Eliminating Ignorance, Womanist Perspectival Discourse, and Cannon Formation

Abstract

Eliminating Ignorance, Womanist Perspectival Discourse, and Cannon Formation Cheryl A. Kirk-Duggan (bio) "Eliminating Ignorance""Ain't Got Time to Die" (The Spiritual, Redacted):Well, she kept so busy praising her saviorKept so busy fighting for justice Kept so busy pondering pedagogyAin't got time to die! In response to a lead article for the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, "Silent Scripts and Contested Spaces," Cannon illustrated "Eliminating Ignorance."1 We must be willing to embrace the benefits of embodied multiculturalism to address effectively, with powerful strategies, the dismantling of hierarchal, mechanistic patterns of racist misogyny that justify reasoned legitimacy of oppressive, systemic domination. Cannon did not simply choose to become an extraordinary pedagogue. Rooted in the legacy of her maternal great-grandmother, Martha Zella Barringer, one subjected to brutal, dehumanizing violence against her personhood, Cannon mirrored Barringer's intellectual curiosity and zeal for learning. Barringer completed her elementary and secondary education at Scotia Seminary, a school of the Presbyterian Church. Generations of Cannon women believed education to be the oldest, most important field where they have served powerfully and have long focused their energies on embracing education as an arena of opportunity. Despite the paucity of funds, horrible living conditions, and other challenges, Martha and other black women, the vanguard of knowledge for freed people, were educators, courageously committed to emancipatory epistemology. [End Page 113] Cannon juxtaposes her family's teaching legacy from post-enslavement and her experience as senior racial/ethnic woman in the American Academy of Religion (AAR) since the 1970s, to posit how past institutionalized domination shapes the present; thus, women of color in classrooms today, and all who support us, can move from what is to what can be. Such a hegemonic stranglehold pertains to the superior/inferior foundational paradigms, methods, and canons operative in our educational and sociopolitical institutions. Social construction of gendered racism and concrete policies of inequities place women of color amid a state of conflict: surrounded by enemies and relentlessly criticized or attacked not for what we do but for who we are. Such aggressions create cognitive dissonance in everyday communities of thought, as Western scientific intellectual tradition formulates significant microaggressions against women of color. Cannon worked to eliminate ignorance given our academic context in which decision makers often heavily weigh the strongest credentials of white men as they systematically shift their standards and focus on the weakest aspects of racial/ethnic minorities. Governing structures deny many professors who are women of color recognition as viable, equal members in the body politics of learned societies. Power brokers in academia have created and perpetuated an economic stronghold in which black women's intelligence is belittled, misperceived, and devalued. Cannon reminded us that while fulfilling our responsibilities as full-time faculty members, we must pay attention to the quality of our lives and to how the emotional drain from the acute and unyielding verbal harassment, dirty looks, and demeaning jokes takes a toll on our health and overall well-being. What can any woman of color say when we experience brutal, callous, unrestrained, multilayered disrespect? To help eliminate ignorance, women of color in the field of religion must exegete structural, cultural, and hidden manifestations of power dynamics in order to identify folks outside the classroom who engineer questioning and undermining of our authority, intelligence, and interdisciplinary teaching methods inside the classroom. When women of color publicly share the disrespect occurring in our classrooms with members of the larger educational community, too often our intellectual compatriots in learned guilds of religion and biblical literature—even those usually oriented toward justice advocacy—seem disinterested observers or casual bystanders. There are no simple responses to the complex tapestry of white supremacist, androcentric, patriarchal, misogynistic norms within educational cultures, where women of color classrooms are battlegrounds. Thus, we eliminate ignorance by embracing the benefits of embodied multiculturalism to address effectively, with powerful strategies, the dismantling of hierarchal, mechanistic patterns of white supremacist patriarchal misogyny that justify the logic and legitimacy of oppressive, systemic domination. [End Page 114] Expanding an Alice Walker Quote: for Dr. Katie,"Writing, Teaching, and Preaching saved herfrom the sin and inconvenience of violence." Womanist Perspectival Discourse"Them that's...