I don’t name names here. Just sayin’.
Also, I want to reiterate something I said last week; anyone finding their way here to read is obviously welcome to partake of what I’ve created, but this isn’t housed on a server from where I work, it isn’t endorsed by my employer or my superiors… and it’s not an academic research paper. This is my blog. I share stuff here. If you don’t like it, hit the back button.
That said, I want to talk about something I know I have mentioned here before. Given how the state of our understanding of how race and gender interact in this country, I think it’s worth a revisiting.
Anyone who knows me knows a few pretty basic things about my life, but I’m going to toss them up here, in rapid succession, simply because they matter to the story. I’m a first-generation college student. I came from a poor family, raised by a single mother for most of my childhood (a brief interlude with a step-dad happened in my teens). I have degrees in creative writing, political science, composition and rhetoric and my big gun, my PhD in Rhetoric and Writing: Digital and Cultural Rhetorics and Professional Writing. I’m (mostly) Cherokee. My Cherokee perspective is intimately tied to my academic work, though I work on games and pop culture, which often confuses people. That’s the info dump.
Here’s the story.
I was on the academic job market for “a while.” Longer than I needed to be, honestly, but that was due to weirdness with my first appointment, and the many interviews I went on were all sort of tinged with the issues of one or two committee members just not “getting” what I do. And I understand that. Much like anything that has a distinct flavor, I’m not for everyone. No harm, no foul.
Well, one foul.
I applied for a few jobs where I knew people on the hiring committees. Those people didn’t really stick up for me, which is kind of something that bugs me due to the fact that we speak so much about alliance and advocacy in rhetoric departments (largely to amuse ourselves, I think, in the way that someone posts a Facebook status about a tragedy then does nothing else– a little placebo to make us all feel like we fought the good fight).
These folks that I knew, friends– and yes, despite my criticism above, I don’t hold ill will toward these people– were willing to share some notes with me, to help me improve.
One shared a troubling note. As I mentioned, I study games, but I’m not what you’d call a single-area scholar. I study all sorts of stuff that sort of orbits and darts into and out of games, and while that’s my sort of meaty core focus, I’m far from a one-trick cowboy. At one school, I interviewed with a committee that had full professors that were significantly older than, and more prominent than, me. That makes them my elders. And if you understand Cherokee culture, you don’t interrupt or belittle an elder.
These two full professors told me at the outset that they didn’t know “much of anything” about video games and expressed a sort of fear that the questions might lead to places where they couldn’t follow up. I took that as a prompt to not show off expansive game knowledge, and so I shaped my responses to their questions to hit their wheelhouses, not ignoring games at all, but making a concerted effort to talk about games in ways that made sense to each of them and allowed for them to follow-up and relate.
I also answered their questions literally, because that’s just what *I* do. I’m not sure if that’s Cherokee or Phill. But if you ask me a question like “what books would you use to teach a class on X,” I’m going to tell you the few books that come into my mind then tell you, frankly, that I’d do research before putting together the class and that in the moment I really couldn’t give an exhaustive reading list, but I’ll offer concepts and assignment ideas and learning goals. Because– secret for any non-academics reading this– that’s how you build a class. Anyone who tries to build a class with an on-the-spot reading list is doing a bad job.
So this friend of mine on the committee said that the committee wasn’t impressed because I didn’t name a bunch of game theorists and so they assumed I didn’t know my stuff. I pointed out, slightly confused, the extensive reference list on my writing sample. The friend rebuffed me. So I then explained that I didn’t just start saying the names of people that no on one on the committee would know because that felt smug and belittling, like I would be trying to lord the fact that I could name drop over the committee.
The friend said that’s what I should do. Always.
And I explained that culturally, that doesn’t work. It’s disrespecting an elder, and it works against fostering communication and collaboration by creating a sense that I possess knowledge that is mine to weaponize, to silence.
The friend said to me, with zero irony, “Can’t you just act like the rest of us when you interview?”
And I said “you mean can’t I act white?”
There was a moment of silence. I used it to elaborate.
“I’m one of a handful of Cherokee in the academy, part of a dwindling number of people who adhere to a set of traditions and customs that is older than this country, that was colonized and all-but-destroyed. What you’re suggesting is that I ignore that I have the chance to be a Cherokee in this space. You’re asking that I act white so I can earn the favor of white people. I know you said it to help, but that’s about the most racist and colonizing thing you could do while offering advice.”
My friend gave me a small lecture about the sacrifices we have to make to work in the academy.
I contended, as I still do to this day, that making that sacrifice harms all of us. Not just me. It erases culture.
My friend told me it was going to be hard for me to find a job if I insisted on enacting my cultural stance (read : being me), and told me that if that committee had realized how much game-based knowledge I had I would almost have surely been at or near the top of their list.
I pointed out that since that person knew me, that person would have told them.
There as an awkward discussion of ethics, which just seemed weird given it was coming while faces were still red from telling me to act white. But my friend insisted that it wouldn’t be right to speak to things that the person knew from something other than my interview and materials.
Then I mentioned my writing sample. Then I thanked my friend for the advice.
These are the sorts of things that happen. They’re microaggressions, but they do tremendous harm.
We need to be more aware of these things as they happen. It doesn’t ever seem like a big deal to the majority. But applying standards unevenly in regard to understanding culture– by heaping praise on anyone who will behave-as-white– we stifle diversity.
And we NEED diversity now, more than ever. The old boy’s network is starting to collapse on itself like a dying star. If the most learned among us can’t be out in front of “the old ways” and be more inclusive and understanding, we are quite literally screwed.