When Academia Attacks: Protecting Black Womanhood from Institutional Harm

Table of Links

Abstract and 1 Introduction

2. Early Life

3. Whiteness as an Institution

4. The Triple Threat

5. The Academic Plantation Field

6. The Future Is Black Women

7. Imagination as a Tool

8. Imagination through Research

9. Imagination through Play

10. Collaboration as Imagination

11. Conclusions and References

5. The Academic Plantation Field

I entered academia in 2017, right after the Trump election, to disrupt the violence that was about to come. I was a first time mother of a six month year old Black girl. I thought academia would be the safest place to be, given the focus on academic freedom and speech. What I learned about academia shocked me, but it put into perspective what I was witnessing in the field of social service work. Academia is the belly of the beast. The foundation and construction of whiteness, patriarchy, and coloniality are conceptualized and maintained through academic research, pedagogy, and practices. Black feminist scholars such as Crenshaw (1991), Collins (2000), Hooks (1994), and Cooper (2014, 2018) all speak about the interlocking nature of these systems of oppression within academia in their scholarship. My time in academia has been eye-opening and liberating. I have spent the last seven years navigating the beast of academia, trying to figure out if there is space for me as a Black woman scholar. While in academia, I realized my mere existence was a broken policy shaped by the systems and structures of US academic institutions that curate, teach, and practice dominant epistemologies. My humanity does not protect whiteness and is deemed a threat to the institution.

Throughout my seven years in academic training, I have personally been the subject of multiple complaints from students about my pedagogy, attire, and overall demeanor. I have spent almost every semester in some form of mediation mandated by the University to resolve student conflicts with me. As an adjunct faculty member, I have been taped without permission, and audio has been used by university lawyers and administrators without my knowledge. I am not perfect; I acknowledge I have areas I am challenged in, but academia has not aided in my growth as a professor. Academia has served as a place where I feel like I am being put on a psychological and emotional wiping post without any meaningful, tangible outcome. For example, when I interrogate the complaints against me and summons to what I like to call “dean court”, they have almost always been about perceived unsafety regarding feelings or the directness and candor in my deconstruction of power. One academic year, I had to hire an attorney to support me in navigating the academic institutional jungle, and I was summoned to multiple hearings without an actual material resolution. White Supremacist values continue to oppress, subjugate, surveil, exploit, police, and justify violence against Black women (Collins 2000; Rodgers 2021; Spencer and Perlow 2018). Rodgers (2021) affirms how the harm of Black women in academia shows up as overt and subtle experiences of discrimination, including the silencing of Black women’s voices and positionality. Institutional power has tried to silence me multiple times. In most of the mediations I attended, when I asked the goal of the meeting, the answer was almost always to obtain a resolution. When I asked for examples of possible resolutions, I was told that the goal was to provide space for the student who was almost always white presenting to address upset, unsafety, and hurt feelings with my pedagogy. I am a professor, not a clinician. My job is not to fix feelings it is to educate. Somehow, in the school of social work where I carry out most of my teaching, we have created a space where future social work practitioners and clinicians will hold their feelings as facts and weaponize them to hold Black women hostage. We are not your mammy; get somebody else to do it!

Today, in 2024, I am deeply concerned with the field of social work and academia overall. We have reached what I hope to be the peak of extreme violence and pure savagery. I am witnessing firsthand what my aunties and mentors told me all along would happen. In 2024, I am witnessing the killing of thousands of children across the world, and even acknowledging it in this paper may be breaking an institutional policy at one of the many institutions I am affiliated with. There is this silent yet very loud gag order within academia to say nothing about what we are witnessing right before our eyes in 2024. Academic freedom has been eliminated. Institutional policies have been weaponized to dismiss violence, which protects imperialism. Yet, if we acknowledge the extreme violence and trauma, we may risk our careers and livelihoods. We have entered what I am now calling “the savagery of whiteness”. This phrase relates to the way whiteness engages in extreme violence and demands that we all stand by and “mind our business”. Whiteness is currently operating like a dysfunctional family that protects the abusive actions of an adult against children rather than protecting the children. Whiteness is upset that Black women will not agree to watch death without protest. Opinions and feelings have been turned into facts and used to target, dox, and harm young people on college campuses. I have witnessed faculty call for the arrest of students ON campus due to protests because they have different opinions. Whiteness does not know how to engage in difference. Whiteness is a tyrant. I have witnessed and been a victim of online exchanges, which resulted in a person contacting my employer to “tell on me”. If this is not the end of times, I hope it is the beginning. If this is the beginning of something new (which I hope), what does accountability look like when academic institutions are responsible for producing and helping legitimate feelings and opinions as fact? Whiteness does not have an answer because whiteness is too busy denying that it exists.