I love what I do. I couldn’t begin to send enough prayers of thanks to the heavens above to communicate the deep feelings of rightness I feel to be learning, reading and writing as much as I can in this pinnacle of opportunity in my life. I even like my college, a lot, to an extent. We’ll get into that. I just can’t sustain this kind of fatigue without breaks in between.
I know what I signed up for, and I’m aware that my university or department or major is certainly not isolated in this issue, but I am losing much of my steam I picked up at the beginning of this year. I even consider myself a comparably optimistic individual, especially when it comes to starting new things. Considering the worst isn’t custom, and I still feel the glee of a new class or school session I felt when I was eight years old and tasting the joys of education by my mother’s hand while being homeschooled. I’m just in a situation where at my big age, I have to see what’s ahead of me for what it is, which hurts more often than it heals recently.
There is such a disconnect between the path I walk and that of my white peers, that it feels hard to even conceive that we’re doing the same work. It feels near impossible to sit in the rooms I sit in and not see everyone else’s cold sweats and bug eyes at some of the things that come across our desks or syllabi or Canvas pages, to the point where I doubt my own sensibilities. One of the only brief moments of clarity I’ve had this semester is when reading the words of Claudia Rankine in my intro to poetry class, and feeling for just a moment that I’m not crazy.
“You take in things you don’t want all the time. The second you hear or see some ordinary moment, all its intended targets, all the meanings behind the retreating seconds, as far as you are able to see, come into focus. Hold up, did you just hear, did you just say, did you just see, did you just do that? Then the voice in your head silently tells you to take your foot off your throat because just getting along shouldn’t be an ambition.”
Two pages earlier in Citizen, Rankine harkens the words of Hurston with an incredibly impactful piece of artwork by Glenn Ligon as follows:
A couple of days later, I heard Hanif Abdurraqib read the same Hurston quote live when delivering a particularly resonant response to a question about black culture in history, as he so exquisitely does, and I felt that rightness again. Deeper than truth or affirmation, but some visceral sense that as insidious as it is, this is how it is.
When expected to conform to whatever fever dream white girlboss English majors are trying to sell y’all now and jump for joy when assigned yet another reading from a slave owner, I feel that there must be an unbelievably inconceivable boundary in these unmelanated folks minds when they look at their curricula and their classrooms. Every meeting and class and orientation the first week of my time on campus told me there is nobody like you here. there is nobody. and the next four years will profess that. This repeats until I find my life rafts, which have helped me maintain my sanity as best I can.
Seeing the romanticization of the echo chambers of oppression that academia stands on so often is baffling. After so many hollow words and calls for change and opening my hands and heart as a real live person standing in front of these people, do they still not get it? Considering that I have to ask that question, I think I’ve overestimated white academics, and given them both too much credit and benefit of the doubt in most cases. When the vile cocktail of unintelligence and short-sighted selfishness that an insulated upbringing in a white supremacist society yields comes to life in the environments that let it teem, the fumes are enough to knock me out. Which they have.
This year I’ve written a lot about black visibility, both inside and outside of academic contexts. I turn again to Rankine, who wrote the following:
“Not long ago you are in a room where someone asks the philosopher Judith Butler what makes language hurtful. You can feel everyone lean in. Our very being exposes us to the address of another, she answers. We suffer from the condition of being addressable. Our emotional openness, she adds, is carried by our addressability. Language navigates this.
For so long you thought the ambition of racist language was to denigrate and erase you as a person. After considering Butler’s remarks, you begin to understand yourself as rendered hypervisible in the face of such language acts. Language that feels hurtful is intended to exploit all the ways that you are present. Your alertness, your openness, and your desire to engage actually demand your presence, your looking up, your talking back, and, as insane as it is, saying please.”
At this point, I don’t have any solutions. I don’t have answers, or ideas, or my own words because I’m letting this just sit within myself for now. I’m giving you Rankine because for the first time in a very long time, I feel speechless. I can only speak to my exhaustion in a way that feels unproductive and sloppy and embarrassingly unhelpful to me, but it’s all I have right now. I’m sorry. Really, this issue is kind of a mess and more of a diary entry, but for some reason I feel it would benefit others. I’ll end with this.
This hyperawareness of all the ways I am visible on a white background is something that in the past would have paralyzed me, but I staunchly refuse to let that happen to me now. I breathe, I pray, I become brave, and I quote Rankine to myself. I think I will get at least some of those words tattooed on me. Again. I love you, I apologize for the delay, and I’ll see you next week.