Brother, did you forget your name?/Did you lose it on the wall/Playin’ tic-tac-toe?/Yo, check the diagonal/Three million gone/Come on/Cause they’re counting backwards to zero.
-Zack de la Rocha, Rage Against the Machine, “Freedom”
I’m about to take a rather serious risk professionally. It will seem, on the surface, like it’s not such a big deal, but there’s a level beneath it that is even more frightening given the status of rights in our country right now.
BTW, Barack Obama ignored my 8 pleas to free Leonard Peltier, just like George W. Bush before him, and Bill Clinton before him. Lots of white people who the court was unfair to walk free while Leonard dies in a cell thanks to recanted testimony against him.
Back to me, since I was telling a story. I wrote a book. Well, it’s a dissertation that I went through the painful (and advice to others– unnecessary, start over with new research) effort to revise into a book. As I did the research for the book, I attempted to enact an Indigenous (more specifically Cherokee) methodology. But I found, as I talked to people, that no one really wanted to hear about that. So I didn’t explain it that way in the first draft of the book.
I could have revised the way I was asked to by the reviewer of my manuscript. And don’t get me wrong, I took the reviewers comments to heart and acted on many of them. But a number of them attempted to apply the traditional methodologies of rhetoric and composition-western, anglo-white male expectations– over top of what I did.
So I decided to take a risk with the revision. I’m going to explain, in a book about video games, what it means to do case-study research in an ethnographic style (it’s not real ethnography, as I only spent a year total with my participants). This is going to lead to the manuscript being extremely different from any other book I have encountered about game studies and might topple over the “fit” of the book in the series that contracted it.
This is a risk. It’s a potential danger. But my career has been all about navigating dangers that people don’t realize are dangers to me. I’m not sure that they can see it if I don’t tell them. Which puts me in the most awkward of positions, for the whole concept of a Cherokee rhetoric that I attempt to employ is to not be actively disrespectful. And how does one say “hey, you don’t see the racist ways these events are impacting me?” without it feeling disrespectful?
I know that being called racist hurts. It happened to me in a graduate seminar once. Amid a discussion where two extremely white literature Ph.D. students were arguing what Bloom and Fish would think of a piece, I said “Well, Chuck D, of all people, can inform this discussion…” and was railroaded for being racist by saying “of all people,” since no one realized that was my code for saying “I am about to mention someone who isn’t a white person who is nestled in your Ivory Tower.” So 2 white dudes who researched poetry told a working-class Cherokee rhetoric student that he was racist because he put a qualifier on introducing a rapper into their discussion of white dudes.
That event still hurts, and it was over 10 years ago.
So no, I don’t want to tell people “hey, you’re being racist.”
But the problem is…
… people are being racist. It happens to me in interviews all the time. There is a way that we behave, as Cherokee. We respect our elders, and we respect people in general as they speak. We don’t interrupt our peers unless we simply must, and we absolutely do not interrupt our elders. We also don’t belittle our elders by intentionally speaking over their heads but things they don’t understand. And since that latter thing is the de facto way of illustrating mastery in rhetoric and composition (in English studies in general), I’ve had numerous situations where I was told afterward that I hadn’t exhibited expert knowledge, but this was after being told point blank by a full professor interviewing me that they didn’t know the first thing about what I was talking about, resulting in me doubling back and finding a way into the topic that utilized their understanding. This was viewed as me being simple, of me not knowing what I have trained expertise in. This was my cultural understanding of how to treat people.
The expectation is that I could just act more like the other people in the academy, violating my own cultural ways to adopt another paradigm. Which, if you translate it, is a request to act more white. That’s something that white folks have asked of Native folk for years to mixed results. It’s pretty much racist, though. It’s an act of colonization. And if I point that out to a mentor offering me the advice to “act more like us,” I feel like I’m being a jerk. So… I don’t do that.
So yes, a risk. I’m hoping that when re-evaluating this book manuscript my editors and the external reviewer will respect what I’ve laid bare and articulated in this draft, the things I left out of the book before so it’d look more like the work in our field is “supposed” to look, creating weaknesses that were only weaknesses due to lack of understanding the reasoning behind those moves. I hope this move lands. If it doesn’t, it will tell me something I didn’t really want to know, but something I should probably suspect.
The difference, I think, in my way is that I choose to believe that people want the best for other people and the best for all of us. I will maintain that faith as I take a scary step out onto the balance beam.
Wish me luck.