly society, the American Anthropological Association. In 2007, then-president Alan Goodman appointed a commission charged with two primary responsibilities:
“(1) to collect information in order to better expose how privilege has been maintained in anthropology and the AAA, including but not limited to departments and the academic pipeline and

(2) to develop a comprehensive plan for the Association and for the field of anthropology to increase the ethnic, racial, gender and class diversity of the discipline and organization.”

Baez, Benjamin. 
Affirmative Action, Hate Speech, and Tenure: Narratives About Race and Law in the Academy. Benjamin Baez (Routledge Falmer 2002).

I like everything that Baez has written on race in higher education. Everything.

Geok-Lin Lim, Shirley et al, eds.
Power, Race, and Gender in  Academe: Strangers in the Tower.  New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1991)

My favorite chapter from this collection is Gunning, Sandra. “Now That They Have Us, What’s the Point?” The Challenge of Hiring to Create Diversity.”

Matthew, Patricia A., ed. 
Written/Unwritten: Tenure and Race in the Humanities (not yet, but I couldn’t resist…)

 

 

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December 11, 2012 · 7:49 pm

CFP: Narrative, Race, and Ethnicity in the Americas

Narrative, Race, and Ethnicity in the Americas

In her landmark study of race and American literature, Playing in the Dark (1992), Toni Morrison argued that literary history has taken for granted a certain set of assumptions, including the understanding that “American literature is free of, uninformed, and unshaped by the four-hundred-year-old presence of, first, Africans and then African Americans in the United States” and that “this presence […] had no significant place or consequence in the origin and development of that culture’s literature” (4-5). Morrison’s work provides a thoughtful and insightful study of race in American narrative and has inspired a generation of scholars to continue the study of race and ethnicity in American literature. However, much of this work (but certainly not all, as evidenced by Frederick Luis Aldama’s recent collection Analyzing World Fiction: New Horizons in Narrative Theory [Texas, 2011]) tends to fall outside the scope of formal narrative studies. And just as Susan Lanser’s 1986 ground-breaking article “Toward a Feminist Narratology” has inspired scholars to explore the fruitful possibilities of a feminist narrative theory that engages an intersectional approach to issues related (but not limited to) gender, the editors hope to compile a collection of essays that similarly engages the study of race, ethnicity, and narrative in the Americas, a cultural-geo-political area that we conceive of broadly that is not simply bounded by the nation-state of the U.S. Following Aldama’s collection, we hope to provide a work that encompasses a diversity of voices, subjects, and approaches to the study of narrative, race, and ethnicity.

To that end, we invite proposals for a collection of essays that will examine the intersections of race, ethnicity, and narrative focused on texts produced by authors with cultural ties to the Americas, a region that has seen the widespread sale of African slaves, the decimation of indigenous peoples in the wake of European colonialism, the hybridization of settler-colonials with roots in Spain, and the systematic mistreatment of Asian immigrants, as well as a cultural history that has needed to be ever-mindful of that heritage. It is the belief of the editors that “the Americas” share a unified cultural history, particularly with respect to issues of race and ethnic identity, and that narratives produced by artists in many American nations reflect that shared history. As such, the editors would like this volume to include as many diverse voices, backgrounds, and identities as possible.

We seek proposals for essays that will address the various ways that the formal study of narrative intersects productively with methodologies of critical race studies, post-colonial theory, and general ethnic studies. In other words, following the example set forth by Lanser, how can issues of identity help us better understand the workings of narrative, and how can a formal study of narrative assist us in the study of narrative forms? We seek essays that engage the diversity of possible theoretical approaches, as well as works that explore a multiplicity of ethnic voices and audiences. We do not wish to define what it means to study narrative, race, and ethnicity in the Americas; rather, we hope to provide a starting point for the variety of directions such a study can take.

Proposals for essays should be between 750 and 1000 words and should clearly articulate their theoretical position and identify the narratives to be analyzed. Completed abstracts are due by March 31, 2013 and can be sent to James J. Donahue (donahujj@potsdam.edu), Jennifer Ho (jho@email.unc.edu), or Shaun Morgan (dmorgan@twcnet.edu). We welcome questions or inquiries about this volume prior to this date, as well. Submitters will be notified about the status of their proposals by May 31, 2013 and final essays of 5,000-6,000 words will be due on January 31, 2014.

Although we do not have a formal agreement with a press just yet, an editor for the Ohio State University Press Series on the Theory and Interpretation of Narrative has expressed strong interest in reviewing this collection.

Possible topics (though others are welcome as well) include:
— the interconnections of Critical Race Theory and Narrative Theor(ies)
— the impact of Civil Rights, the American Indian Movement, or other civil rights movements on the production, consumption, or study of narrative(s)
— the intersections of Post-Colonial Theory (as it pertains to literature of the Americas) and the study of narrative
— the use, limitations, or necessary expansions to formalist approaches to the study of narrative(s) produced by People of Color (are concepts such as narrator, implied author, etc. race/ethnicity neutral?)
— are narrative approaches grounded in the study of race and ethnicity methodologically different from narrative approaches grounded in the study of gender or class; and if so, how?
— the necessary additions/revisions/etc. to cognitive and ethical approaches to the study of narrative that considerations of race engender
–the ways in which a study of narrative and race can be useful as a form of anti-racist praxis

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