Racist Knowledge(s) & Being a Minority in Academia
Racist Knowledge(s) & Being a Minority in Academia
In this post: I recently asked my Black friend from grad school what the most enraging thing a white professor told her was. What she told me was far worse than I imagined.
Next week: What is culturally responsive pedagogy? How do you decolonize the classroom? On the importance of refined critical thinking skills.
Last week: It's too late to save education, and it has been since the 1970s. In this post, I explain why in the context of neoliberal policy and deregulation.
I recently asked my Black friend from grad school what the most enraging thing a white professor told her was. I expected a reply along the lines of “your work just isn’t rigorous enough,” a common refrain used against anyone who dares think or write differently in academia. The question arose out of an ongoing conversation we’ve had since we were grad students about what constitutes a field of knowledge, and why is that only white Eurocentric knowledge is deemed acceptable in the hallowed grounds of the ivory tower (is that why they call it an “ivory” tower?).
What she told me was far worse than I imagined. She said the most enraging feedback she received was in the form of a letter mailed via snail mail at the end of a semester from a professor who studied Pre-Columbian civilizations, that wrote (and I quote):
Talk about some toxic-ass behavior, way to go white lady professor who spent her career writing about the contributions of brown people but still clearly failed to recognize her own racism.
Can you imagine hearing that as the only minority and probably the only one in the department who hailed from a working-class background? She told me a matter of factly: “I cried for two weeks, and then I got over it.” Of course, she did, she had to. The strength of Black women really knows no bounds. For the record, she went on to not only earn her doctorate, but also a tenure track position and a book deal before she even graduated.
I knew she had had it particularly rough in grad school if only from the rumors I heard about her before I even met her-- how she was “only here” because she had a prestigious Ford Foundation fellowship (which is only given to minority applicants) and was, therefore “free” for the department to take her on as a doctoral student (oh Jesus, the connotations of that are even worse looking in writing). How “eccentric” she was. How she “wasn’t that smart” and “obviously hadn’t read Hegel.” These nasty bits of gossip around the department are also what was vaguely referenced in that “feedback” letter my friend received. All of this is toxic and all of this is racist. It’s often hard for us white folk to see, but the more we become conscious of it the better.
The message was clear: because you went to public school, and then public university, because you are Black you are not trained “rigorously” enough to be of value to academia. But I beg to differ, and I challenge all of us to re-think how we conceive of intelligence, superiority, and check our own toxic behavior by not participating in vicious rumors like this, because it hurts us all, and most of all, undercuts the very pursuit of knowledge itself. Which is why we got into this thing, right?
When I finally did meet her, I found her to be far more intelligent than the rumors from both fellow grad students and professors had implied. Not only that, I had never read work like hers-- it is so profoundly creative in how she thinks about art and culture, its history, and its social role. I still find her writing refreshing for how it expertly straddles both clarity and poetics.
Sure, she wasn’t citing Hegel, or other white scholars that she was told in no uncertain terms she had to read in order to be taken seriously. But really, who cares? What relevance did Hegel & Co have on her work on Afro-Latinx modern art? Yes yes, what about the Hegelian master-slave dialectic, I already hear the crusty academics muttering under their breath-- but isn’t it time we move past that simplistic binary construct?
When I read her writing for the first time, I was envious. I wish I could write like that, but my education shaped me differently. In contrast to my friend, I had a fairly traditional canonical education when it came to Hegel and his other white male counterparts (who people still insist represent something “universal” about the human condition). As I sought to decolonize my own brain, I read Luce Irigaray, and then Gayatri Spivak, and many more postcolonial theorists who eventually led me to Black feminist writers; Patricia Collins and Michelle Alexander were the first ones I read. I didn’t read bell hooks until after grad school because I had been told so many times how she wasn’t “rigorous” enough to cite, which when I did read her, and then another book by her, and then another, I found to be a profoundly ludicrous position if not just straight-up racist and sexist. It is also the exact same way that the professor tried to dismiss the work of my friend. I guess racists aren’t known for creativity.
It wasn’t until I read these feminist and postcolonial critiques of the Eurocentric “canon” that I fully understood: it doesn’t matter if you haven’t read Hegel. It doesn’t matter if you haven’t read Plato. Why doesn’t it matter? Because there are so many different forms of knowledge and so many lenses through which to view and understand the world.
The canonical white male philosophers represent a tiny fraction of it that for too long have been the determinant of someone’s intellectual prowess in academia. Just because some of us had to suffer through a classic European education doesn’t mean we have to keep perpetuating that violence by judging others for not having had it.
This awareness that these conceptions of “knowledge” and “intelligence” are only just constructs, or theories if you will, is liberatory. If you want to get Platonic about it, this limiting conception that you must have read every dead white male philosopher in order to be taken seriously as an academic is merely a simulacrum of a simulacrum: a false copy of a false copy of which there is no original.
If you are an academic and I’ve offended you, well, good, this post isn’t for you. It’s for all of the minority and marginalized graduate students and academics out there who have been belittled, dismissed, and gaslit because they don’t write like their white counterparts. It’s you all who are desperately needed by academia in order for it to possibly keep up and stay relevant-- you don’t need them.
So, here’s to all those who have been told they were not good enough by a teacher or professor, or peer. Fuck that, keep doing you.
As one of the great philosophers of our time, Biggie Smalls, says:
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