Generations Later: The Same Furious Passage of the Black Graduate Student

Sociological Roots

My introduction to sociology has always been unique. I attended a small, historically white single-sex liberal arts university with less than 1000 students. Like a traditionally white college or university, historically white single-sex institutions (HWSSI) rely on historical and contemporary racial exclusion within student demographics and upper-level administration, racialized cultural practices and scripts, and color-evasive ² rhetoric. The distinction, however, is that foundationally HWSSI’s relied on connecting the domestication of women in tandem with their intellectualism. Over time the rationale shifted from domestic desires to ones rooted in white feminism. They prioritized the ability to achieve in society despite one’s ‘sex,’ collapsing the experience sexism and patriarchal violence without a racialized perspective.

Initially, I had minimal experience with social sciences–only brief interactions by taking political science and religious studies courses. In my sophomore year, I enrolled in an upper-level sociology course, race, and the Law class. Without seeing the syllabus or knowing the professor, the name alone drew me in. At an institution with roughly 60 Black students in a good year, the opportunity to talk about race felt freeing.

The professor was a Lakota woman, one of the few non-white professors at the university and the first I had. Each week, the class of about 10 students would come together with fresh off reading a book. Rather than a lecture-based course, everything was shaped by discussion and not a regurgitation of information. She encouraged us to put the assigned materials in conversation with one another, rather than test us on the content–she used critical media assignments. Significant media assignments discussed the strength and weaknesses of the books. Encouraging many of the students, to realize that just because we were learning something did not mean it was inherently correct. We had the authority to challenge scholarship so long as adequately could explain our dissenting options. The following semester, I declared my major to become a sociology major officially.

The following classes I took as a sociology major only added to what I believed sociology to be. In addition to my race and the Law professor, the university hired a Black man to offer more sociology classes. Together, they created a social justice-oriented department informed by critical race theory and Native feminism. They encouraged students to be active in the local community and campus but also practiced what they preached. They came to our community events and protested, sponsored student organizations, and publicly advocated for the most marginalized students on campus. Within the confines of our department, the subverted the ordinary experiences of HWSSI. They reminded students that we were already producers of knowledge, that academia was helping to challenge, articulate, and refine our thoughts. I learned the value of recognizing the tools and tactics of whiteness, which has shaped and influenced how I do sociological scholarship. Moreover, the promoted learning over the grades, shifting our attention towards gaining knowledge and not superficial level facts that would not benefit students.

Rule #1: You Must Learn and Reproduce (White) Sociology

My decision to go to a Ph.D. program directly getting my undergraduate degree was an easy one. I had spent years as an organizer connecting the BlackLivesMatter movement to racist practices, policies, and procedures at the university. I wrote my senior honor’s thesis about public memory and the Black Panther Party. I had an investment in continuing to explore the Black radical tradition as an activist and scholar.

Naturally, when I saw the option to take a social movement course during my first semester, I jumped at the opportunity. While it was not my first class explicitly dedicated to social movements, specific courses at the graduate level were not offered annually in my department. I knew enrolling in the course was a now or never moment and decided to take it to expand my knowledge as a social movements scholar. The course objectives were clear. We would spend the semester learning classical and contemporary social movement theories, methodological components of studying social movements and explore social movements, revolutions, riots nationally and globally. I was one of two first-year students in the class and, surprisingly, one of three Black students.

Most of the readings favored a structural Marxist perspective on social movements. Despite the notion that we would explore various theoretical approaches to social movements, we spent 1 week learning classical social movement theories and other learning cultural theories. Primarily, we focused on the dominant approach political process theory, which conceptualized social movement action, goals, and participation in tandem with its relationship with the state – i.e., the political and economic institutions in a society. For weeks, while I waged critiqued the approach, I was talked down to by organizational and political-economic sociologists. Though I was one of the “good” first year (the language they used not mine) students, there was no way I understood the complexities of Marxist theory. Initially, I brushed the comments aside. I knew the assumption that I did not understand Marxism, nor organizational or political-economic sociology was rooted in others, not realizing its connections with race, ethnicity, and indigeneity. However, over time I started to think I knew nothing. Even though I spent years studying social movements, the consistent back-handed comments about how I studied social movements made me believe my knowledge about the subject was irrelevant.

After repeated conversations with the other Black students and a Latinx mentor in the class, I learned everyone had a story to tell about the snarky comments. Most of them were like me when they pushed against the dominant epistemology. They were conceptualized as someone who did not understand sociological theories enough. Through these conversations, I learned the first rule of studying sociology: learning and reproducing white sociology. While I had known the danger of not incorporating theories of race, racism, and indigeneity, I did not understand how antithetical that was to the mission of sociology (Ladner, 1998; Pascale, 2010; Wyse, 2016). I had always found a home in sociology despite the disciplinary constraints. While I learned sociology outside the bounds of socio-spatial whiteness, enrolling in a sociology Ph.D. program can with the expectation that would uphold the liberal façade. The “empiricist tradition of “objectivity” (Romero, 2020, p. 3), did not accept epistemological challenges. I was expected to take white sociology unquestionably. All other approaches would be viewed as dissenting opinions in favor of maintaining the status quo of sociology.

The most unexpected aspect was how much time I needed other people to affirm my thoughts, feelings, and emotions. My mama noticed it before I did. As I called her week after week, she asked me, “what happened to the confidence you left home with?” That realization rocked me to my core. I spent so much time questioning myself and other people. Was I too soft as a faculty member described me or was, I in a toxic environment? Even now, while I understand the hostility of white space, I still second guess myself. I worry about failure but not because of white sociological standards anymore, but because I spent so much time investing in trying to convince myself I was smart, that I played directly into the hands of whiteness. Sometimes I feel like I fail the radical tradition of Black sociology by choosing to be reactionary rather than standing firm in what I know to be true. Sometimes I still do blame for being a problem – even though I know that there is a broader structural issue. I synthesize everything as an individual flaw, something I caused rather than the reality of being in an oppressive space.

Rule #2: You Must Assimilate to (White) Professional Standards

In my second semester of graduate school, I enrolled in one of the most challenging courses in my department, quantitative methods. Since my visiting weekend, students told my cohort mates and me horror stories about the course, about how much they struggled through homework and exams. Now while I never have one to shy away from a challenge, I recognized my fear of anything that involved math. I had accepted that the assumption I was naturally bad at math, overtime quitting to try and taking as an innate flaw actively.

After a few weeks of receiving low B’s and C’s, I decided I would need to ask for help. I showed up at the professor’s office hours each week and frequently met with one of the graduate student teaching assistants. As I grew more confident in trying, my performance in the class improved, and so did my confidence, which made me interact act more with the professor and students within the classroom. I would come to class laughing and smiling, interacting with the professor as he told stories about his life experience as a demographer and his genuine joy for quantitively. He would randomly ask us questions about the readings when I got something wrong. He reminded affirmed me publicly about how far I had come and that he knew I knew the material.

My cheerful demeanor and ability to laugh and joke with the professor became an issue for the other graduate teaching assistant in the class. Two weeks before the class ended, she sent me an email with the subject line, “Classroom College Etiquette,” with the professor of the course, and the other graduate teaching assistant cc’d. In the email, she described me as loud and vulgar with my “gang of colleagues” in the hallway before the start of class. She told me I was a distraction to Ph.D. students in the class writing that college was not high school and that I needed to act appropriately. Moreover, she said she was surprised that the professor of the class did not ask me to be more respectful.

I stared at that email for a long time before I cried. Just as I got my confidence back, here was a reminder that I was anomlaic in academia. I sent the to the other students in the class, asking if anyone else received the email. They all said no, so there was a clear sign that I was targeted and stereotyped because I dared to be confident. While I do not identify as a woman, I am perceived as one because of how I perform gender. I am awarded the perks and privileges despite the pain that comes across with being misgendered over and over. However, I am read as a woman, I too, am affected by the stereotypes and harm Black women face both inside and outside of academia. While some parts of the email relied on some stereotypes all Black graduate space, others directly connected to a racist, sexist experience.

The email used racist stereotypes associated with Black womanhood. First, came the signifying word “loud.” For Black women, loud can mean boldly occupying unowned space. As whiteness is the right to own and regulate to be loud in that space when the unspoken rules and procedures suggest otherwise, is a threat. To be confident, to be “… sharp-tongued [and] loud-mouthed” (Cole & Guy-Sheftall, 2003, xxxiii), was direct domination of white space.

Loud can also mean being too visible, breaking the racialized script that good Black people are quiet, do not make waves, and thankful for being given a position in academia, to begin with. Now, as a point of clarification – I am loud not just in voice but in presentation. My hair is blue, my tattoos and piercings are visible, my clothes filled with patterns, and I unapologetically exist as such. Professionalism in academia meant cutting out those parts of myself, yet it is, for this reason, exactly why I lean into loudness. In this classroom, as I lead more into it, it meant I was not as terse as the other students, despite working my ass off. I was not allowed to say fuck, nor could I laugh. I was responsible for the actions of my peers. Even they laughed in moments without me; I was still a negative influence on everyone else.

Second came questioning my status as a graduate student. Often, Black graduate students are asked if they received access to the university because of diversity fellowships or affirmative action. Within this framework, there is no space for Black graduate students to be in graduate school because of merit. However, here is another trope all Black people in academia face, being viewed as the diversity hire, the diversity student, anything deemed as negative to denote a Black person as unworthy of being in the institution. For this graduate teaching assistant, I was not in the same ranks as more doctoral severe students, but also even though it was a class of primary sociologists, I could not be in the same program as her. Per her imagination, I had not yet come to understand the seriousness of being in a university. Whether or not she knew the harm she was doing, she still infantilized and shamed me.

Yet, the two most frustrating parts about this email are that she spoke on behalf of the professor and the other graduate student. No one asked her to send me that email. No one else had an issue with me. No one else viewed my behavior as inappropriate or non-collegial. She went out of her way to let me know that she disapproved of my actions, and as she acted as the guard of academia, everyone else would follow her lead.

Moreover, she was not white. All too easily, it becomes assumed that white people are the only ones that perpetuate violence in white spaces. Some people cling so much to color-evasive ideologies. They believe that they, too, will be afforded the rights associated with whiteness.

Rule #3: White Comfort Comes Before Anything Else

At the beginning of the fall semester of my 2nd year, I started therapy. After the first year of nonsense and with my advisor going on sabbatical, I knew I would need a judgment-free zone to speak. I would go every Friday, to signify making it to the end week and to decompress over whatever I experience, whether it was related to academia or not. Therapy became my saving grace. As I took care of my mental health, found a medicine regime that worked for me, I was able to parse out some of my more complex feelings with academia. My therapist suggested I write down every negative interaction that I had on campus, in my department, and with peers. The goal was simple to remain authentic to myself and to avoid making undergraduate and graduate students feel the way I did when I became a professor.

For a year, I journaled every day. I wrote down every instance whenever I graded assignments, and students disputed my grades more often than other graduate students. I wrote down the time a white graduate student asked me to them figure out the racial categories for a survey. They showed me a list with thirty-year-old categories and just chuckled I was visibly shocked. I wrote down how multiple people asked me for articles and books to supplement their research, some expecting citations to build their literature review. I wrote about every time a white person blamed me for their mental health when confronted with racism. Around this point in my graduate student career, I stopped having basic race and racism conversations. I knew people needed to be educated on the issues, but I rejected that form of labor, needed to come from me. I was already worn out, no longer interested, and just fed up, but what pushed me over the edge was a white liberal race scholar misusing #MeToo on social media.

Initially, when I saw the Facebook post, I scrolled right past it. I have a hard and steady rule with social media; I do not argue with people. After spending years discussing with people, thinking I could change their minds about race and racism, I viewed the conversations as redundant. For white people, social media provides a shield, as they are surrounded by all of their friends to see and support, they are encouraged. They double down on their problematic behavior and just accept the conversations as a means of debate, ignoring the fact that what happens online is also experienced offline.

The post was an attempt at solidarity between one first-generation student to another. As she bonded with a student earlier that day about making it into college despite the odds, she used #MeToo as a general descriptive, removing the words from there is historical and social significance to show solidarity between survivors of sexual assault and sexual violence. Words have meaning, and for people who purport themselves to be race scholars when we make grave mistakes, we need to be corrected. So, I wrote a few sentences about why words matter not expecting drastic rebuttal because how does one make an argument to support purposefully misconstruing Black women’s words?

When white liberal scholars decide they have been accosted, their reactions, whether online or in person, are always the same. There is an attempt to admit to no wrongdoing. Followed by a faux harm reduction statement such as, “well, that was not my intention.” Within the same vein, some white scholars work hard to shifting blame and responsibility for their reactions to someone else. As the conversation made her uncomfortable, she hid the post, and when contacted about it, she said it was for my protection. I demonstrated the lack of accountability and refusal to admit when she was incorrect publicly, was the problem. Only for her to retort that conversations with me about racism made her physically sick, and for days because I didn’t speak to her nicely contributed to her mental health issues.

As she detailed the severity of how I made her feel, she pushed aside the exhaustion I felt with having a conversation over something that could have been a simple fix. At this moment, she sought out to remind me of the realities of being in white institutional space: white people, when confronted with racism, weaponize their emotional responses. White space maintains through “hierarchical emotional domination” (Matias, 2016), meaning her feelings about being confronted with race and racism become above my own. There is the expectation that the world stops when a white woman cries, and in turn, I should ignore my frustration and exhaustion to coddle her hurt feelings (Evans & Moore, 2015; Wingfield, 2015). These are the realities of white graduate programs; they require Black students to lessen the blows of white violence to ensure white comfort. I broke that rule every time I checked her on white nonsense. If Black people respond with anything other than an even tone or say they are fed the fuck up, then we aren’t a team player.

On top of all of this, is the ever-present issue that Black scholars face across academia. When white race scholars are called out because they are doing something that is genuinely harmful, there is again the expectation of niceness. Ain’t shit sweet about having to coddle white liberals to racial liberation, especially when they say they say they are a race scholar. Why should I be helpful? Why is the expectation that I self-regulate to provide someone stability when I interact with the pain of racism daily? Why am I not allowed not to be okay? How many times will Black scholars have to say they are annoyed by how white scholars treat race as a playground for there curiosities but still find time to replicate harm and injustice?

A Scholar of Hopelessness and Hope

Every time I have to sit and think about what I experience in academia, I also have to grapple with the question of why I choose to stay. Somedays that answer does not exist. I hate feeling as if I do not matter. I hate feeling like I am begging people to see my humanity. I hate others telling me who I am or what they envision me to be. In some ways, I have become so tethered to the idea of leaving academia because it is presented as a quick-fix solution. Though I may go, it does not mean that I am free from similar constraints. White space does not just disappear because I choose to leave it; the white normative behavior just shifts.

I should also state that I do not hate being a scholar nor an academic. I love being in the constant pursuit of knowledge. I love being able to share the joy of sociology like my professors have done for me. I love interacting with some of the students. I am not bound to punching into a clock every day. I am not bound to asking for days off. I am not bound to sit in my office for 8 hours a day to be paid. Much of my career at this moment is flexible in ways I would not be able to experience in other places.

There is no quick fix for the white space of academia or of sociology. I am not willing to exert all my time and energy trying to fix what others will not. Yet, I find hope and promise in the others. From students on campus who make corrections to the statue of a white supremacist on campus to friends engaging in juvenile justice work, putting pressure on the local government and school systems to protect Black and Brown youth, what I know is that real movement happens whether or not whiteness tries to stop it. here have been generations of scholars who have worked to produce the next generation of activists, professors, and visionaries for with the legacy of movement in mind. My choice in staying in academia is similar to theirs, the dissemination of knowledge to help move liberation forward.