I just wrote an uncomfortable email. Well… uncomfortable for me.
The topic of discussion in this email was a scholar of color, an academic. I had to give some real– and unsolicited– advice to a person I respect as a mentor, based in large part on my own experiences. In the process, I wrote things that I am sure could be taken as disrespectful, even with the qualifiers I put on each of them.
And writing this email, I realized that while I’m still not officially over the hump and into the field, this is the transition that a scholar who isn’t white has to make. I have to be this guy. I sort of knew it, but now I actually feel it in my bones. It’s a deep, penetrating feeling that I’m going to be the guy who makes people uncomfortable because I rattle the status quo.
I’ve defended another scholar who is like this for years. I once worked with a person who I deeply admire but who working with, for me, was difficult because while we agree about issues that matter and agree that certain things need to be studied certain ways and representation matters… we sort of fundamentally disagree on how to enact that.
People in my old home field HATE this person. Deeply and with a reserved sort of “you shouldn’t take what *person* says seriously” or “*person* is such an asshole!” I’ve been told more than once to distance myself from “that whole mess.”
What people don’t realize is that therein lies the whole problem that anyone who is not white, not male (though in academia some white women read as having a similar privilege to white males), not heteronormative: you have two options. One is to be quiet and take people’s crap. That’s what most of us do most of the time. Ha, ha, “Chief,” good one. I love the tipi poster on your wall. Yes, we can “bury the hatchet.” We get used to that.
But the side that gets results is this, and I’m going to be super blunt: we have to be a pain in your fucking ass every second of every hour of every time you do something insensitive. I know it doesn’t happen out of malice, but the same sins keep being revisited over and over. If it takes some discomfort to fix, so be it.
The email I was responding to was a positive email about a good person (I assume– I haven’t met the person, but I read a vita and can imagine). But my response pointed to the ways academia is currently failing that person. And I can do that, because they’re shockingly similar to the ways academia failed me. I got lucky; I kept trying to “do the right thing” until I got to a place where I have the most tentative of secure feelings. I’m still waiting for a provost to decide it’s okay for me to have the job I have, but at least I’m not– in theory– still on the job market.
I tried to make sure this other scholar doesn’t get blindsided by the academy the way I did. But in doing it, I am fairly positive at least one person in the email chain will think I’m being vindictive.
Maybe I am.
What we have to realize about life is that if I want vengeance, that’s selfish. I know that. And generally, I don’t want revenge. It’s silly.
But if I can focus that normal human desire for payback into a way of creating justice, I’m going to do it every. single. time.
Because as I’ve told anyone who has asked me, at the end of the day when I lay down to sleep my brain will not stop, and I will be forced to answer to myself for anything I’ve done before I can rest. If I watch a University set another person of color up to fail, and I say nothing because I want to look like the kind, peaceful little Indian boy, WE ALL LOSE. I don’t enjoy getting in people’s faces. It makes me extremely anxious and uncomfortable. But if I don’t do it who is going to? How will we change anything?
So from this point forward, as if I wasn’t already, the world best be ready for the Phill that is the thorn in the paw of the lion. Because the lion lives too good. It needs a little pain.