Darkdaughta commented the following on that post:
I read this a few days ago but I didn't comment immediately.
It's good that you've got the support you've been after to do the work you want to do.
Simultaneously...
My mind is fairly exploding with all the wimmin I've encountered and heard about and had conversations with Ophelia about who were/are Black academics who pushed up against the structure of things and did not get the support they deserved.
These are older wimmin, seasoned, clear, accomplished, highly intelligent, extremely adept at navigating the halls of the ivory tower who did not come seeking validation, just clear space to continue with their work.
These were also wimmin who questioned and adgitated.
I realized the last time I really spoke about the academy in one of my comments here on this blog was when Navelgazer came and wrote in a very oblique way that I was being negative. :)
Loving Pecola...
I support your work. How could I not support a Black midwife. Elemental, basic, crucial, pivotal, strategic...
I don't support the academy or the sorts of power, hoarding, resistance gentrifying games academics are taught, encouraged, payed to play.
You know what I think about the biggies deciding to support your studies...
You are understood as strategic, as necessary, as mouthy yet intelligent, probably respectful enough of the power structure that those who support you understand that with a little support you will find your place among them with ease. Perhaps if they give validation, support and safe passage, eventually you will decided to stop questioning the structure and the way of things too stringently...perhaps you will decide to reinvest and support the structure that decided to support you.
Otherwise they wouldn't be supporting you to explore and to pose questions...within a particular framework...questions they haven't wanted to have asked or answered in the very same classes you are taking where you rail against the absence of so much you intuitively understand should be there, should be offered.
You are useful to them. You will be more useful as time goes on if they can ensure that you identify with them and through them with the structure they support.
sigh...
I was thinking about you clearly locating yourself among them as "an academic". I wondered about all what lay behind and beyond those words, that identification.
Instead of taking up more space here, I decided to write something over at my place. Hope you'll come visit and read when you can.
darkdaughta
So, of course, I went over to read what she wrote, and here it is pasted below:
Loving Pecola, I've got a question...Loving Pecola, I've been thinking about the post you wrote where you described yourself as "an academic". I felt a little sad...but also curious.
I felt sad because the existence of the university complex as a corporate, oppressive, power and hierarchical structure designed to crush individuality, dissidence and creativitymakes it difficult to understand myself as allied with people who identify as academics, meaning a large part of how they understand themselves as human beings in the world, as useful in the world, as necessary in the world flows directly from their location in that diseased corporate entity known as the university.
In blogland, I've actually attempted to avoid the blogs of people whose blogland descriptors or even the names of their blogs resonate with an over-identification with the university complex.
So when you wrote about being "an academic" I wondered how you were planning on disturbing your relationship to this super structure? I wondered how you would concede, where and why? I wondered what this would mean for possible alliances with human beings like me, educated, intelligent, inquisitive...
People invested in the free distribution of knowledge as a way to flatten hiearchies rather than maintain them...which is what the university complex teaches academics to do (and to erase with bodies of knowledge they define as radical and defiant).
How do you understand alliance with someone who understands the university complex as enemy?
I realize, I've encountered many bloggers located inside the academy either as students or as those who teach...
I've encountered many people who identify with the academy who have come here...
I realize that as I've welcomed them, I've simultaneously felt a pang of impending separation...the parting of ways...
I realize that I've never asked them who they understood themselves to be, what they understood a resistance politic could look like inside the belly of the beest...
Mostly, I've just given them space...
Watched them come, stay or go...
I think your post was the last heartbreaking straw for me.
I had to ask...
Had to ask to give voice to my trepidation...
Had to ask if I was going to hear rather than invent or project your answer...
This is what came to me today, from another "academic"...
I really don't trust academics even when they attempt to deconstruct their home turfs.
The only ones I've ever really trusted have been those people who haven't been allowed or able to find safe harbour there, who haven't been welcomed, who haven't been supported, who couldn't stay without speaking openly, regularly and fully...and then of course being made to feel intensely uncomfortable, barred from studying or teaching for the threat they posed.
Nonetheless...
Here is one speaking from inside the corporation...a corporate entity masquerading as a purveyor of knowledge.
Here is an academic with a vested interest in the maintenance of the super structure which defines the pinnacle of the educational experience all over the planet.
I do, nonetheless, like what she wrote and the sorts of questions she asked.
I guess in a way, I wonder too, if your focus on studying works located as necessary inside academia, will allow you to more easily read this woman's words, delivered in certain tones, using particular words, bracketed by acceptable biography, suitable credentials, author credit and correct endnotes...is that what they call them?
The pangs remain. I write and reach through them because that's what I know how to do best.
I found this while I was out desperately seeking...as I do everyday...(read this article she found, here)
- Then I replied, before reading the above post that she had written:
And NOW, I'm adding this:She asked the hard questions. The questions I ask myself often. I keep coming back to this post because, really, this is the heart of it. I see academia as surefire step over the deep end as far as my sanity is concerned. So the next question is why do it? I’m working that out. And in the mean time, I’m working out how to do it without losing myself. This is a real concern. This is reason #1 for my distraction. I realize that this looks backwards…figuring out how to do it before knowing, for sure, concretely, why I’m doing it…if I’m doing it. I only say "if " because if I do not, can not, figure out how I might be able to do this without losing my mind…without being able to clearly see what a non-academic, academic me might look like, I won’t do it.
That’s the reason for the panic…I’m moving forward with the process of looking for programs, weighing my options, narrowing down topics, etc…without yet knowing how I’m going to do this. I’m doing this because the deadlines are looming. People will also want to know why can’t I just wait, take my time deciding, and go later? My answer is usually “because I know I won’t come back.” What I don’t ever take the time to explain to people (because most times I really don’t care enough about the person asking to go into details about my personal decisions) is why I know I won’t be back. I know because this experience is one that best swallowed with momentum…in other words, it’s easier to play the game when you’ve been playing for some time already, the rules are fresh in your mind, and you’ve become accustomed to the lifestyle of a student. It’s hard to be a student as an independent thinker. (I’d like to think I’m an independent thinker, but I have a ways to go ;o) The independent thinking student has a hard time swallowing gunk whole, a hard time memorizing and regurgitating…a hard time suspending belief of anything contrary to what they’re being told for long enough to pass the exams and get the degree. It makes this so much harder. This is not us fighting the expertise of those teaching us…I believe in experience as a guide and as credibility for teaching. What I’m referring to is things like racism and white privilege that blanket topics covered in class. For example when we start to place value on one diet over another, or one way of treatment for a symptom over another, or one way of belief about a particular practice over another based on the fact this particular diet, treatment, or practice is white western-based and therefore better, it’s hard to not internalize that as “better.” It takes a lot of mental energy to constantly ask one’s self, ok, is what is being sold better because of fact, or because of the presenter’s (un)conscious devaluing of “other?” And if it’s presented as fact, what makes it so? These are the things that are constantly going through my mind…and I can’t turn it off...but it makes it so much harder to just listen, record, and memorize. I’m careful about what I take in mentally… about things that might destroy my building of a positive sense of self and well being…about things that seem to always place me and my experiences as other or backward or ignorant. This is a big deal because if one isn’t careful, one begins to believe that maybe what they know to be true about themselves…about the life they’ve lived…about the people who have lived and seen things they haven’t but have told them of, is not really, actually, what they have experienced. It’s that “I know about your life better than you do” attitude. I have to remind myself everyday of the value of the life I live, have lived, outside of this place. So, my point is that, it’s easier, I think, to just keep going (get the PhD) and get it over with…sort of like ripping a band-aid off fast.
What will conversations with me as a so-called academic mean in terms of alliances with people like you? I have no clue because I do not yet have a concrete vision of what my own politics as a resister within the academy will look like…only that if I can not envision a way of resisting…I mean real resisting…within the setting, I won’t even be there. Which is why I can’t answer exactly how, where, and why I will concede. That is what I’m trying to figure out, or more importantly, I think, how, where and why I absolutely wont concede. What I would hope is that part of my “resistance plan” includes ongoing conversations with folks like yourself. But in that case it would also have to include safe spaces for critique…and right now there are very, very few people who I allow that much of an inner sanctum…partly because I think you need have a lot more knowledge about a person than I normally give in order to assess whether what I'm saying is coming from a place of ignorance or experience…and because my gut reaction in response to critique from someone who doesn’t have that background knowledge about me is usually, “who the hell do you think you are?” I think, though, that an alliance can only be successful with some amount of hope…which requires a level of trust about intention…which is hard to come by. I do not believe in the hoarding of knowledge. That I can say for sure. That’s why I have a blog, to tell people who want to do this, how they can make it happen, and hopefully at the end it will be an example of how to do it without losing self…
How do I understand someone who understands academia as enemy? As ally. As an ally in a different locale. I don’t have a history of discounting non “academic” ways of knowing. (and I’m using that in full awareness that I have not even attempted to define what that is supposed to mean…let’s just say it means people who choose not to accumulate a plethora of letters after their name) Since you don’t really know me, and in the absence of those who do, I guess I just ask that you believe that about me. Hmm…my relationship with the man is political in that way…people often (I am surprised by just how often) ask me about how we came to be a match, being that we are not “equally yoked” in terms of “educational attainment.” It irritates me like thick thighs in the summer time. Like these degrees are supposed to mean that I can’t love someone without them, or that I’m somehow smarter than him because I have them. The man is smart. Actually he’s fuggin brilliant. (ok, this is a tangent…lol) And about “academics”… it’s starting to sound like a dichotomy…you’re wither an out-casted academic or an assimilated academic…you and I both like to play between the lines…so I’m not hoping to be either of those…I’m hoping to be me…forever and always…to take responsibility for defining “academic” for myself. These degrees don’t make reading that article any easier…I have never found reading those things easy, but I do practice it…a lot…why? Because I am sitting in a classroom full of privileged people who I have to hold my own among when called to answer. And other research, I read because I find it interesting, usually things that match up with my own interests. But I don’t find that any easier to read than your blog, the man’s lyrics, or my own writing. It’s just another kind of writing. My undergraduate degree is in writing and linguistics…my research project was on African American English…why? Because I was sick of the BS about how bad it is. I don’t place a higher value on so-called standard english over any other language, or research articles by PhD carrying academics over those with no formal education. At least not consciously, and in fact I make a conscious effort not to do that. How could I when oral story telling by "un"educated people is so important to who I understand myself to be?
You will not find me trying to convince you to give academics a chance…nor will you find me trying to convince you to keep putting yourself out here simply to be consumed, chewed and spat by those who disdain, and subsequently attempt to hide any wisdom offered by those who chose to walk outside ivy halls and corporate infrastructures masked as institutes of knowledge brimming with open minded scholars wanting to better the world. I understand your apprehension and avoidance of visiting such folks…and your cringe at me, now, because of my self-identification. But what I think is worth the continued conversation, despite my identity-searching labeling of myself, is the trust due someone who is trying to walk alongside you in blogland by way of calling out her own privileges and biases, unpacking her reasons for being in cahoots with known enemies (whether personal or institutional), and sharing more and more personal stuff about herself to you in the hopes of being open to reciprocal learning, in whatever way that can happen.