issue sixty-five

black academia pt 3 reloaded the re-up: me and my PWI

For months and months, I start this essay and decide the start is bad and erase it and start again. I’m tired of doing that, but I’m more tired of all the things I’m about to talk about, so I’m just going to begin with the frame of a recent thought I had. Also - catch up to parts one and two of this little essay series I’ve begun on here (linked below)!

big little lies as a perennial vibe check

Something weird is happening to me at my PWI. Something more than just exhaustion, and rage — I still have those too — but also paradoxical in its provisional balm. It’s an itch, and it's a triple bind between me, myself and I. Something I’ve fully known all along, but I’m only seeing realized in front of me at the current moment of my life.

I’ve found that the more “campus capital” I acquire, the more walls of whiteness I run up against. Walk with me here, even if you might need directions. 

Over the first (almost) two years at my small, liberal arts PWI, I have blazed an objectively stellar path. I have gone through the grindset and put my nose to the grindstone, I’ve paraded for the tours and brochures, and I’ve made the most of playing the game — to the extent that I can. I mingle at academic events and socialize at extracurricular ones, I work on campus, I take 20 credit hours and smile about it because it gets me further “ahead.” I serve on three executive boards, and participate in three mentorship programs. My scholarships and awards sit atop my email signature like gleaming twin jewels, Thing 1 and Thing 2. My resume is two pages, and I’m proud that it can’t fit on one. 

It’s hard to describe the reality of the effort I put forth into absolutely milking the four years I have here like I just did without sounding either begrudging or ungrateful, and I feel like in rejecting and refuting those descriptors of my own tone I come off either corny or like I’m being held at gunpoint by our mascot. It’s with this in mind that I have to hope anyone reading this can take this attempt at honesty at face value, in good faith, and as a depleted plea contesting the inevitability of how much I have to exploit myself to make it out the other side of this degree looking like a “success.”

When I searched for and picked this school, I was 16 years old. I had neither the intellectual understanding, personal network nor life experiences to tell me what it would be like to immerse myself in it as a Black woman, and I can’t help but think many of the other prospective universities of the same ilk I considered would be much different. I also emerged from high school, a lockdown, and a passion left behind a little bit fearless. I girlbossed my way into the door and never looked back, and have attested a lot of my renewed productivity, courage, ambition and energy in college to growth and self improvement. 

While that isn’t entirely untrue, the further I chug along in my collegiate experience, the more I realize that these traits are symptomatic of the underlying capitalistic pressures that I’ve had no choice but to internalize. If I wasn’t involved in high school, I need to be now. If I didn’t put my name in the running for anything I’m interested in before, I need to start doing so this time around. If I’m idle, or lazy, or not giving 110% to the limited time I have here, I’m doing it wrong. It being college or existence as a burgeoning professional.

This is where blackness comes back in, because it’s the reason I started this conversation with myself. We’ve all heard the “work twice as hard to get half the credit” thing, trust we’ve all seen Kerry Washington in Scandal — which means we’ve all heard it. Again, that sentiment was something I got but didn’t really get until I was running the race when I actually did have to work twice as hard. Though I may be stellar and exceptional and going above and beyond, I can still be passed over or ignored or cast aside. And I have been! Y’all would not believe the lily-white mediocrity I have observed just by listening to some of the things these people have the bravery to put forth in a discussion circle. Open the schools, please. 

On top of all this, something that seems to have morphed beyond Ye Olde Token models of yore is the additional layer of commodification of DEI. Now, being Black and being in a room or just walking across the campus lawn while the Campus Marketing cameras are out grants me — and obviously my university at large — some sort of Diversity Points; being aware of that and graciously bowing to it while saying some buzzwords in front of those cameras grants me double. Being the one and only or being a representative of any given minority group is condescendingly rewarded by your agreement to do that dance for your oppressors, oftentimes with very little benefit to you and great PR for them. 

Something that I really, really detest about white supremacy and the vacuums it creates is the perceived scarcity of opportunities for the minority. I don’t like to be jealous, or territorial, or grabby, or hasty, but when you’re one out of a few with even fewer chances for recognition/power/leadership/white acknowledgement required to succeed, it becomes easier to internalize that scarcity as a mode of survival that inspires one to grab every opportunity they’ve got. And as much as that system would like me to believe otherwise, when I grind through 16 hour days with late nights and vending machine meals just to still be the only Black person in the room, that’s actually not fulfilling! Or an achievement! You’re still the only person in the room! It’s lonely, and tiring, and leaves you hollow if you don’t have community and mutual progress. 

This kind of rat race obviously breeds contempt, and burnout and individualistic isolation and all that yummy stuff capitalism usually breeds! I hate it, and it remains one of the things about being here that I try to combat the most with community, and breaks and reminding myself to take space away from those imaginary pressures when I can. 

All of this is to say I’m tired of persevering and fighting back and speaking up and staying strong and paving the way. Why should I have to do 260% of the work to have the best experience possible in my degree when my white peers can do 70% and pass with flying honors? What if I just wanted to come here to learn, and I’m now yoked with the burden of centuries of burdens of immovably white forces?

Therein lies this paradox. To take a rest from the self-commodification of being an “other” is to resign the seat at the white table that you just fought tooth and nail for, but to fight that fight and wiggle your ass into that seat, glue it there, and refuse to ever leave is soul-sucking. In performing “black excellence” through the internalized lens of white success, you also build a trap in which you lose the ability to dissent — don’t bite the hand that feeds you, and by the time you wake up to feel the slap of that hand, it's too late to say anything about it. 

I’ve experienced the most alienation, microaggressions, and downright racism in the classrooms of faculty who gave me A’s. People have handed me award certificates that said the N word in front of their classes the year before. Some of the most unprofessional and unresponsive individuals I’ve met in my time here are lauded darlings, fan favorites, and I watch them be applauded. When you become a poster child for the system that’s currently chewing you up and spitting you out, you can’t exactly extricate yourself from said system in a manner that is graceful for both you and it, because it exists to serve itself at the expense of outliers like you. 

This is the discouraging end of the road, this final idea that I can’t be here and be Black in a way that is satisfactory to the establishment I’m participating in. I know this paradox, and yet I have to activate the double consciousness required to live not knowing it — lest I go completely mad.

Same as the beginning, I keep circling back on the conclusion of this piece and reaching dissatisfaction with each lap. I keep coming back to exhaustion, which is where I sit now and where I rest my head. I don’t particularly have solutions on my mind, and I know others have studied and worked extensively to think of some, but I find myself so defeated by the snail-paced bureaucracy that academia festers and the promise it yields that any actual change will cement itself when I’m probably broke and in grad school, far away from this place. 

I don’t know what to do and I don’t exactly have wisdom to impart with a neat bow here. I just stand on the fact that I now know myself and know to protect myself through this journey. I hold myself, and I wait for spring, and I know I’m not the only one feeling this way. At least I’ll always have “The Chair” on Netflix, I guess. Thanks for listening, and thank you for being here in this Substack community. Much love <3

pinkpantheress to cleanse the feed. photo credit unknown, so sorry </3