Brave men didn’t die face down in the Vietnam mud so I could not style on you/
I didn’t walk uphill both ways to the booth and back to not wild on you/
You think baby Jesus killed Hitler just so I’d whisper?/
And you’re safe and sound and these crooks tapped your phone to not have a file on you?
-El-P, Run the Jewels 3, “Talk to Me”
Every year on my birthday I resolve to blog every day. Every year I don’t. There are reasons.
The biggest one is silly. I’m scared.
You see, I want to write what I think and feel. And that’s dangerous when you’re a scholar who doesn’t have a secure job. I used to write on my blog regularly, but I made a post midway through my Ph.D. program criticizing the structure of the program and the way I was being professionalized and at times, in my estimation, minimized. It was NOT well received.
I learned a lesson from that post. I learned that when you’re different from the norm, you better not voice your concern if you don’t want to face the retaliation that academia swears doesn’t exist.
This is not a criticism of the people who essentially silenced me then. It was a lesson I needed to learn at the time, and I don’t hold any malice. In fact it’s only me opening back up for business and speaking my mind at 40 because I’ve slowly built back to who and what I was. It’s not safe. Not for my career. Not in the America where what was happening hidden in the background is now out front-and-center.
But being quiet isn’t doing anything.
And honestly, when I can see where I got doing exactly what was asked of me, I don’t see the real reason to be afraid to say what I think and be who I am. I’m still fighting and clawing to get where I want to be, often being treated ridiculously by colleagues outside of my program (my program is a godsend– AIMS is amazing. They saved my soul at the moment I was going to give up). People don’t act like they should.
My mother said something to me once, while I was a Ph.D. student, that sort of epitomizes how our family’s view of the world works. I told her that I was confident that if the people in my grad program told me there was a problem with me, I needed to find the problem and fix it (in the recesses of my mind I still believe the claim that I was hard to work with even though I do more service, take on more projects, collaborate with more people, and mentor more students than anyone who trained me at any point in my career). My mom said:
You know, you wake up in the morning and you think that the people who are supposed to know what they are doing know what they’re doing. But they don’t, do they? They’re bad at what they do.
So simple. But such a hard lesson to learn.
My 40th birthday was the first business day of the 45th President of the United States.
I’m watching liberties vanish.
Someone t0ld me about 9 months ago that I do Native American wrong. A white person who trained at an Ivy League university. Told me, a mixed-blood Cherokee who grew up dirt poor suffering the various prejudices of an all-white school system. A white man of privilege told me I “Indian” wrong.
You think that people know how to do their jobs.
Not everyone does.
As for me, I won’t ever claim I do it better than anyone else, but I do my job correctly. I am sure I stumble like anyone else, but when I mess up, I stop right where I am and announce that I messed up.
That blog entry I mentioned earlier in this post, I didn’t make a mistake when I posted it. I suffered due to it. It hurt me to feel the responses of some people. It wasn’t the right thing to do, but it had the exact rhetorical impact I needed. But when I made that post I felt like no one was listening to me. And when I posted it, people listened. I needed to be heard.
And now I’ve decided that I’m going to speak about things here on my blog, right out in public where everyone can see it, so that as I fight what I consider to be the good fight people can see it, see me. Will that be a mistake? If I was teaching a student, I’d warn her of the various dangers. People don’t always want to know.
I doubt this blog will be controversial. I’ll surely be blunt sometimes, and I’m not sure that the sort of people who call me a “social justice warrior” in the hallways of my University will like what I say here. But I don’t know why those people would be reading this. Anyone who knows who I am knows what to expect. I’m not a deceptive person.
If you’re here, I’m glad you found this. I’m 40-years-old. I’m done being scared of what my mentors might say if I speak out. It’s time to be an adult and do my job like *I* know what *I’m* doing. It’s time to hope that others like me out there can see that there is a place for them in the academic world,
It won’t come easy. But there’s a place.