The Venn Diagram of White Privilege and Academics: How We Hate Women

The Venn Diagram of White Privilege and Academics: How We Hate Women

We hate women. And usually use whatever form of privilege we have— racial or otherwise— to avoid confronting hard truths about ourselves, our belief systems, and of course, our complicity.

In this post: Society tends to hate women, and the maddening experience of being victim-blamed, being gaslit, and having your experiences trivialized.
Next week: Dr. Caitlin Faas and I go over wtf it means to be both "embodied" and "reduce stress," and how to know your limits while staying productive.
Last week: What does it mean to unite praxis with practice as a radical academic? I answer this question through Shuttleworth fellow Chris Hartgerink's plan to Liberate Science.

When I saw Dylan Farrow in the last episode of Allen vs. Farrow this week, I was reminded yet again that women’s voices have no power. And that our tears aren’t doing us any favors. Victims are violently dismissed simply as unhinged and seeking attention. The gaslighting is so prevalent in our society, I didn’t even understand how I myself had fallen prey to it with my own whistle blowing fiasco thing until Dr. Christine Blasey Ford testified against a mediocre white man and rapist. Of course, she would be no match. And she was a white professor. 

For the past four years, I’ve been fortunate to speak and work with scholars from around the world about academic integrity, leaving academia behind, and forging something completely different. And of course, activism. I’ve also learned that the price of being a whistle blower is far too high, and that if you haven’t experienced something on that magnitude, it’s hard to grasp just how profoundly horrific the experience is.

What I discovered was a ground swell of quietly disenchanted and highly intelligent people eager for something, anything really.  The thing I have learned about this amazing intellectual community (hi, dear reader, and thank you) is that we have our work cut out for us. 

Because what we have to say is not something the status quo of academia, and especially not education writ large, wants to hear. 

It’s such a sad, white knuckled clench that so many academics use to desperately cling to the illusion that academia is a meritocracy. It kind of reminds me of how we white folk cling to our whiteness, and the notion that we earned our white privilege.

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Oh, the power of denial. Or is it refusal? When it comes to willful ignorance, academics share a lot in common with whiteness. And, white fragility (as I wrote in an earlier post “Academic Fragility and the Strength of Those Who Left”).  

Because rather than confronting horrific realities, too many academics, alongside with many white people (and what a fun Venn diagram that is) insist on psychologically refusing to accept reality. I have both done this and been a casualty of this.

This is why to discuss these things, there is a certain amount of nuance that must always be attended to. 

When I was served with a defamation and conspiracy lawsuit for my blog by an individual, not a university, whatever writing career (or sense of self) that I was cultivating got cut off at the knees, in just as violent a rupture as my exile from academia. I was in trouble for speaking truth to power, and for daring to use my writing as a means of bettering my reality. Again. 

It was devastating. Gradually, much of my newfound audience of eager collaborators and digital pen pals evaporated, along with any much-need credibility. I literally saw offers for op-eds from large publications magically pop and disappear as soon as I told editors, “sorry, I’m being sued for defamation and conspiracy.” 

At the same time, I saw my aggressor’s career in academia flourish and a critical acclaim all built on lies. In my humble opinion, of course. This is why I can only imagine the layers of pain, rage, and invalidation Dylan Farrow must have felt her entire life as celebrity after celebrity played into that white man’s PR spin extraordinaire. Talk about blaming the victim. I felt sick and nauseated as that chilling sociopathic side of Woody Allen was made clear in no uncertain terms in Allen vs. Farrow. 

As I struggled to figure out how to respond to the lawsuit, which demanded I remove my blog and in its place write that I had lied, made it up for attention, and that I retracted all my other previous statements.  I was getting online trolls demanding to see evidence of what I claimed, even though all of that information was always already publicly available. Especially with the filing of the lawsuit. All of a sudden, I was treated as a hostile witness whose testimony was not to be believed.

And the strangest part? People thought I did it for the money… of being a blogger. And there I was, getting ready to file for bankruptcy and going through a long string of unsuccessful job interviews. Many claimed I did it for the attention. Yes, I spoke out and knowingly risked getting sued because I felt strongly that what happened to me should not happen to other people. I wrote them as a warning signal to the only people I assumed would read the blog of a recently scorned sad white lady academic: my former department, naturally. I never imagined that I had accidentally stumbled into a mass failure of higher education to provide stable employment, health care, and resources to the adjunct professors who teach 75% of undergraduate classes for less than 26k a year and no benefits. But then I found it, and I kept digging, all the way to China, or, in this case secondary public education and the filthy war with charter schools and school privatization.

The reasons behind my leaving academia ultimately became my saving grace: I discovered people liked to read my non-academic writing. That I had a voice that mattered. That I offered comfort to others in the same powerless positions that I was in. And that I could use my platform to fight for something better for the future. If only to advocate that everyone should read Black futurism and Octavia Butler forever and the end.

I should have known the turn against me, and whatever I was trying to do with Post-PhD, would be multifaceted and, in many ways, justifiable. Even predictable. 

I could not get a job. I had no idea how to make meaning out of my life-- it seemed I was finally stripped of everything that I was actually good at.  I wonder(ed) if I was ever going to make it out of the hole in which I found myself. Bankrupted and jockeyed out of being able to form a career not once but twice, I realized this was the price I was paying to be a whistleblower. I knew it would be high, but I could not have possibly known the psychological horror it would trap me in.

That’s how I know that no one can even begin to understand the hell that men put Dr. Blasey Ford, Meghan Markel, and Dylan Farrow through. That I must respect my trauma and theirs, and understand that the single only thing that mattered in this conversation was empathy. Or, being treated humanely. It’s pretty simple when you look at it that way.

The maddening experience of being victim blamed, of being gaslit, and your experiences trivialized is how BIPOC feel everyday about having to deal with white people and our insistence our feelings never be hurt. It’s exhausting. It’s also counter productive.  For real, the emotional labor of BIPOC women knows no depths. White folk hear this: They’re exhausted by us. Perhaps we can begin to at least respect it by practicing empathy. By practicing being human.

With the murders of six Asian women and two others in my home state of Georgia (as always, a site of profound disillusionment with white humanity imo), the #NotAllMen bullshit in the UK, and the reality that, even when multiple women come out saying they were sexually harassed by Cuomo, that is still somehow not enough “evidence.”  I’m sorry, are they waiting for some semen on a dress to be believed?

Remember how much we hated Monica Lewinski? How we called her fat and a slut? I don’t know how she was able to make it through. Remember the last Woody Allen movie you watched? Was it before or after you knew he married his daughter and raped another one? Remember that time a highly accomplished white female professor’s words were not believed? Remember when Broke Turner got a wrist slap for rape? Remember when we were devouring tabloids of Royal Life, while Megan Markel wanted to kill herself?

We don’t just hate women, we don’t believe them either. Both women and men are culprits in this, because just as internalized racism is real, so too is internalized gender discrimination.

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