In this post: Dr. Tashima Thomas gives Unsolicited Academic Advice on trusting yourself, your methodology, and finding your tribe.
Next week: A reflection on the UCU strikes, past and upcoming content, and what the f*ck we are supposed to do with all this mess, including a list of what I'm reading.
Last week: I list sixteen PDFs on different topics including pedagogy, Why We Teach as a Practice of Freedom, Teaching to Transgress in Real Life, and the Pedagogy of Lesbian Feminism.

Post-PhD the blog/newsletter: began with a personal story whistle-blowing on academia, and it sparked this amazing years-long series of conversations with academics from all over the world as Post-PhD the blog. Now, we’re building another archive of stories from academic exiles, rejects, and other radical intellectuals.

Today’s unsolicited academic advice comes from Dr. Tashima Thomas. She shares in an interview her experience of being Black while PhD-ing, the difficulty of being (one of) the only minorities in a graduate program, and what she wishes she had known during her doctoral work.

‎Watch our interview here

This week's Unsolicited Advice comes from an interview I conducted with Dr. Tashima Thomas. She has a Ph.D. in Art History from Rutgers University with a focus of study the art of the African diaspora throughout the Americas from the 18th century to the present. 

She is also one of my oldest Ph.D. friends; we went to grad school together and in many ways, her writing, approach to research, and approach to art history has been the most inspiring for me as a writer.

Dr. Thomas went through the wringer in graduate school, and I stand as her witness to just how "accidentally" racist the rest of us grad students were to her, but How most of all, the professors were threatened by her and actively treated her as an enemy.

As Dr. Thomas continues to navigate academia while carving out a unique path for herself (both in academia and beyond through her website Papayarose), I have seen the racism she encounters on a daily basis from liberal scholars who often even write about racism. 

This is the sticking point for me when my fellow white people cannot see what is right in front of them (but that's the topic for the book and my other newsletter Not Safe For School). 

So, in honor of Black History month, and my great friend Dr. Tashima Thomas, I think everyone needs to go out and buy this book, VANGUARD: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote and Insisted on Equality for All.

The interview: 

(the abbreviated version, to see the video of our full conversation, click here)

Allison Harbin: Oh hello Dr. Thomas, why don't you start by telling us about the research that you do.

Dr. Tashima Thomas: My initial research agenda was around food pathways and the afterlives of the plantation. Ecocritical analysis of that, a large focus on race, class, gender, sexuality is very trans historical. It's very transnationalism.

A question that Dr. Thomas is often asked is how she can approach a conversation about the similarities between the 21st and 18th century, as she explains:

Dr. Thomas: Art history really comes out of the practice of enlightenment and colonialism and, you know, a dedication to Linnaeus and classification and organization, according to patriarchal hierarchies. 

Dr. Thomas describes her work as more thematic, bypassing these patriarchal hierarchies and making it easier to put things in conversation from the 18th century to the 21st century. 

Dr. Thomas: We really need to think about this and kind of, you know, shed some of those old patriarchal hierarchies of platonic thinking about, you know, space-time and, you know, it being kind of siloed. And so that really, you know, is how I arrived at a trans-historical transnational methodology.

AH: To quote Stefano Hardy the university desperately needs what she brings but cannot bear it. 

Our main academic advice question is: 

How have you navigated academia and what do you wish that you had trusted about yourself back then? 

For me, this question relates back to when I was in academia, and I didn’t trust myself at all. Looking back, I know I was right! So I wanted some practical advice for how to navigate toxic/racist people in academia. 

Dr. Thomas: I didn’t have a problem trusting myself. When I first started working on food pathways in art history, nobody was doing this kind of work. I was ridiculed and humiliated publicly for it.

Her peers and professors did not embrace her subject; instead, they humiliated her and trivialized and diminished it to the point that they did not want her working on it. This is where the trust in her writing came in.

Dr. Tashima: So I always trusted myself. Otherwise, I would have changed my dissertation topic, but I always trusted myself, and I always trusted my writing, and I realized I'm not going to write like some of the people that I wish I could write. Like, I just have to write like myself. 

Now, she sees that everyone is doing this work. Dr. Thomas' goal is to reach a more general AND academic audience, which means making her work accessible and onboarding more inclusive.

Dr. Thomas: That's what led to Papaya Rose, which is an outlet for me to speak more frankly and openly pretty. 

Dr. Thomas'  first piece of advice to students is to trust themselves. 

As the only Black student to graduate with a Ph.D. from Rutgers, there have been many times where she is the only person there that looks like her. 

Dr. Thomas: So often people of color feel unsupported and it's not in their imagination, they're discouraged. I had friends who were people of color, black people who were in graduate school at the same time as us, at different schools, Harvard, different places. Many of them left, and now they teach high school. They teach, you know, at other places. But they just could not get through those programs that really, you know, were subjected to a certain kind of psychic violence. 

AH: Dr. Thomas was constantly gaslit and undercut in her studies which never made sense to me as someone who worked closely with her and her work. Watching this as a white person made me ask myself, how can I burn this down?

Dr. Tashima: The advice that I would have for graduate students or people of color who are struggling with these kinds of issues in their department who are made to feel like the university is all about diversity, equity, inclusion. But what they see in practice every day is very different than that. I would recommend that they find a cohort of other people of color as a support system who are going through similar things.

Dr. Tashima did this herself and felt that it really helped her talk about what she was going through. 

Dr. Tashima: You know, you're not crazy, you're not imagining these things and they're going through a lot of the very same thing. So find your support system, find your tribe.

I wanted to end the interview on an optimistic Black futurist note, so I asked what a university funded by the US would look like.

Dr. Tashima: Student debt, loan forgiveness, and that alt-ac should be included in academia in terms 

Dr. Tashima: And we probably don't spend as much money on sports. We spend more on academics. 

Sounds pretty reasonable to me.

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In solidarity,

Allison