Finding My Patronus: Warding Off Dementors Threatening Two-Year College

by Cheryl Hogue Smith

Dementor: “a gliding, wraithlike Dark creature . . . [that] fed on human happiness

https://giphy.com/gifs/hp-patronus-spells-lVBUOl3PAlN7i

I want to say upfront that I hope this article opens a discussion about how the state of teaching in two-year colleges is, for some two-year college teachers, sucking out their teaching souls. I know because I am one of them.

Anyone who teaches in a two-year college knows that administrators, legislators, and other policymakers often believe they understand what is best for community college students, even though many have never taught them. Just today, as I write this, my own institution announced that “CUNY Ends Traditional Remedial Courses,” boasting that the “university finishes 7-year phaseout of the outdated credit bearing remedial courses” and “now offers targeted students corequisite support in first-year math and English courses.” In this article, Chancellor Félix V. Matos Rodríguez talks about “replacing the outdated remedial approach with a more effective, equitable and evidence-based system” of accelerated learning, as though no effective “evidence-based systems” previously existed for developmental education (e.g., Boylan and Boylan and Saxon). In relation to accelerated learning, however, CUNY admits that “although it is too soon to measure the impact of full implementation of corequisite courses at CUNY, early signs are promising.” Those “early signs” consist of preliminary data that show 50% of students earned math credit in 2020 compared to 36% in 2016. These data are the only “evidence-based” results CUNY provides for math and English, yet they proudly announce the effectiveness of the program.

Unsurprisingly, the above CUNY report cites the “What We Know About Developmental Education Outcomes” report from the Community College Research Center (CCRC) at Teachers College Columbia. But CUNY is not alone in its reliance on CCRC findings; two-year colleges across the nation make decisions based upon the findings of this organization that helped Redesign America’s Community Colleges, even though, after a glance at their website, only 3.7% (2 people) of their Leadership, Senior, and Research Staff have actually taught the students they are “redesigning” for. (That number is 11.3% [6 people total] if you include the three who attended some community college and the one who worked in Student Affairs of three different community colleges.) Many have never taught in any capacity, and several hold degrees in economics and/or have worked at financial institutions. But what should we expect from this community college research body whose businesslike policy and program guidance has contributed to the corporatization of two-year colleges?

As teacher-scholar-activist (and my Kingsborough colleague) Emily Schnee points out,

Neoliberal policies have resulted in a dramatic decrease in public funding for higher education; an increased reliance on tuition dollars to cover college budgets; a conceptualization of students as consumers and education as a commodity; the subjugation of faculty governance to centralized administrative decision-making; a loss of academic freedom; a diminished role for the liberal arts; and an overall restructuring of colleges and universities, in the image of corporations, to emphasize the efficient achievement of measurable outcomes.

Schnee adds that “neoliberalism is nowhere more prevalent than the 21^st century community college.” If it’s true that higher ed now functions on a business model—and all of the above points to the fact that it does—we should probably ask ourselves in what successful business are crucial decisions made by those who can only understand their customers in abstract ways since they’ve no direct knowledge of them.

Unfortunately, most of the above is nothing new for two-year college teachers. But we’re scrappy. You want to “redesign” our institutions? Fine, we’ll redesign our curriculum so students can succeed within the context of our own classes—despite however difficult the new policy or programmatic change makes it for us to do so. You want to “eliminate” developmental English? Okay, but I can’t be the only one to see that this is advertising at its finest: dual enrollment programs, stretch classes, accelerated learning programs, etc. are developmental classes. As the many discussions/presentations at conferences and TYCA white papers show, we fight to take back control from those who determine what is ”best” for our classes, and we do it both individually and collectively as we’ve taught ourselves to do—even when that fight is difficult and disheartening.

I must confess, however, that I’ve recently been wondering whether becoming a Starbuck’s barista or a Walmart greeter would be a preferable career choice to that of a two-year college English teacher. I know, instinctively, that questioning my career has to do with my students’ inability (or unwillingness) to read and write about the texts of my course, yet this is nothing new to me. In fact, in 2020, I analyzed six years’ worth of student data to understand how students several years prior seemed to have no difficulty reading a required course book, while my current students struggled (or downright refused) to read that same book. I noticed a sea change, even beyond those in my study: students in my first-year composition class very much resembled students from my developmental class from 5-7 years before. It’s difficult to ignore the timing of this sea change in relation to developmental education policies, like CUNY’s mandate to begin the “7-year phaseout of the outdated credit bearing remedial courses” to be replaced with acceleration models.

For clarity, I am not disparaging acceleration programs or disputing that developmental courses can disadvantage already disadvantaged students. We’ve understood for years that developmental education needed some kind of reform. In 2012, Mike Rose talked about strengthening basic skills instruction in order to “liberate it from the academic snobbery and bankrupt assumptions about teaching and learning that profoundly limit its effectiveness” (186). Rose knew that “changing both beliefs and practices in remedial education” through “substantial professional development” and “creating good technology and meaningfully integrating it into curriculum” were two “efforts . . . necessary to realizing this recasting of basic-skills instruction” (186-187). So even one of developmental education’s greatest advocates recognized the need for change, but he also recognized that the changes should be determined and controlled by those who understood the students who needed the instruction, not by those who simply studied statistics about those students.

It’s no secret that, even before COVID, entering students demonstrated little understanding of their responsibility in their own learning process. Their indifference towards learning was hardly surprising, however, since so many of them had spent their entire educational lives under the ineffectual educational policies of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and Common Core (Klein), resulting, perhaps, in a facile ability to take standardized tests, but with little understanding of their responsibility to negotiate meaning when reading texts—including texts of their own making. Emily Isaacs claims that, since COVID, students “have become accustomed to thinking that learning happens by showing up”; I would note that this condition describes many students in pre-pandemic years as well. Nevertheless, Isaac’s point applies more widely because, since the pandemic, an increasing number of students have demonstrated an unusually high level of disengagement (Malesic; McMurtrie), and their disengagement feels different—so much so that I would argue that our students are in the midst of a second, post-COVID sea change.

Let me explain, first, with this picture of how my video screen looks as I have been teaching my classes on Zoom over the last three semesters:

This screenshot was taken of those students who attended the class on the last day of fall 2022 (and I have changed the names of the students, but not the four icons), and since fall 2021, it’s a view of what I typically see as I teach. (Prior to fall 2021, at least several students had their cameras on in every class.) By CUNY policy, I cannot force my students to turn on their cameras, and the students know it. But I actually support the right of students to hide. For one thing, I don’t know what their living quarters look like; I don’t know if they have family members in the same room; I don’t know if they can afford WIFI or the streaming service that having a camera on will cost them; and I don’t know if they’re at or traveling to work. Over the semesters, I learned to teach by looking into my own eyes and laughing at my own jokes. (For this particular class, I taught to the upside-down Spidey.) Some days, the students made great use of the chat, but most days, it was as mute as they were, a testament, most likely, to their under-preparedness for the day’s lesson or to their more general disengagement from the class. Teaching this way felt so isolating and ineffectual and demoralizing that I could feel the dementors sucking out my soul. Every. Single. Time. Teaching was becoming as alienating for me as learning was for them.

I am not the first to discuss students’ disengagement since COVID. Beth McMurtrie describes the anxiety students now feel, not only because of COVID but because they are so removed from what school should be and look like that they choose to remain disconnected.

Jonathan Malesic implies that students are disengaged, in part, because professors during COVID relaxed standards and policies so much so that we perpetuated students’ belief that they bear no responsibility for their own learning. Thus, the result of deep and pervasive student disengagement is, not surprisingly, teacher burnout—a burnout so severe that many are leaving the profession (Camera; Dill; Flaherty; Klein and Lang; Myskow). Granted, much of the national attention on teacher burnout applies to K-12 education and the Great Resignation of teachers, where “some 300,000 public-school teachers and other staff left the field between February 2020 and May 2022” (Dill). Yet 35% of “workers” surveyed in college and university “say they ‘always’ or ‘very often’ feel burned out at work” (Camera); I imagine the two-year college numbers for teachers would be higher, especially given the pre-pandemic workload issues TYCA studied (which are now surely worse). Karen Kelsky, creator of the Facebook group “The Professor Is Out,” a group that helps professors leave academia, nicely sums up the burnout issue in higher ed: “[D]efunding, exploitation, systems of overwork, loss of faculty governance, activist right-wing boards of trustees that are interfering, activist state legislatures that are interfering, the attacks on ‘critical race theory’ . . . people working 60 to 70 hours a week for inadequate compensation. That’s the cause” (as qtd. in Myskow). In other words, a day in the life of a two-year college teacher. Yes, these are real issues, but these issues have always been a part of the fight.

What I am experiencing now, why the dementors are threatening my teaching soul, is because this post-COVID sea change students are undergoing threatens a plague on all our houses. During the pre-COVID sea change, I still felt I could help students understand that learning requires their active participation, that confusion is part of the learning process, and that questions lead to illumination. During this post-COVID sea change, however, I feel like students are in an academic version of The Matrix, not knowing a world of learning exists outside of their passive realities, not even knowing there’s a red or blue pill to choose from. And it’s this fight I don’t know how to win.

Malesic argues that the solution to students’ disengagement is in-person learning. Yet he also claims that once students “go through a year or more of remote classes . . . [they] develop habits that harm their ability to learn offline too,” like acting as though they are “still on Zoom with their cameras off, as if they had muted themselves.” Malesic’s observations echo a senior advisor for one of Kingsborough’s student programs who explained that students who are struggling in online classes are also struggling in in-person classes, just like students who are faring well in online classes are also doing well in their in-person classes. So, as far as the students are concerned, their success is not necessarily dependent upon the modality of the instruction. Instead, their success is dependent upon their attitudes towards learning and academic tasks. And therein lies the rub.

But let’s be fair. As McMurtrie says, “In addition to two years of shifting among online, hybrid, and in-person classes, many students have suffered deaths in their families, financial insecurity, or other pandemic-related trauma. That adds up to a lot of stress or exhaustion.” At Kingsborough, as at many other two-year colleges, my students are taking first-year composition in their first semester and are full-time students, while many are also working full-time or at least several hours part-time each week, typically traveling on public transportation to and from school for one-to-two hours each way when they go to campus. Many also have extensive family obligations, are food and/or housing insecure, and often deal with life circumstances that understandably interfere with or take precedence over their learning. Add to this that, in New York City (NYC) public schools, students can submit missing work on the last day of any grading period, and the teachers must accept and grade it. (And, from what I was told confidentially, they can’t give it lower than a 55.) This unwritten pre-COVID policy certainly contributed to the pre-COVID student sea change. It’s now a written Department of Education (DOE) rule since 2020 (and NYC can’t possibly stand alone here), and this policy has imprinted itself into the minds of students who believe, when they reach me, that the same policies apply. For example, in early January, a student who had disappeared from an accelerated first-year composition class in early November and had not turned in any work asked if he could submit extra credit so he could pass the class.

But policies like those of the NYC DOE might not be the only factors at play here. Schools like Kingsborough have a “15 to Finish” initiative that pushes students to take 15 credits per semester (or 15 credits within the fall A semester and fall B intersession) in order to graduate within two years. While an admirable initiative undoubtedly generated by Pathways (another national CCRC-generated movement community colleges are saddled with), it’s also an unreasonable one for many of Kingsborough’s students who also work and have family obligations. (And, as Schnee adds, “time-to-degree” programs also “reinforce and deepen long-standing educational disparities.”) How many students who participate in this initiative now have to learn to balance several full-time obligations into a single day? I can just picture my student who asked for extra credit trying to balance his life obligations and putting off the work for my class until the end, hoping I, like his DOE teachers before me, would accept all his work. Of course, I am making this scenario up in my head, but, sadly it’s not an unreasonable one, and it’s not one isolated to NYC.

The truth is that student under-preparedness and disengagement are nothing new, as the pre-COVID sea change can attest to. It’s just now more dire. Rebecca A. Glaser believes student attendance issues can be linked to “the pandemic” that “taught students that they can get most of the course content by reading the textbook or watching a recorded lecture.” I’m not sure what students she’s teaching, but most of my students have learned how not to read for my course. Since COVID, almost all of my students don’t read for class, which leaves little in-class time for analyzing texts since students barely have time to get through a first read. I know the answer to student success lies in their ability to read effectively, and I’m struggling as a teacher to help them. Most are perpetually unprepared and disengaged and are experiencing a convergence of exigencies—all of which result in a perfect academic storm.

However, I find I, too, am experiencing my own perfect storm: I struggle to keep outside forces like administrators and legislators from interfering with my classes, and I struggle to find ways to help students experience learning instead of settling for their passivity. I struggle with work-life balance because of how student disengagement affects my time. I struggle to avoid the temptation of discovering what “The Professor Is Out” has to offer. But, however much I’m tempted, I will never look. Because, even though I’m struggling, I’ll be back. I need only chant my patronus charm—which, unsurprisingly, resembles a group of students—to protect me against the dementors that haunt me.

Cheryl Hogue-Smith is a professor of English at Kingsborough Community College. She is the past chair of the Two-Year College English Association (TYCA). Her scholarship has appeared in many journals, including Teaching English in the Two-Year College (TETYC) and the Journal of Writing Program Administration.

By Cheri Lemieux Spiegel

“I never wanted to disturb the peace

But it feels like no one’s listening

Are we talking to ourselves?

Are we just talking to ourselves?”

-Rise Against (“Talking to Ourselves”)

I stood before my mirror last week in a t-shirt many in our field have donned in solidarity. Across my chest read: Feminist Fight Club, Rhet/Comp Chapter. A raised fist symbol rests between the words “fight” and “club.”

 The closed hand is a symbol I have written about before, even once on this very blog. My dissertation – a working theory of guerrilla rhetoric –considered Geoffrey Sirc’s suggestion that we add a “rhetoric of the middle finger” to Corbett’s paradigm of open hand and closed fist (a term I now read as redundant, thanks Dreyer’s English) rhetoric.

 As Asao Inoue called to boycott the Council of Writing Program Administrators he too evoked the rhetoric of the raised fist by way of his inclusion of the now-iconic image of Tommie Smith and John Carlos from the 1968 Summer Olympics.  However, Inoue also evoked a different image of the hand that I would like to meditate upon further today. Allow me to quote his passage at some length:

 So I say this next thing with my hand on my heart and my head down and with great love and compassion in my words not just for them but for those we all say we want to help in our writing classes and writing programs: I know from these kinds of experiences that unfortunately our words of support, especially from White allies, are pretty cheap. Words of support really do not protect people of color doing antiracist work unless they make commitments and are backed by actions, such as boycotting the CWPA until they change. I don’t mind the words of support, but I’d rather see actions in support. Speak with your feet and body, not just your mouth.

Inoue opens his hand, not to extend it to those in our community, but to place it upon his own heart. This gesture is one that has become commonplace in my life since COVID-19 moved a majority of daily connections into video conferencing platforms.

 As the co-founder of This Most Unbelievable Life, LLC, I’ve spent the last year with my collaborator Paul Fitzgerald facilitating meditation groups and book studies within the Zoom platform. The work in those groups often gives space for individuals to tap into deep joy as well as heartfelt sorrow. Even across the Zoom platform, those in our community often feel deeply alongside one another. In a space where the offer of a reassuring hug or a gentle hand upon another’s shoulder is not possible, we offer instead, an open hand, placed in solidarity upon our chest.

 For me, as I echo the gesture back to those who express it to me, I feel a resonance in my chest. I am made aware of my human heart. I notice what’s going on within me and I am reminded that across time and space, another human heart beats and is attempting to find resonance with me.

 With this in mind, I must ask: have you read Inoue’s words with an open hand? With a closed fist? Would you consider doing so – right now – with an open hand placed, to connect with his across time and space, upon your own beating heart?

 What might our field become if we were to take up a call for open-hearted rhetoric?

 I know many in our community felt deeply when they read Inoue’s blog. Good. Let us all get in touch with those feelings. Place your own hand, open, upon your beating heart. Do you feel anger?  Okay. That’s anger. Who among us doesn’t know anger? Do you feel deep sorrow?  Okay. Many of us know sorrow. Do you feel defensiveness? Okay. Name that. We know defensiveness. Do you feel anxiety?  Ah, anxiety. We in writing programs seem to know that one well, don’t we?

 Get in touch with your own feelings. Own those feelings. You, dear listener, are the only one responsible for your feelings. Feelings are reflections of needs met or unmet. Identify the needs in you that contribute to those feelings. Identify the strategies you currently use to meet those needs.

 And then, come back to Inoue’s request. Not with your closed fist. Not with the glad-handing, rhetorics of “polite” that help both white supremacy and misogyny to thrive. Instead, with an open heart.

 Why am I asking for you to join me in reading Inoue’s work with your hand upon your chest?  Why today?

 Well, let’s go back last week: to me standing in front of my mirror seeing a woman in a Feminist Fight Club t-shirt.

 I was preparing to go meet Mariah Salazar, a student of mine. Mariah is an English major at Northern Virginia Community College where I have taught since 2006. Although she has taken two classes with me, it was the first time we met in person because of the pandemic. And what she didn’t know at the time is that she walked alongside me as I began navigating my teaching life from an entirely new perspective. What she didn’t know is that I taught this year not from the place of the most recent hot topics in writing studies, but from my heart and from the texts and topics that originally brought me to this field. 

What I rediscovered was the social justice mission that drew me to the field and which got watered down as I grew into the prescriptive “best practices” of writing program administration. While I had once come to this field awakened by the ways that prescriptive grammar and languaging norms had corrupted my own sense of self and constricted members of my home community, I now found myself within a community that gave lip-service to our rights to our own language, while prescribing now – not how written language “ought” to be, but instead how writing programs “ought” to be.  We just shifted our desire to control, oppress, and shame to a new context. No longer the guardians of good grammar; we are now the gatekeepers of good programs.

 The very document that sparked the boycott of CWPA was The WPA Outcomes Statement. While I have not seen the Taskforce’s revision of the document, I know the current version well. Version 3.0 does not prescribe methods for achieving the outcomes. The tool was written in an attempt to be descriptive. The authors frame it this way – allow us to hear their intentions too with open hands upon our hearts:

This Statement identifies outcomes for first-year composition programs in U.S. postsecondary education. It describes the writing knowledge, practices, and attitudes that undergraduate students develop in first-year composition, which at most schools is a required general education course or sequence of courses. This Statement, therefore, attempts to both represent and regularize writing programs’ priorities for first-year composition, which often takes the form of one or more required general education courses. To this end, it is not merely a compilation or summary of what currently takes place. Rather, this Statement articulates what composition teachers nationwide have learned from practice, research, and theory. It intentionally defines only “outcomes,” or types of results, and not “standards,” or precise levels of achievement. The setting of standards to measure students’ achievement of these Outcomes has deliberately been left to local writing programs and their institutions.

 As empathetic readers, I would like us to hear the authors positioning this statement as a descriptive document, not a prescriptive one. I also hear an emphasis on regularizing over standardization. I hear an emphasis on the need for local conditions to frame how achievement is determined. In many ways, we can hear the lessons of prescriptive/descriptive grammar echoed in the careful word choices in this document.

 However, my lived experiences suggest that this document is not always used in this manner. Many of us have accepted, if not been taught, that these things reflect what “good” writing programs do. The fact is that the outcomes are prescribed even if the strategies for meeting them are not. These outcomes were not recognized or accepted readily by all members of the field. Many of us had to advocate for the adoption of these outcomes and to persuade others in our departments that these were in keeping with the best practices of the field.

 I have met many WPAs over the years who speak with shame at how the lived reality of their program does not reflect the outcomes statement. Class sizes are too big. Literature places too centrally in the program. Faculty and/or administrators do not have credentials in writing studies. Grammar plays too much of a role. Their faculty labor conditions are exploitive. They believe or have learned things about writing instruction they could never say aloud in a department meeting at home.

 As I speak with WPAs I am struck by how many must be excellent code-switchers. They must speak the language of writing studies while in our shared spaces and then go home and speak the language of their home community – one that might be driven by the ethos of neo-liberal logics or agnostic to the current trends in writing studies. I’m reminded of how, as a first-generation college student, I had to learn the language of my upper-middle-class peers and professors to speak while I was at the university and then remember not to speak like I was “too big for my britches” when I returned home.

 I experienced this same tension when I served as a departmental administrator at my community college. I was both recognized as a WPA at national conferences and told by administrators at my college that my institution could never have a WPA. I have proposed a formal writing program four times during my time at my college and I have been unsuccessful each time. I have never submitted my program for the CCCC Certificate of Excellence because the criteria are constructed to award not innovation but adherence to the conventional wisdom of what counts for excellence in writing program administration. What counts as excellence, it seems to me, is reflective of programmatic realities at R1 institutions or other highly selective or exclusive programs.

 When I got quiet, hand on chest, and asked: what is happening here? Why am I not being successful? I learned something powerful: I had, for the better part of a decade, asked my community college writing program to conform to the prescribed values of the elite, rather than coming with curiosity and compassion about the labor of my community.

 When I came to my program with curiosity, I learned it was time to step down from my place as an administrator, to pause in my attempts to build a writing program and to humbly admit the violence of my own certainty.

 I began my teaching in Fall 2020 from that place. I went into the classroom uncertain of the WPA Outcomes statement. I decided instead to place the eight habits of mind from “The Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing” at the center of my teaching. And I started having deep conversations about what it means to teach and learn at my community college, not with my writing studies community or my English colleagues, but with art professors, librarians, and my aforementioned collaborator, Paul Fitzgerald, who is a biology professor and a certified meditation teacher.

 What does all this have to do with me preparing to meet Mariah?  Well, as I looked at my Feminist Fight Club t-shirt, I thought about what kind of field I want to welcome her into. She came to college as an English major and someone who wanted to step away from an emphasis on grades and focus on authentic learning. I admire that. She is also an excellent writer and researcher. Seth Kahn, who she interviewed for her final project this spring, noted she was also an excellent interviewer. She will thrive in whatever branch of English Studies she decides to call home. Like many students who come to college as English majors, her primary exposure to English Studies from high school and before was through the lens of Literature and Creative Writing. I suspect I might have been the first person she met from writing studies. Through the course of her first-semester class, she was introduced to the writing of Paul Heilker, Jacob Babb, and Elizabeth Wardle. I did not teach a “Writing about Writing” course, but I did pull in texts from the field as I deemed them appropriate to how our conversations unfolded.

 Mariah’s final research paper for our first semester together looked at her attempt to find herself, a Latina woman, reflected in her field. She began this inquiry by looking at the literary landscape and discussing how literature written and enjoyed by young women (particularly the Twilight series) is disparaged. She explored how English is perceived as a “women’s major” despite the fact that the literary canon continues to predominately feature male writers alongside just a select number of women, a majority of whom are white. She opens this essay with these words, which I hope you’ll pause and read with hand on heart:

“To enter into the academic field of English as a woman, no less a woman of color, is to accept that you will receive contradicting criticism. In my short time experiencing this career choice I have both been told that I chose English because it is an easy woman’s major and that a career in the English field would be a waste of my intelligence and potential. But I have also been made to feel that my gender and upbringing make me less qualified than my counterparts.”

 She gave this essay the following title, which has stayed with me: “Where is her voice in her field?”

 Where indeed?

 Paul Heilker. Jacob Babb. Elizabeth Wardle.

 (White) Male writers alongside a select woman, who we might note is also white.

 In this same class, I featured a panel of writing studies scholars. I decided to put this panel together at the last minute, so it featured dear friends of mine – the kind of people who will show up for me with few questions asked, even though I often am a last-minute planner.

 So my panel, which discussed students’ rights to their own language and linguistic justice featured…

 Mark Blaauw-Hara, Darin Jensen, and Kaitlin Clinnin.

 (White) Male writers alongside a select woman, who we might note is also white.

 Where is Mariah’s voice in her field?

 Since I was first introduced to the term “anti-racist” I have struggled with how to realize an anti-racist agenda within my pedagogy. One white colleague at my institution is recognized amongst us for teaching minority voices; he does so primarily by teaching male hip-hop artists. I believe the issue begins with but does not end with, who we assign. Over the last few years, I have led a few book groups on anti-racism. I’ve been struck by the fact that I seem to only teach within majority-white communities when I am teaching about anti-racism. My classrooms are minority-majority while my English department is majority white, credentialed at majority-white institutions, I suspect by majority-white professors. I have three degrees in English and I have only twice been taught by a person of color in a university setting. I have never had a Latine teacher or professor in any subject. What I would learn upon meeting up with Mariah last week is that she has never met a Latine teacher of English. She noted that the only teachers of Hispanic or Latine descent that she’s known have all been teachers of Spanish, a subject she stopped taking in the United States school system because of the way Latin-American versions of Spanish are portrayed within standardized curricula.

 Where is her voice in her field?

 As I looked at my Feminist Fight Club shirt, I thought about experiences of sexism, mansplaining, sexual harassment that I’ve experienced in the field and navigated with dear ones in our discipline. I recalled the exchange on the WPA-L that led to the creation of that very shirt and which Michelle LaFrance has discussed in “Failure to Wake? What #WPAlistservefeministrevolution Tells Us about a ‘Feminist’ Writing Studies.” 

But why stop there? I could also recall the narratives from Kristi Cole and Holly Hassel’s Surviving Sexism in Academia: Strategies for Feminist Leadership and those in Cristyn L. Elder and Bethany Davila’s Defining, Locating and Addressing Bullying in the WPA Workplace. More recently, I could turn to Amy E. Robillard’s “From Isolated Stories to a Collective: Speaking Out About Misogyny in English Departments” which was published just days before Inoue posted his call to boycott CWPA.

 As I saw that shirt reflected back at me in the mirror, I couldn’t help but ask myself: Is this a field I want to bring Mariah into? Is this a field that I can stand tall and proud to represent? Is this a field where I know humans are treated with the care they deserve as fellow beings on this earth?

All I know is this: I didn’t wear the shirt. And we have work to do. 

When I left Asao Inoue’s plenary talk at CWPA in 2016, I did so with a strong sense that who recruited to our field, from within our first-year writing programs, would be the strongest determiner of the future inclusivity of writing studies. I went away with the charge to examine who I mentored and how I encouraged students to imagine how their voice might add to the field I loved. 

Can I, in good faith, recommend this field to the students entrusted to me?

We are trained in a rhetorical tradition that was built by patriarchy and white supremacy. Our institutions, our writing programs, and our language are all infected by the tools of these creations. It is with love and great respect for all who built our field that I say: it is time to let the old ways die. The organizations, publications, and disciplines we have built and served will never love us back. Fields do not deserve our love, but humans do.

Lakoff and Johnson pointed out some time ago that our language is deeply steeped in metaphors of war. Indeed, my own dissertation research explored the ways that guerrilla warfare principles might be removed from the battlefield and used as a foundation for theorizing about how disenfranchised groups might use guerrilla communication tactics to address the needs of their communities. The field of writing studies has long approached communication from a place of assumed antagonism – where there are causes to fight for and wars to wage. What if, dear friends, everything isn’t an argument?

The prevalence of war and conflict-oriented lenses reminds me of Mary Rose O’Reilley’s inquiry from 1993: “is it possible to teach English so that people stop killing each other?” Lest we forget, O’Reilley first heard that question when it was posed to her in a teaching workshop in 1967. War and violence are pervasive and persistent in human history. Although we might claim to believe they are the last resort – strategies to be taken when civil communication falls short – inside our classrooms and disciplinary discourse, these metaphors drive discussion and often our ways of relating to ourselves, to one another, and to our craft itself. 

Although not specific to writing studies, in Big Magic, Elizabeth Gilbert speaks to the violence that I suspect many of us have grown accustomed to accepting as normal in the writing life, for example: “[our] relationship with [our] work is often emotionally violent. You want to make something? You are told to open up a vein and bleed. Time to edit your work? You are instructed to kill your darlings. Ask a writer how [their] book is going, and [they] might say, ‘I finally broke its spine last week.’ And that’s if [they] had a good week.” Can we language without violence? Can we language about languaging without violence?

We in writing studies have not only failed to fully answer O’Reilley’s call for the peaceable classroom, but we have also failed to build a peaceable discipline. We also contribute to the problem through our behavior with one another. What would a field (re)built on the priority of community good, equity, and inclusion really look like? 

I’ll admit, I do not know exactly. However, to return to my moment of reflection from before the mirror, for me it begins with quitting fight club. I feel called to step away from metaphors of violence. I feel this calling not because I am no longer angry. I’m mad as hell. I feel anger coursing through me on most days. I do not anticipate it will leave me soon. And I am okay with that. My anger is instructive.

However, I often regret allowing my anger to drive me toward mere reaction, rather than responsive action. When I notice anger and allow myself to pause and enter a period of reflection, I often see both myself and my context anew. Anger points to needs unmet, but it takes time to learn and strategize about how one might have their needs met without infringing upon the needs of others. I believe this is the greatest need within our field today: we need processes that allow us to understand and articulate personal and professional needs. We need those processes to not prescribe rigid strategies that attend only to the needs of the most privileged in our midst. We might do well also to carefully and honestly examine our tendencies to lead with judgment and evaluation. How often do we comment on the strategies those in our midst use to articulate their needs, rather than openly doing our part to hear the very human needs that drive the strategies we observe?

Reaction, defensiveness, judgment, and evaluation have been my ways of navigating the world for quite some time. In some contexts, they were nothing less than survival skills. Now, I am beginning to discover and explore an alternative way of being in the world through language. I have recently begun, as the recipient of the Loser-Savkar Fellowship, a formal study of the teachings of Nonviolent Communication (NVC), the principles of O’Reilley, and peacebuilding theory more generally. 

One thing that has struck me as I have begun this pursuit is that teachers of NVC are clear that there are times when individuals must abandon the principles of NVC: when circumstances truly are matter of life and death. If someone’s safety is truly called into question, survival must be the focus. Please hear me, friends: people are dying. Human life is being lost in service of patriarchy, white supremacy, heteronormativity, and insular constructions of gender.

With hand-to-heart, take a look around you. In this moment, are you safe? Is your life, in this moment, in jeopardy? If you are not safe, please, make that your priority. Your safety and survival are of utmost importance. However, if you, in this moment, are safe – however you personally define that – then you have been given the privilege to listen and learn from your fellow humans on this earth. Those who speak out in ways you might diagnosis as aggressive, rude, dismissive, unseemly or otherwise other, are articulating needs. What are those human needs? Can you hear the unmet need in the voices you dismiss or diagnose as problematic? Can you hear the unmet need in you that calls you to dismiss and diagnose those you encounter?

What will it cost us to listen to our needs first and then to authentically seek connection with one another? I am willing to own my privilege and imperfection and allow the latter rather than the former to be my teacher. I am prepared to examine my syllabi, course materials, and participation within and beyond the field with an openness to better understanding how violence manifests within me and the way I navigate language. I hope to use Nonviolent Communication principles to re-see my teaching, my way of being within my institution, and my place in writing studies writ large.

With hand to heart, I ask: will you join me?

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Mariah Salazar for her willingness to read and offer comment on this piece as it emerged. I would also like to thank Kaitlin Clinnin, Mark Blaauw-Hara, and Darin Jensen for helping me, time after time, find my own voice in my field.

Cheri’s Bio

Cheri Lemieux Spiegel is Professor of English at Northern Virginia Community College’s Annandale Campus and the 2021-2022 recipient of the Loser-Savkar Fellowship. During her time at the college, she has held multiple leadership roles including Technology Application Center Faculty Mentor, Campus-Lead for Achieving the Dream, and Assistant Dean of Composition. However, her first love, as someone who may forever identify first as a teacher, will always be the classroom. Her doctoral research proposed and revised a theory of guerrilla rhetoric that was based upon the premise that guerrilla practice might be removed from the battlefield and used in the operations of nonviolent groups who struggle against the limitations of their conditions. Her degrees and her position at the college continue to enrich her life-long fascination with language, the power of words, and the way communication informs how we come to this shared existence we call life.  She is a former member of the Council of Writing Program Administrators Executive Board, the advisory board for the Coalition of Feminist Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition, and the advisory board for WPA: Writing Program Administration. She was guest co-editor of a special issue of the journal (Summer 2020) focused on two-year college writing programs. Her work has appeared in Teaching English in the Two-Year College, Computers and Composition Online, and Basic Writing eJournal. In addition to her academic life, Spiegel is co-founder of This Most Unbelievable Life, LLC and co-host of the This Most Unbelievable Life Podcast. 

 

by Helena Worthen and Joe Berry

It’s January 20, and Joe Berry and I are forty days away from our March 1, 2021 book deadline. Nevertheless, we turned on the TV to watch Joe Biden make his speech from the Capitol steps where only two weeks ago there were white supremacist rioters shoving each other around and posing for selfies. Enough said. Then it’s back to work.

 

The work at hand is as follows: bibliography, footnotes, acronyms, list of essential terms, make sure the last chapter says what it needs to say. Then re-write the introduction to accommodate the fact that since we sent our proposal in to Pluto, hoping to get into the Wildcat series, nearly a year has passed. During that year the coronavirus has gone world-wide jamming up schedules and turning education into an internet wonderland. Remember when people were talking about the end of “brick and mortar” colleges and universities as if that was the distant future? How our institutions of higher education will re-constitute themselves when things return to normal (whatever that means) will depend, as always, on who has the power at the moment. It’s time to ask the Freirean questions: For whom, by whom, and for what purpose? What is higher education for, really? And what do we, people who work in it, need in order to do our jobs right?

 

Back to the work. I haven’t mentioned the title, because that will probably come last. Right now we are vacillating between at least two. One simply tells what the book is about: The Contingent Faculty Movement Today: History, Strategy, and Troublesome Questions. That’s a pretty good one, actually. The words “troublesome questions” refer to questions that always come up in the process of organizing, whether it’s a new union just forming or one long established. We have questions like “Is this legal?” and “Who are our friends and who are our enemies? And “What about union politics?”  We respond to these at length, avoiding giving answers but laying out the range of ways these concerns can “trouble” a group of activists.

 

The second option, which was the original title, is A Fifth Transition: A Strategy for the Contingent Faculty Movement Today.  This reflects the fact that we’re doing not just best organizing practices but also the history of the contingent faculty movement going back to the 1970s. We then step back to a bigger time scale and place the last 40-50 years in the context of how the whole higher education industry has gone through transitions as it adapts to the needs of the dominant powers of society.  Examples are the period of standardization in the early 1900s, the explosion of enrollments under the GI bill after World War II, the creation of the multicultural curriculum and fields of ethnic studies after the student “disturbances” of the 1960s and 1970s, and then the transition that leads us into the present, the neo-liberal contraction of budget cuts, layoffs, the rise of the for-profit institutions and above all, casualization of the faculty – in other words, us.

 

This big-scale history section, although it’s the one that seems to be the flashiest concept to talk about,  is only one of the five parts of the book. We take a much closer look at our history – that is, the history of contingent faculty employment in higher education – by devoting four chapters to the story of organizing among Lecturers in the California State University system. In fact, that’s how the idea for the book got started. Joe has been appearing at contingent faculty conferences and other higher ed events for at least 20 years now, especially since the publication of his book Reclaiming the Ivory Tower:  Organizing Adjuncts to Change Higher Education (Monthly Review, 2005), and at one of these events someone always asks, “What is the best contract for contingents in the US?”  He answers by telling them about what’s in the California Faculty Association contract with the CSUs, which is a giant system of 23 campuses and about 27,000 faculty, of whom over 70% are contingents (called Lecturers).  So the next question always is, “How did they get it?”  That’s what those four chapters are about, and without trying to tell the whole story here I can say that it started back in the 1970s and has taken place on legislative, bargaining, electoral, and internal organizing terrains. The breakthrough came when the lead activists realized – really got it – that they had to view themselves as workers just like any other workers, not as white-collar-privileged “professionals,” and adopt direct action tactics, publicly advocate for and identify with their overwhelmingly working-class students, and prepare themselves for a real strike.

 

There are other stories I can tell about what it’s been like to write this book, but I’ll limit myself to this: its first stirrings came about when Joe Berry was sitting out in the back garden with his long-time friend, John Hess, who was an organizer among Lecturers in the CSU system and had recently retired, only to get a diagnosis of Parkinson’s. Their conversations revolved around shared experiences organizing and leading contingent faculty and in the labor movement generally. Of course, one of them said, “We should write a book.”

That was ten years ago. John has since died; I took over his role as co-author. My relationship to getting things written – articles, books, whatever – is different from Joe’s. Joe is a historian; he can dwell in the archives for weeks, slowly accruing a grasp of what actually happened and building the big picture. I’m the one who says, “I’ll meet you at ten am at the kitchen table and we’ll finish the footnotes.”  We have some funny stories about this part of our relationship; our book about unemployment benefits for contingents, published by the Chicago COCAL and co-authored with Beverly Stewart, came about when I realized that he was on the phone with the State of Illinois person who administered the law, to whom he was explaining the intent behind the language “reasonable assurance of re-employment.”  We wrote that little book in order to be able to hand over something for a person to read, instead of Joe being on the phone all the time trying to explain it.

That’s part of the motivation behind this book, whatever it’s called: putting it all in one place, with bibliography and explanatory footnotes. Our hope is that if we get it in by March 1, Pluto will get it out while the re-constitution of higher ed is still fluid enough to be shaped by the power from below, from the people who really do the work and know what is needed in order to do it right.

 

Helena Worthen is a novelist, teacher, editor, and contingent faculty activist. She is the author of the prize-winning 2014 book, What Did You Learn at Work Today? from Hardball Press, Brooklyn. She retired from the University of Illinois Labor Education Program in 2010, where she was Director of the Polk Women’s Labor Conferences.

 

Joe Berry worked as contingent faculty and labor educator for thirty years and was active in all three major faculty unions. He is the author of Reclaiming the Ivory Tower, from Monthly Review (2005).  He edits COCAL Updates for the Coalition of Academic Labor, where he serves on the International Advisory Committee and also on the Board of New Faculty Majority.

We are over eight months into the global pandemic, and nothing is any more certain. The phrase “uncertain times” has become tired and cliche; yet, there are few words that capture the fear, doubt, anxiety, and restlessness of this time. All across America, teachers of all levels juggle remote, hybrid, “hy-flex”, or risky in-person teaching while also providing emotional support to their students, colleagues, families, and communities. In the wake of unanticipated expenses and budget shortfalls that have been largely ignored by federal and state governments and under the banners of austerity and retrenchment, university boards and upper administrators are laying off and furloughing campus workers in unprecedented numbers–from facilities workers, to staff, to faculty members of all ranks, to student workers. Meanwhile, politicians and groups like Campus Reform have weaponized universities’ COVID-19 responses and organized attacks on faculty members for their activism, research, and pedagogies (see for example the attacks on Scholar Strike participants at Texas A&M and the University of Mississippi). As these groups try to control university administrations and launch personal attacks against individual faculty on Facebook and Twitter, COVID-19 cases continue to spike on college campuses where football games, bars, and social events drive numbers up. States and counties with varying mask mandates (or none at all) continue to see numbers rise as we enter the fall. Recent data points not only to another surge in the virus but to record breaking death and hospitalization rates. Against this backdrop, what many are calling “the most decisive election in a generation” looms on November 3.

 

When we created the blog series “A Year of Activism: Perspectives on the 2020 U.S. Elections,” we had intended to use the series as a space where writing, rhetoric, and literacy studies scholars of all ranks and from various institutional types could address issues related to the elections and their teaching, research, and service. On one hand, we saw the series as an extension of both Spark and Teacher-Scholar-Activist. The series maintains our foci on activism but also initiates immediate and ongoing conversations related to one topic: the elections. On the other hand, we saw the series as an activist intervention. We had hoped that the blogs in the series would contribute, if even in some small way, to shaping the outcome of the elections. In terms of reader response, the series has been a success. Thousands of folks have read blog posts from the series and shared them on social media and in classrooms. In terms of recruiting contributors and maintaining regular contributions, the series increasingly became challenging and fraught with complexities amid the pandemic: How could we ask people to take on more work under these ever-shifting conditions? We feel the uncertainty and strain. We feel the pull to organize in defense of colleagues, against retrenchment and austerity measures, and to get out the vote on our campuses and in our communities in order to steer the U.S. toward greater democracy. We also feel the need to keep our loved ones close and to devote time and attention to our own economic, health, psychological, and emotional needs.

At the same time, we feel our attention shifting from making arguments about the Trump administration and ensuring that America’s democratic process, such as it is, actually delivers despite decades of concerted effort to disenfranchise millions of Americans through various means and in light of renewed efforts across the country to suppress votes. Most recently, well-reported efforts to suppress the vote include how, in mid-October, the California Republican Party placed more than 50 fake ballot boxes around the state in order to steal and destroy early-voting ballots; an October 19th letter from the owner of a mobile home park in Fort Morgan, CO, who threatened to raise tenants rents if Biden won the election; a ballot box in California was set aflame in an attempt of suspected arson; and the October 30 attack by Trump supporters on a Biden/Harris campaign tour bus heading from San Antonio to an event in Pflugerville, TX. But, social media is full of videos, photos, and written accounts of people making their way to polls being harassed by Trump supporters who stand near or circle around polling stations and shout threatening messages. These extra-legal and illegal efforts to suppress voters supplement Trump and the Republican Party’s attempts to steal the election through various means: from gutting the U.S. Postal Service in order to ensure that many mail-in ballots miss the deadline, to trying to throw out thousands upon thousands of votes, to spreading lies that votes counted after election night will not count in election totals. Trump and the Republican Party have myriad tactics at their disposal, and they are using all of them. However, all these tactics may pale in comparison to their success in filling the Supreme Court with underqualified figures–hacks who could play a decisive role in the election itself.

 

This post serves as a coda to the series as a reconnoitering; it reflects that shift from figuring out who to support in opposition to Trump and what issues we need to focus our attention and efforts on to focusing on not letting Trump and his white supremacist coterie steal the election. Whatever the outcome after November 3 ( once all ballots cast get counted), there is still much work to be done to move struggles for social justice forward. Spark’s mission, whether in this series or in the journal, has always been about calling attention to this work. In reconnoitering, we take this moment to draw attention to the thoughtful posts that contributors wrote for this series:

• December 2019, “Perspectives on the 2020 U.S. Elections” Holly Hassel reflects on the impeachment of Donald Trump and considers How we as teacher-scholar-activists can respond, survive, and fight back

• January 2020, “White Supremacy, Anti-Racism, and the U.S. Presidency” James Chase Sanchez addresses the need for anti-racist strategies to come to the fore in the upcoming presidential election

• February 2020, “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of Online Targeting for Activism” Michael Trice implores us to move away from online targeting as a form of activism related to the elections, and he discusses the relationships among identity, online presence, social media activism, and local activism

• March 2020, “A Note about Our Year of Activism Posts and Coronavirus”, Teacher-Scholar-Activist and Spark editorial collective members make a statement about the context of the pandemic in academic institutions across the country

• May 2020, “Rejecting the ‘Comfort in Being Sad’: Relocating Agency within the Stakes of 2020” Anthony Warnke and Kirsten Higgins discuss how the COVID-19 outbreak ups the stakes in the 2020 US presidential election, and they call for other teacher-scholar-activists to “reject the comfort of being sad” in favor of taking action around and through this election

• June 2020, “The Use of Just Imagination: A Call to Action” Natasha N. Jones and Miriam F. Williams describe how Black people have used their imaginations in order to fight injustice and survive in America

• June 2020, “Standing Against Anti-Black Racism Within and Beyond the Academy: Amplifying Strategies for Action”, members of the Spark Editorial Collective amplify voices from various organizations in writing, rhetoric, and literacy studies in an attempt to move toward building an anti-racist coalition across these fields

• July 2020, “Do White People Hate Us?” Kimberly C. Harper raises questions about the recent commitments that many white academics are making to antiracist practices and how these commitments will transform white academics’ behavior

• September 2020, “New Faculty Orientations:Queerly Useful Stories Among COVID-19, Black Lives Matter, and the 2020 Election” Gavin P. Johnson discusses experiences starting a new faculty position in the present moment and how storying one’s positionality help create spaces where he can reflect, plan, and take action

 

We also point toward the future and urge you to check out Spark’s Volume III call for papers. Edited by Jaquetta Shade Johnson and Phil Bratta, the call deals with the role that coalitions play in advancing activism. We also encourage you to contact Teacher-Scholar-Activist’s editors and contribute to the ongoing blog. Overall, we must continue the difficult work of organizing in our communities. A day, a week, a month from now, our world will look different, and as teacher-scholar-activists, we need to be ready.

In solidarity and action,

Don Unger and Liz Lane

Co-managing editors, Spark: a 4C4Equality Journal

 

October 10, 2020

Dear Judge Barrett,

We write to you as fellow faculty members at the University of Notre Dame.

We congratulate you on your nomination to the United States Supreme Court. An appointment to the Court is the crowning achievement of a legal career and speaks to the commitments you have made throughout your life. And while we are not pundits, from what we read your confirmation is all but assured.

That is why it is vital that you issue a public statement calling for a halt to your nomination process until after the November presidential election.

We ask that you take this unprecedented step for three reasons.

First, voting for the next president is already underway. According to the United States Election Project (https://electproject.github.io/Early-Vote-2020G/index.html), more than seven million people have already cast their ballots, and millions more are likely to vote before election day. The rushed nature of your nomination process, which you certainly recognize as an exercise in raw power politics, may effectively deprive the American people of a voice in selecting the next Supreme Court justice. You are not, of course, responsible for the anti-democratic machinations driving your nomination. Nor are you complicit in the Republican hypocrisy of fast-tracking your nomination weeks before a presidential election when many of the same senators refused to grant Merrick Garland so much as a hearing a full year before the last election. However, you can refuse to be party to such maneuvers. We ask that you honor the democratic process and insist the hearings be put on hold until after the voters have made their choice. Following the election, your nomination would proceed, or not, in accordance with the wishes of the winning candidate. 

Next, the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s dying wish was that her seat on the court remain open until a new president was installed. At your nomination ceremony at the White House, you praised Justice Ginsburg as “a woman of enormous talent and consequence, whose life of public service serves as an example to us all.” Your nomination just days after Ginsburg’s death was unseemly and a repudiation of her legacy. Given your admiration for Justice Ginsburg, we ask that you repair the injury to her memory by calling for a pause in the nomination until the next president is seated.

Finally, your nomination comes at a treacherous moment in the United States. Our politics are consumed by polarization, mistrust, and fevered conspiracy theories. Our country is shaken by pandemic and economic suffering. There is violence in the streets of American cities. The politics of your nomination, as you surely understand, will further inflame our civic wounds, undermine confidence in the court, and deepen the divide among ordinary citizens, especially if you are seated by a Republican Senate weeks before the election of a Democratic president and congress. You have the opportunity to offer an alternative to all that by demanding that your nomination be suspended until after the election. We implore you to take that step.

We’re asking a lot, we know. Should Vice-President Biden be elected, your seat on the court will almost certainly be lost. That would be painful, surely. Yet there is much to be gained in risking your seat. You would earn the respect of fair-minded people everywhere. You would provide a model of civic selflessness. And you might well inspire Americans of different beliefs toward a renewed commitment to the common good.

We wish you well and trust you will make the right decision for our nation.

Yours in Notre Dame,

John Duffy, English  

Douglass Cassel, Emeritus, Law School

Barbara J, Fick, Emerita, Law School

Fernand N. Dutile, Professor of Law Emeritus

Joseph Bauer, Emeritus, Law School

Jimmy Gurulé, Professor of Law.  

Thomas Kselman, Emeritus, History

Catherine E. Bolten, Anthropology and Peace Studies

Karen Graubart, History and Gender Studies

Margaret Dobrowolska, Physics

Aedín Clements, Hesburgh Libraries

Cheri Smith, Hesburgh Libraries

Antonio Delgado, Physics

Atalia Omer, Peace Studies

Eileen Hunt Botting, Political Science

Jason A. Springs, Peace Studies

David Hachen, Sociology

Manoel Couder, Physics

Jacek Furdyna, Physics

Carmen Helena Tellez, Music

Kristin Shrader-Frechette, Biological Sciences, Philosophy

John T. Fitzgerald, Theology

Debra Javeline, Political Science 

Philippe Collon, Physics

Cara Ocobock, Anthropology

Amy Mulligan, Irish, Medieval Studies and Gender Studies

Stephen M. Fallon, Program of Liberal Studies and Dept of English

Jessica Shumake, University Writing Program and Gender Studies

Mandy L. Havert, Hesburgh Libraries

Dana Villa, Political Science

Stephen M. Hayes, Emeritus, Hesburgh Libraries

Catherine Perry, Emerita, Romance Languages & Literatures

Olivier Morel, Film, Television, and Theatre.

Darlene Catello, Music

Encarnación Juárez-Almendros, Emerita, Romance Languages & Literatures

James Sterba, Philosophy

Laura Bayard, Emerita, Hesburgh Libraries

Susan Sheridan, Anthropology

Mary E. Frandsen, Music

Mark Golitko, Anthropology

Christopher Ball, Anthropology

Gail Bederman, History

G. Margaret Porter, Emerita, Hesburgh Libraries

Cecilia Lucero, Center for University Advising

Peri E. Arnold, Emeritus, Political Science

Amitava Krishna Dutt, Political Science

Julia Marvin, Program of Liberal Studies

Julia Adeney Thomas, History

Michael C. Brownstein, East Asian Languages & Cultures

Christopher Liebtag Miller, Medieval Institute

Maxwell Johnson, Theology

John Sitter, Emeritus, English

Robert Norton, German

Hye-jin Juhn, Hesburgh Libraries

Denise M. Della Rossa, German

Sotirios A. Barber, Political Science

Pamela Robertson Wojcik, Film, TV and Theatre

Jeff Diller, Mathematics

Ann Mische, Sociology and Peace Studies

Zygmunt Baranski, Romance Languages & Literatures

Robert R. Coleman, Emeritus, Art History

William Collins Donahue, German, FTT, & Keough

Sarah McKibben, Irish Language and Literature

George A. Lopez, emeritus, Kroc Institute

Mark Roche, German

Nelson Mark, Economics

Vittorio Hosle, German, Philosophy and Political Science

Tobias Boes, German 

A. Nilesh Fernando, Economics

Fred Dallmayr, Emeritus, Philosophy and Political Science

Greg Kucich, English

Kate Marshall, English

Mark A. Sanders, English

Christopher Hamlin, History

Meredith S. Chesson, Anthropology

Ricardo Ramirez, Political Science

Stephen Fredman, Emeritus, English

Dan Graff, History and the Higgins Labor Program

Henry Weinfield, Program of Liberal Studies (Emeritus)

Mary R. D’Angelo, Theology (Emerita)

Asher Kaufman, Kroc Institute, History

Stephen J. Miller, Music

Janet A. Kourany, Philosophy and Gender Studies

Michelle Karnes, English

Jill Godmilow, Emerita, Film, Television & Theatre

Mary Beckman, Emerita, Center for Social Concerns

Clark Power, Program of Liberal Studies

Richard Williams, Sociology

Benedict Giamo, Emeritus, American Studies

Ernesto Verdeja, Political Science and Peace Studies 

Catherine Schlegel, Classics

Margaret A. Doody, English, Professor Emerita 

Marie Collins Donahue, Eck Institute of Global Health

 David C. Leege, Emeritus, Political Science

This month’s post, the eighth in Teacher-Scholar-Activist and Spark’s 12-part series “A Year of Activism: Perspectives on the 2020 U.S. Elections,” comes from Gavin P. Johnson (Christian Brothers University). In the post, Dr. Johnson discusses his experiences starting a new faculty position in the present moment and how storying one’s positionality help create spaces where he can reflect, plan, and take action.

In the remaining months leading up to the U.S. elections, this series will feature critical perspectives on those elections, issues related to them, and thoughts about how scholar-activists (teachers and students) can intervene. We encourage readers to share these posts and to discuss the ideas with people in your communities, classrooms, and workplaces.

Liz Lane & Don Unger, Managing Editors—Spark

Darin Jensen, Editor—Teacher, Scholar, Activist

New Faculty Orientations:
Queerly Useful Stories Among COVID-19, Black Lives Matter, and the 2020 Election

By Gavin P. Johnson

I’m one of the privileged few hired into a faculty position this year. This is not a #humblebrag but rather an acknowledgment…a positioning…an orienting. Among austerity cuts that are still raging over a decade after the 2008 recession, the global COVID-19 pandemic, increasingly visible racist violence on and off university campuses, and a looming election that pits neoliberal democracy against neo-fascism, those of us who are lucky enough to be new faculty need to reflect on our current positionality and what led us here. In their recent College Composition and Communication article, “Relating Our Experiences: The Practice of Positionality Stories in Student-Centered Pedagogy,” Christina V. Cedillo and Phil Bratta (2019) argue that storying our lived experiences helps students in our courses “to consider academic counternarratives that contest educational conditions and assumptions” (p. 215). Here, I want to extend Cedillo and Bratta’s point and insist that storying my positionality as a newly minted PhD and incoming faculty constellates “a network of potential resources from which [we] may draw as [we] see fit” (p. 216). Below, I share stories illustrating my current positionality so that we—you and I—might think through the different issues that influence much of my current thinking and preparation for this brave new semester.

Storying our experiences, in many ways, illustrates the paths that led us to our current positions. “In following leads,” Sara Ahmed (2019) explains, “we can value how we arrive somewhere” (p. 7). Furthermore, by acknowledging our embodied experiences, we can make useful those experiences without reifying the usual. Making useful our experiences through storying, as Cedillo and Bratta suggest and as I do below, queers the narratives of utilitarian efficiency we accept in our lives as teachers and scholars: “To queer use can be to linger on the material qualities of that which you are supposed to pass over; it is to recover a potential from materials that have been left behind” (Ahmed 2019, p. 208). Using stories when orienting our classes, research, and service can be something queerly useful in these “unprecedented times.”

As your accomplice in calling for a more socially just world, I share these stories and this space so that we might generate tactical strategies [1] for surviving as new faculty but also as people trying our damnedest to thrive in a world that often pushes us to the edge. However, as a white cis-man with a terminal humanities degree and a tenure-track faculty position, I hold very visible, material privileges. Those privileges are also shaped by my queerness and status as a first-generation college graduate from a working-poor southern family. The stories I carry are mine, and, because of my privileges, the tactical strategies I suggest may not be appropriate for you. Nonetheless, I hope you find these stories queerly useful.

***

April 20, 2020. Dissertation defense. The Zoom call was scheduled for 2:00 pm EST. By 4:00 pm EST, one way or another, the outcome of my graduate school experience—7 years in the making—would be decided. A few weeks before, when I was forced to concede that my defense would be virtual, my chair and I planned for us to meet either in his office or his home to co-host the Zoomed defense. But within those weeks, the plan had become impossible: COVID-19 cases rose higher, social distance mandates were issued, and a pseudo-quarantine was put in place. For our health and peace of mind, we decided that he’d Zoom from his house, and I’d Zoom from my apartment. My chair has a grounding energy that I had benefited from throughout my entire PhD process—recruitment, annual benchmark meetings, comprehensive exams, a prospectus defense, but now I’d be alone in my apartment separated from my committee by screens and the miles in between. I woke up the morning of the defense with the worst brain fog I’d had in months, and it did not clear by 2:00 pm. I stumbled through my defense, misunderstood questions, and had trouble articulating the project I had spent two years composing. When I temporarily left the call for my committee to deliberate, I broke into tears.

As we continue to adjust to our increasing virtual world—the one we thought we wanted until it was thrust upon us by COVID-19 and the incompetence of our political leaders—we will continue to feel the lack of face-to-face socialization, the grounding energy of mentors and friends, and the moments of joy that come from sitting around a table simply being with others. But, as Lorde (Yelich-O’Connor and Little, 2013) sings, it’s not enough to feel the lack. How, then, can we find something queerly useful here to create new ways to hold space together?

***

June 19, 2020. Juneteenth. I was at the pharmacy closest to my apartment. It’s a large chain pharmacy in mid-town Memphis, which is a primarily white neighborhood in a primarily Black, historic southern city. Even in this primarily white neighborhood, I see more Black and brown faces in this place than I did in most places in Columbus, Ohio, where I completed my PhD. As I sit in the waiting area of the pharmacy, an elderly Black man—he announces he is 87 years old—sits next to me. I say hello, and he returns the greeting. I assume we both smile, but our faces are covered by masks. As we sat there, he leaned over and whispered to me, the only white person in the sitting area, “You know they tell me ‘Black Lives Matter,’ but I tell ‘em ‘All Lives Matter.’” My stomach turned, and I didn’t know how to respond. Why did he feel like he needed to tell me this? What was my white body communicating to this man? The pharmacy technician called my name, and I quickly got up, told the man to have a nice day, and walked up to the counter. He responded, “Oh, you too, mister.”

This experience, ephemeral as it was, sticks to me. I’ve spent the weeks since thinking deeply about this old man, the life he may or may not live, the city that we both call home, and the students who will log in to my classes and see my white body. How might this story impact my relationships with the Black and brown students? How might I use this story when crafting lessons for discussing race and the complex ways it is felt on our different bodies?

***

July 19, 2020. A New Career in a New Town. I moved to Memphis, Tennessee, just over a month ago to join the faculty at Christian Brothers University (CBU). Coming from Ohio State University, one of the largest research universities in the country, to CBU, a small liberal arts Lasallian university, I anticipate many changes in the coming semester. First off, I’m no longer a graduate student. I’m now tenure-track faculty member teaching a full 4-4 course load. In the fall, I will be teaching two first-year writing courses, a course in professional communications, and a special topics course in cultural rhetorics. I have experience teaching writing courses and cultural rhetorics. My mentors and new colleagues note that having experience in three out of four courses will make my prep much easier. But it’s now less than a month out from the semester, and I have yet to put any words to paper for these syllabi. Part of this is my trademarked procrastination. Part of this is me quietly taking a stand and refusing to work until my contract begins in mid-August. Part of this is my unease planning courses at a new institution where I’ve had very limited engagement with the student population. Part of this is that we still don’t know exactly how this semester will be delivered considering the still-rising cases of COVID-19 across the US.

In what ways are we, even under these “unprecedented” circumstances, still expected to perform efficiently? Many teachers, new and returning, must not only balance their job duties with empathy but also reevaluate how to do so under circumstances that seem to change with every new email. How might we find this chaos useful when re-imagining our pedagogies?

***

August 14, 2020. New Faculty Orientation. I’m not a morning person, and an 8:30 am virtual new faculty orientation sounded like the worst of all possibilities. CBU is a small school, and I realized just how small when our new faculty orientation was a Zoom call between the Vice President of Academics and Student Life and the 15 new hires (university-wide). As far as orientations go, this was relatively painless and even had a few light-hearted moments. But, the shadow of difficulties could not be denied. We were coming into a university trying to keep pace with its better-funded neighbors to respond to a pandemic in a volatile election year. Memphis, Tennessee, is historically important in the racial histories of the United States. Home to the National Civil Rights Museum, which is situated within the Lorraine Motel where Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was fatally shot and a few blocks away from the “I Am A Man” protest memorial, Memphis is a rarity in terms of major cities. The population is “majority minority” with over 60% of residents identifying as Black and/or African American. CBU, on its website, boasts a student body that is “40% minority, 7% international” and that “97% of full-time undergraduate students receive some financial aid.” In contrast, Ohio State enrolls “22.4% minorities.” I cannot find CBU’s faculty breakdown, but I know that I am a white body joining a department of primarily white bodies in a racially diverse institution.

Entering a new institution as junior faculty is intimidating. Certainly, my most used phrase lately is “Can I ________?” I find myself asking for permission, often, but might it be useful to find moments of resistance where we don’t ask for permission? Recognizing that the ground I stand on, here in Memphis, is the ground where many have been denied permission to live (this is the stolen land of the Indigenous Chickasaw people), work, and love makes me think that perhaps asking for permission is not the action we need here and now.

***

August 15, 2020. Three Emails.

Good afternoon,

This email serves to inform you that [Student X], a student in one of your courses, will be under mandated quarantine until August [X]. This is in alignment with CBU’s international travel policy and COVID-19 safety precautions. 

During this quarantine period, [Student X] will be unable to attend in-person instructional sessions. We ask that you please work collaboratively to outline a plan for immediate next steps, including establishing clear expectations for class participation and any other areas pertaining to student responsibilities for completion of coursework. This required absence(s) should not be counted against the student. (Note that this email is being shared with all faculty members on the student’s schedule, so we recognize that your course may already be fully online.) 

Please contact [Administrator A], the Director of Academic Support or [Administrator B], Dean of Academic Services, with questions or concerns relating to the student’s quarantine-based absence. We appreciate your understanding and flexibility in supporting the needs of our CBU student community.

I received this email two days before the start of classes. I received this email about three separate students two days before that start of classes. With only 55 students enrolled across my courses, I received this email about three separate students in different courses two days before that start of classes. With only 55 students enrolled across my courses, I received this email about three separate students in different courses two days before that start of classes while students were actively moving into dorms and preparing for classes—some of which, as of this writing, are still being taught face-to-face.

I, thankfully, am not meeting with students face-to-face this semester. The support of my Department Chair allows me the privilege to teach 100% online, but this also comes with challenges. This is my first semester teaching a full four course load. Attempting to make connections with students—some of whom are attending my class virtually while in quarantine and/or via precarious internet connections—is a daily struggle. New university centers with a growing team of instructional designs ease some of these struggles (shout out to instructional designer who provided a step-by-step guide to creating breakout sessions!) while introducing others: Learning Management System surveillance, technology access, and student/teacher/administrator accountability. In the silences that fill my virtual classrooms and the comparative chaos of my faculty email inbox, I can’t help but consider how useful this entire endeavor is…if it’s even useful at all.

***

I share these stories because, as Thomas King (2003) tells us, stories are all that we are (p. 2). And while my stories may or may not echo your stories, Malea Powell (2018) reminds us that holding in tension the “impermanence, ambiguity, and subjectivity” of our different but interconnected stories makes useful our struggle for knowledge and action. Positioning myself, through these stories, demonstrates one example of a new faculty member trying to find solid ground amid shifting sands. Carrying and sharing these happenings, I am forced to acknowledge and think through my position as it relates to ongoing mental and physical health concerns related to COVID-19, the social disruption of our suddenly primarily-virtual interactions, the ongoing cultural trauma of racist violence within the American police state, and the foreboding threats of the November election. Amid all of this, how do we orient toward action and act not only as allies but also accomplices to the revolutionary work that must be done here and now? As our semesters begin—whether as faculty, adjuncts, graduate students, students, staff, or administrators—we must continuously re/orient ourselves to the current circumstances and recognize both the historic queerness of this moment and the deep-rooted practices that have led us to these positions. Such a queerly useful moment is a shattering of the container of our previous worlds (Ahmed 2019, p. 209) and a possibility, an opening, an invitation to a different worldbuilding project. We must make use of it before the circling terrors of this currently dying world makes use of us.

Endnote

[1] María Lugones (2003) and Karma R. Chávez (2013) use “tactical strategies” as opposed to “tactics” and “strategies” set up by Michel de Certeau (1984) because that binary always already positions marginalized people as “the weak” without a space of their own. return

References

About CBU. (2020, April 21). Retrieved August 25, 2020, from https://www.cbu.edu/about/

Ahmed, S. (2019). What’s the use? On the uses of use. Duke University Press.

Cedillo, C.V. and Bratta, P. (2019). Relating our experiences: The practice of positionality stories in student-centered pedagogy. College Composition and Communication, 71(2), 215-240.

Chávez, K.R. (2013). Queer migration politics: Activist rhetoric and coalitional possibilities. University of Illinois Press.

De Certeau, M. (1984). The practice of everyday life (S. F. Rendall, Trans.). University of California Press.

King, T. (2003). The truth about stories: A Native narrative. House of Anansi Press.

Lugones, M. (2003). Pilgrimages/peregrinajes: Theorizing coalition against multiple oppressions. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.

OSU Statistical Summary. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.osu.edu/osutoday/stuinfo.php.

Powell, M. (2018). Interview – Malea Powell on story, survivance, & constellating as praxis. In L. Lane and D. Unger (Eds.) 4C4EQUALITY: Writing Networks for Social Justice. Retrieved from http://constell8cr.com/4c4e/interview_malea_powell.

Yelich-O’Connor, E. and Little, J. (2013). Ribs [Recorded by Lorde]. On Pure Heroine. Auckland, Australia: UMG.

About the Author

Dr. Gavin P. Johnson (he/him/his), Assistant Professor in the Department of Literature and Languages at Christian Brothers University, is a teacher-scholar specializing in multimodal composition, cultural and queer rhetorics, community-engaged writing, and digital activism. His scholarship is published or forthcoming in Composition Studies, College Literacy and Learning, Peitho: The Journal of the Coalition of Feminist Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition, Pre/Text: A Journal of Rhetorical Theory, Computers and Composition, Constellations: A Cultural Rhetorics Publishing Space, and various edited collections. He is a proud queer, first-generation college graduate from southeast Louisiana. 

By Jamila Kareem

The Precedents.

“America has looted Black people. America looted the Native Americans when they first came here. So looting is what you do; we learned it from you. We learned violence from you.” –Tamika Mallory, Activist

“Break precedent!” –Victor Villanueva in “On the Rhetoric and Precedents of Racism”

In the 14^th century, Mansa of Mali, Abubakari II dared explore the reaches of the Atlantic Ocean. He never returned.

Over 100 years later, Christopher Columbus found a world that already existed and called it new.

Most of our schools teach only one of these legends. Like the bodies that hold its histories, one of them is seen as simply unworthy of systematic knowledge.

When we tell you to “Say their names” …

… we are combating long-held habit of cultural forgetting. We are resisting the institutionalized erasure of our people.

The Testaments.

The deaths of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Walter Scott, Freddie Gray, Sandra Bland, Aiyana Jones, Eric Garner, Philando Castile, Michael Brown, Jerame Reed, Oscar Grant, Sean Bell, Tanisha Anderson, Emmett Till, and too many others occurred alongside the propagation of education ideals that demote Black existence in the U.S. and across the world. Like Trump, the police departments, commissions, and supporting legal system that interacted with these lives were inculcated in a hierarchy of schooling that devalues the same lives. I concur with Jones and Williams that “white America tends to focus on the ‘progress’ of this nation through racialized lenses, [but] Black America has had to grapple with the terrors and tragedies that have come out of the white imagination.” So when universities, colleges, textbook publishers, education councils, and K-12 school districts say some version of “we stand with Black Lives Matter,” I am skeptical. I am wary. How can I not be after being both a victim and a beneficiary of the racialized social system that influences these entities?

I think the first time someone said to me “You talk like a white girl” outside the home happened in third grade. At that age, the accusation affected me minimally. My school teachers were White, some of my friends were White, and the people who lived in the nice well-kept clean houses on TV were White. In fact, I, along with the other kids from the hood, was bussed 35 minutes one way to an all-White neighborhood to attend school throughout the week. Talking White didn’t feel like an insult but an observation. Although most of my real friends were other Black kids from the hood and the cadence of my speech came unintentionally, in truth, I probably thought to talk like a White girl was a preferable way to be in the world. My teachers rewarded it because the speech had been a byproduct of something greater–the adoption of a whiteness-centric lens on the world. A world where invoking the mannerisms and ideologies associated with venerated whiteness is the controlling perspective.

You’ll notice that I won’t mention POTUS much in this post. Comedian Dave Chappelle might have summated my thoughts best: “He’s not making a wave; he’s surfing it.” Mr. Trump is the product of a system that has told him that his life as a rich, White, heterosexual American Judeo-Christian male is worth more than other lives, as are the lives of people like him. Our higher education systems have been structured to imply to students and teachers that they must represent that existence as much as possible for their lives to have worth.

You literally strip our histories, voices, experiences—our proofs of existence—from your knowledge bases, therefore not only racializing the curriculum but also racializing what we consider common knowledge. Natasha N. Jones and Miriam F. Williams remind us that even as, “America perceives itself to be a nation of imaginative thinkers, often the imagining of Black folks is not productively acknowledged, properly amplified, or respectfully appreciated.”  So how can we not expect so many of our students and their families to feel, at best, excluded or, at worst, persecuted by the very system meant to acclimate them into an American society that will only induce these attitudes?

The Deeds.

In the last three years, The Chronicle of Higher Education published 794 articles and special reports related to issues of race in higher education. To say that racism has permeated the education of our college students long before they enter college classrooms for the first time is a comment on more than the curriculum. The coursework that students complete reflects but one relic of anti-blackness rather than represent the ideology on its own.

 

While many of our conservative-leaning counterparts in academia, like the author of the tweet above, sing tales of the leftist social justice snowflake warrior university systems blanketed in the liberal values of multiculturalism, most racial justice efforts of the academy come only as far as they reproduce the established order. Most instruction about African peoples in the U.S. begins with ancestors as chattel in shackles at the whim of White citizens. These lessons tell us that the most honored culture of whiteness enslaved us and freed us. As if to insinuate, behave—model our behaviors—or you will remain in shackles. If not physically, then socially and psychologically. And while what has become known as White guilt may manifest some remorse or simply regret in the consciousness of dominant White American racial group, having this point of initiation for the Black American community also defines a racial contract (Mills) in the consciousness. This is a contract that tells a teacher—White, Black, or otherwise—that it’s acceptable, even commendable, to punish Black students for exhibiting common child and adolescent behaviors. Anyone who has been paying attention knows that Black American students are suspended at a significantly higher rate than any other racial group in pre-college schools.

It’s the same racial contract that correlates the educated voice to “talking White” and writing White. These imprints on our collective racial consciousness cause teachers, administrators, and education policymakers to accept Black American language patterns in lower scale academic sociolinguistic situations but not in higher scale contexts (Blommaert). This way of perceiving allows White adolescents to streak their hair in blue or green or pink and gets braided up Black young women sent home or suspended. Such a perception gives education institutions—both the system itself and individual sites—license to loot the artifacts of Black cultures that they see fit and to demolish the remaining pieces to cultural rubble. It tells society that the best way—perhaps, the only way—to survive truly is to revere, assimilate into, and practice Whiteness-validated ways of knowing. This innate sense of racial socialization reduces the beginnings of a millennia-long history of an entire rich, abounding culture to only 500 years of presence—to a foundational point of enslavement, subjugation, tragedy, and defeat. Even among the snowflake social justice warrior liberals.

The fact of the matter is that the U.S. culturally and ideologically loots and shoots Black people, as it has for so long, with little to no sustainable alteration in the collective racial consciousness. In popular culture, we can witness this through things like the appropriation of box braids, micro braids, cornrows, afros, and other Black-created hairstyles. The validity of these styles as well as Black-invented dance styles, and even Black American language vernacular only hold cultural capital when they are proliferated through mainstream White American social structures. this approach is true of the higher education system overall as well. There, black American cultural customs and histories are used as a tool to feign ideals of diversity, inclusion, equality, even anti-racism–within the confines of the Euro-Western Judeo-Christian middle-class straight cisgender male power structure. The emblem of the White savior social justice Warrior. But would any of these proponents of inclusion take the time to design a curriculum that teaches the lifestyles of medieval West Africa with the same appreciation of medieval Europe? Are they willing to research and understand Afrocentric or Black-American-centric worldviews the way that Black children and families have to assimilate into whiteness-centric worldviews? How significantly are they willing to even contemplate, let alone address, the ways their ideologies in and out of classrooms and conference rooms might harm Black students, faculty, and staff? As discussed above, mainstream education practices (figuratively) shoot Black Americans by attempting to force the blackness–our original sin–out of us by any means necessary.

If U.S. higher education truly wants its antiracist, inclusive talk to be trusted, and to have meaning in Black American communities, it must systemically address the ways it has and continues to contribute to the ideological loading and shooting of black communities. We are not there yet.

Jamila M. Kareem, Ph.D., is a teacher-scholar researching critical race theory in composition studies. Her research examines the connections between race, discourse, writing, and pedagogy. She is a CCCC Scholar for the Dream, whose work has been published by Teaching English in the Two-Year College, Journal of College Literacy and Learning, JAC: A Journal of Rhetoric, Culture, and Politics, and in the collections Diverse Approaches to Teaching, Learning, and Writing Across the Curriculum: IWAC at 25 and The Good Life and the Greater Good in a Global Context. She has scholarship forthcoming in Literacy in Composition Studies and in the collection Mobility Work in Composition. She teaches as an assistant professor in the Department of Writing and Rhetoric at the University of Central Florida.

References

Abe, D. (2016). Eric Garner [Photograph]. Black Past. https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/garner-eric-1970-2014/

Anderson, J. (2020). Breonna Taylor was an EMT working at two hospitals when she was shot and killed in March [Photograph]. P. Ashley, Wave3 News. https://www.wave3.com/2020/05/12/breonna-taylor-was-killed-botched-police-raid-attorney-says/

Associated Press. (2020). George Floyd, 46 [Photograph]. ABC7 Eyewitness News. https://abc7chicago.com/george-floyd-transcript-video-second-autopsy-stephen-jackson-and-thomas-lane/6318505/

BBC News. (2014). Michael Brown in headphones from Facebook [Photograph]. BBC News. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-30207808

Blommaert, J. (2007). Sociolinguistic scales. Intercultural Pragmatics, 4(1), 1–19. DOI 10.1515/IP.2007.001

Dean, M. (2015). Tanisha Anderson [Photograph]. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jun/05/black-women-police-killing-tanisha-anderson

Gray, F. (2015). Freddie Gray photo from Instagram [Photograph]. C. Rentz, The Baltimore Sun. https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/crime/bal-freddie-gray-remembered-as-jokester-who-struggled-to-leave-drug-trade-20151120-story.html

Hartsfield-Reid, L. (2016). Jerame Reid, 36, of Upper Deerfield Township [Photograph]. M. Miller, The Press of the Atlantic. https://pressofatlanticcity.com/news/crime/family-of-police-shooting-victim-in-bridgeton-ashamed-of-justice-system/article_ecbc9fca-6981-11e6-86ef-3f46881e7302.html

HBO. (2018). Profile of Sandra Bland, a former Naperville resident who died in police custody in a Texas jail in 2015 [Photograph]. The Chicago Tribune. https://www.chicagotribune.com/suburbs/naperville-sun/ct-nvs-sandra-bland-hbo-st-0727-story.html

Jones, N. N. & Williams, M. F. (2020, June 11). The just use of imagination: A call to action. Teacher Scholar Activist. https://teacher-scholar-activist.org/2020/06/11/a-year-of-activism-perspectives-on-the-2020-u-s-elections-part-5/

Law Offices of John Burris. (2018). Oscar Grant, a 22-year-old transit rider who was shot and killed by BART police on New Year’s Day, 2009 [Photograph]. E. Baldassari & D. Debolt, Mercury News. https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/12/31/10-years-after-oscar-grant-reforms-a-movement-a-family-still-grieves/

Leiderman, S., Potapchuk, M., & Butler, S. (n.d.). The anatomy of white guilt. Racial Equity Tools. Retrieved July 12, 2020 from https://www.racialequitytools.org/resourcefiles/anatomy_white_guilt.pdf

Library of Congress. (2015). Emmett Till [Photograph]. Biography.com. https://www.biography.com/crime-figure/emmett-till

Loopmaniac. (2020, June 10). Tamika Mallory – The Most Powerful Speech of a Generation (No Music) [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUvGeEQidT0

Mills, C. W. (1997). The racial contract. Cornell UP.

Mother of Aiyana Jones (2013). Aiyana Jones photo from mother Facebook page [Photograph]. D. Bukowski, Voice of Detroit. https://voiceofdetroit.net/2013/06/01/detroit-killer-cop-trial-begins-in-death-of-aiyana-jones-7/aiyana-jones-photo-from-mother-facebook-page/

Negy, Charles [@CharlesNegy]. (2020, June 2). I’ve often said something similar: People who think “whites are the problem” would find if whites suddenly disappeared from earth [Tweet]. Twitter. https://twitter.com/CharlesNegy/status/1267809743885787142.

Nunley, C. (2019, May 3). Hair politics: How discrimination against Black hair in schools impacts Black lives. The Politic. https://thepolitic.org/hair-politics-how-discrimination-against-black-hair-in-schools-impacts-black-lives/.

Olson, R. (2017). Philando Castile [Photograph]. Star Tribune. https://www.startribune.com/5-000-make-that-64-000-raised-for-philando-castile-lunch-fund/444458013/

The CWPA Executive Board and Officers. (2020, June 23). CWPA Statement on Racial Injustice. Council of Writing Program Administrators. http://wpacouncil.org/aws/CWPA/pt/sd/news_article/308259/_PARENT/layout_details/false

U.S. Department of Commerce. (2019, February). Status and Trends in the Education of Racial and Ethnic Groups. National Center for Education Statistics. https://nces.ed.gov/programs/raceindicators/indicator_RDA.asp#info

Villanueva, V. (1999). On the rhetoric and precedents of racism. College Composition and Communication, 50(4), 645-661. doi:10.2307/358485.

 

This month’s post, the seventh in Teacher-Scholar-Activist and Spark’s 12-part series “A Year of Activism: Perspectives on the 2020 U.S. Elections,” comes from Kimberly C. Harper (North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University). In the post, Dr. Harper raises questions about the recent commitments that many white academics are making to antiracist practices and how these commitments will transform white academics’ behavior.

In the remaining months leading up to the U.S. elections, this series will feature critical perspectives on those elections, issues related to them, and thoughts about how scholar-activists (teachers and students) can intervene. We encourage readers to share these posts and to discuss the ideas with people in your communities, classrooms, and workplaces.

Liz Lane & Don Unger, Managing Editors—Spark

Darin Jensen, Editor—Teacher, Scholar, Activist

Do White People Hate Us?

By Kimberly C. Harper

When COVID-19 hit, my children worried if they would see their friends again. It was easy to tell them they would be back together—very soon. Then George Floyd was murdered, and racism and police brutality became a conversation I could not water down for my children. On the way to the dentist, my 8-year-old daughter asked me with such innocence and concern, “Mommy, do white people hate us?” In that moment I caught my breath. Not because of the question per se, but because her dentist is white, and it hit me like a ton of bricks that my child was considering if her dentist hated her because she was Black. I wondered if she thought her dentist might harm her because, even at the age of 8, she equates hate with harm. The question was so heavy that I wanted to redirect the conversation, much like the adults in this country who refuse to acknowledge that racism is an infectious disease in our society. I found myself looking at the dentist and her staff wondering how do we right the wrongs of this society and create a safe space for Black and Brown children. And I do mean to exclude white children from my question because white children are excluded from the dangerous assumptions that can potentially end their lives for the simplest of things. I knew I couldn’t give her a fluffy feel-good answer. I knew that I had to honor her concern and find a path forward for us—and this is something that Americans must do NOW. Right now!

I ask myself what clearing a path forward looks like for educators. We work with students—future leaders. It’s nice to write articles, Tweet, throw around the word antiracist, and post call to actions, but how do we work together and live in a society where the wounds of police brutality and racism have been reopened in such a way that we can’t afford another Band-Aid? (Truthfully, the wounds never close for Black and Brown folk.) Moving forward looks different for Black Indigenous People of Color (BIPOC) and white people. For BIPOC I ask myself, “How do we go back to work and deal with coworkers who were blatantly anti-Black, just three months ago?” You don’t pack racism away and say I’m done with it. Racism has to be dug out—much like a cavity and replaced with a filling to prevent further decay. How do we deal with people of color who are also anti-Black? Are we to forget the racial macroaggressions and forgive the mental anguish and stress that made some of our jobs unbearable?  Are we willing to help our colleagues—despite having told them on various occasions in and in various ways that racism exists? Don’t believe me—just look at the responses to the Twitter hashtag #BlackInTheIvory. Do we really expect BIPOC students, faculty, and staff who’ve been bullied and silenced to walk through the door and say Kumbaya now that the academy is working toward a new iteration of diversity and inclusion?

So much has been written about the Black community and its various pathologies. We’ve been researched to death—literally, but what of the inherent violence that lies dormant in white culture and rears its ugly head when a threat to the systems that oppress Black and Brown people are questioned. As we begin to reimagine a different America—one where color doesn’t equate with police brutality among other things, I ask, “How will white people decenter themselves, and are they willing to do so? Will they work to eradicate the silent culture of hate, privilege, and violence that is part of their American experience?” We can’t move forward if that is not acknowledged. We can’t be allies and work together if they are afraid to confront their privilege and the surveillance culture that is part of the American experience.

I know you might be thinking well where is the scholarship, framework, references, how-to guide, and call to action. I have none. This post is about the emotional work that we must carry out and our shared humanity. It is about the traumas we carry with us from living in a deeply racist, Islamophobic, homophobic, sexist, classist, and all things in-between society. It is about the work we have to do as individuals that can’t be described by a theory. Besides the scholarship is already out there, and I have no fucks left for the academy and our calls to action. Can it be simple enough that we decide to show up for each other on a consistent and meaningful basis? It’s about our humanity and not forgetting that when the country really reopens and we are no longer working from home or going to school from home, we will have to face each other. These words will have to be transformed into action.

It’s easy to be antiracist behind a computer screen, but it’s totally different to stand in the face of racism in real life. That requires courage. Do we have the courage to forge a new path? Do we have the courage to be uncomfortable? Do we have the courage to be silent and let others walk into spaces that have been traditionally reserved for white men? Do we? Can we do this in real life—at our faculty meetings, in our classrooms, at our dinner tables, and in the car on the way to the dentist with 8 year olds?

Dr. Kimberly C. Harper is an Assistant Professor of English at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University. She has taught at the postsecondary level for 16 years. Her research examines social justice, race, and ethos within technical and professional communication. She also researches and writes about the rhetoric of maternal health and hip-hop discourse. Dr. Harper has a forthcoming monograph that discusses the ethos of Black motherhood and its influence on the Black Maternal Health Crisis in American society. She is the host of The Space of Grace, a monthly podcast focusing on reproductive justice and Black Maternal Health. Follow her on Twitter @ronbett75 or @spaceof_grace, or visit her online at www.drkimberlycharper.com.