Black Lives Matter in Scholarship, too.
This is dedicated to who I once was: a newly designated PhD student who discovered that of the 200 required texts for first-year students only three were women and none were black. I shared this with the hashtag #BlackInTheIvory that went viral on Twitter earlier this week. Shardé Davis and Joy Melody Woods started the hashtag to put a spotlight on what black scholars were experiencing in academia. As Nidhi Subbaraman reported:
The stories shocked some… some said they were motivated to improve; some decided to #Strike4BlackLives and #ShutDownSTEM on 10 June, pausing their usual academic work to reflect and to plan how to fight anti-Black racism. As of 11 June, more than 5,750 accounts on Twitter had used the #BlackInTheIvory hashtag.
I think back on the first two years as a first-generation PhD student in a predominately white/non-black university, majoring in technology and recall how excited I felt, as well as how anxiety-producing the experience was for me. I experienced a panic attack right before a cognitive studies class and had to think my way out of it because I was by myself and I didn’t want to be marked late or absent. What I did not know at the time was that it was going to get worse. Much worse.
When I talked about a connection between mathematics and graffiti I was told stay in your lane. Undeterred, I discovered ethnomathematician Ron Eglash and his colleagues who wrote “Culturally Situated Design Tools: Ethnocomputing from Field Site to Classroom” that includes Graffiti Grapher, an online CSDT tool that merges graffiti, math and coding. Eventually, Ron and his team developed a few CSDTs to support my doctoral work based on Afrofuturism.
There were other red flags. After my second year oral exam, a thesis reviewer asked if I could swap W.E.B. Du Bois with Walter Benjamin, a contemporary of Du Bois. Another committee member said the new texts I chose to study made him uncomfortable because he did not know much about them. It should not have been a surprise (to me) that I failed my first attempt to move forward with my doctoral thesis. I came really close to quitting the program.
I never gave up though. The graffiti/math idea had potential. I found other ways to bridge cultural artworks with STEAM subjects, mostly to engage underrepresented ethnic students. As I jumped over the academic obstacles I was using resources provided by the university to create opportunities to explore my ideas. The National Science Foundation sponsored a workshop to bring black and brown artists together with STEM experts and educators.
Current black graduate students (mostly PhD candidates) will ‘cold contact’ me to ask about how to get published or get speaking engagements. Some want to know how I made it through. Most of the time I felt discouraged. Faculty conveyed indifference or mild to moderate hostility when I broached certain topics. I was determined not to be marginalized at the university or in the world. I kept sending news of my accomplishments to administrators and one of them responded with encouragement: “Keep tooting your horn!” I thought, ‘If I don’t do it who will?’
Fortunately, I knew where to look or who to ask as far as finding the information I needed to move forward and complete the PhD. I had almost forgotten what my mother once told me about myself: I was not afraid to fail or take risks and I was definitely not afraid of others’ discouragement. I had cognitive tools from earlier experiences that helped me to survive and thrive in academia as a student. I only wish I had a cohort to provide more support.
Some brief takeaways:
Representation is important. Not only should there be works by black and brown scholars in the canon, but also black and brown instructors and administrators.
Cohorts can support students. Encourage students to develop cohorts that support their interests and research. This includes faculty, students and even experts outside of the school.
Help students develop cognitive tools. Being in a predominantly white/non-black institution adds another dimension of difficulty to the black student’s experience. Students need to know how to channel resilience, when to engage risk taking and how to reframe situations to keep pushing forward.