issue twenty-four
black academia core pt 2. maya angelou is cradling me in her heavenly arms this week
Many years ago, Maya Angelou wrote this of her own high school experience:
The white kids had better vocabularies than I and, what was more appalling, less fear in the classrooms. They never hesitated to hold up their hands in response to a teacher’s question; even when they were wrong they were wrong aggressively, while I had to be certain about all my facts before I dared to call attention to myself.
Keep this in your back pocket.
As a student of the humanities (specifically the English language and its impact on culture) at a liberal arts college, I believe some standards must be met in classrooms. Critical reading and thinking are assumed precedents, not burdens or extra miles. Analysis and comprehensive complementary discussions of texts and ideas are our bread and butter. All of these things will make one a better student, a better listener, and a better functioning members of society. In theory. Or so they are asking $60,000 of us a year to believe.
I also believe, as a lifelong learner and black girl at a predominantly white institution, that it is near impossible to completely vacate one’s identity from the classroom. I do not advocate for a version of academic discussion and community that is void of personal intuitions and experiences, otherwise it would be heinously empty. We have Khan Academy for that. We must bring ourselves to the table in an irreversibly valuable way, to share ourselves, not only our ideas and thoughts.
With both of those tidbits in mind, I have noticed a disconcerting pattern regarding who in academic spaces is allowed to be messy, vulnerable, brave, honest, and just plain wrong, as Angelou observed above. The words she wrote have been painted on my lips underneath my mask in many an incredulous “what on earth did she just say” mid-Socratic-seminar, baffled at the amount of permissive comfortability that white students often exhibit.
When one brings their personal experiences and good/bad/ugly to class, it’s not inherently bad. Or unprofessional, annoying, or intrusive. As I said before, especially in regards to discussing emotionally impactful stories, it’s necessary. What sours this openness in academic community is the imbalance between what is construed as justified decorum painted over a sob story, and what is jarringly disruptive. Guess who often interjects with the former. Or the latter.
From kindergarten, black students are perceived as more rowdy, disobedient, loud and dismissive. They are fit into boxes by ill informed or maliciously ignorant educators who refuse to allow space for their beautifully specific needs and wants in regards to communication and learning. This continues into the suppression of black voices in the texts students study as well as the conversations they have with one another. Before you know it, you’re in college and nobody besides yourself in your American literature class has read a slave narrative.
Obviously there is a pervasive grace period of everyone-comes-from-something-different whining, but at this point, I really don’t care. I think that if you are a grown adult with the privilege of access to private education and a cell phone, you should be able to read the room and know when your highly personal, very white input is (1) not warranted (2) not helpful or (3) not beneficial to the conversation. Even if you have little regard for myself or people like myself, your student-participant brain should be sending off signals that maybe a discussion about the oppression of women of color is not the time to mention your lily white lament of the week. If you’re not that far along, maybe it’s time to consider the whole liberal arts/critical thinking education thing.
Not only do these interjections take time and voice away from previously silenced complaints, but they impair the value of the conversation and instruction for everyone else in the room, especially those who are being silenced. I’m paying as much for my degree as Becky next to me, yet she is receiving a comparably “better” (meaning more personally valuable and useful) classroom experience than I am when spending 20 minutes of our duly earned time speaking about personal grievances that have absolutely nothing to do with our text.
I say this at the risk of sounding “petty” or “whiny” to the above group of people, but I think this is largely because they have never faced that kind of opposition before. Frankly, nobody has ever told them their personal grievances and villain origin backstories were boring/disruptive/unnecessary/divisive/dangerous/unrelated like I have been told, and no doubt Angelou was told, telling by the above quote. Similarly, I journaled the following earlier this month:
If I’ve learned any things from being an English major so far, they are the following: white students will (1) feel emboldened and comfortable sharing vulnerable personal information and traumas in classroom spaces because those issues are always “safe” to be discussed, whereas I say the word “microaggression” or “intersectionality” and suddenly it’s 8 dead, 12 injured and the conversation is switched immediately. (2) Students such as those are emboldened by the fact that they have never been stopped or silenced ever and (3) they think that valuable comprehension of a text = being able to connect it to yourself and your life which is one of the objectively worst approaches to critical reading and English as a whole in my opinion
Sometimes I have little fits of anger when I think about these things (simple things like wanting to have a productive conversation analyzing a book for school or discussing a popular novel) that are just stained for me by the legacies of antiblackness within them, and how it manifests in almost every arena of life around me. Sometimes I want to shake people by the shoulders, begging them to let me have one beautifully black thing for myself with no self interest or absorbance on their part. I used to always think to myself, white blissful ignorance must be the the most painless thing in the world. to walk into any place listen/read/watch any thing and have no objection or abject awareness of glaring symbols and themes and causal relationships that have been occurring for centuries to convince the world that you are less than a human being. And mostly I have these fits of anger knowing that they’re really just frustration because if I had ever been truly angry in my life and didn’t have personal life rafts of faith, family and friends, I would not be able to carry on as I do. It seems hard to believe that I am expected to, sometimes. When I feel this way, I’m forced to return to truths I know and believe, and the words of Maya Angelou never hurt. I’ll leave you with this:
The Black female is assaulted in her tender years by all those common forces of nature at the same time that she is caught in the tripartite crossfire of masculine prejudice, white illogical hate and Black lack of power. The fact that the adult American Negro female emerges a formidable character is often met with amazement, distaste and even belligerence. It is seldom accepted as an inevitable outcome of the struggle won by survivors and deserves respect if not enthusiastic acceptance.