…they want me to remember their memories and I keep on remembering mine. —Lucille Clifton1My essay is composed of five memories and a reflection. These memories illustrate my experience of the second shift, and echoes those of many other Black women in Communication Studies (see #BlackInTheIvory and #CommunicationSoWhite2): the misogynoir working twice as hard to earn half as much.3 My essay is in the form of memories, told as stories, because my own healing from overexposure to anti-Blackness in Predominantly White Institutions (PWIs) has been through story sharing.1One of the first papers I wrote as a graduate student that I was proud of was composed in the form of a letter. I was inspired by the lyrical, experimental writing of bell hooks, Patricia Williams, and other Black feminist thinkers. It was the 1990s. Intersectionality and interdisciplinarity were buzzing in the intellectual air of my lakefront campus.However, when I got my paper back, there was one sentence of feedback. One sentence, from a white professor who would be on my PhD committee:Maybe you can write like this when you’re Houston Baker Jr., but not now.I know that she meant it as advice. She was concerned that I’d never get published in the “right” journals writing like that. Though I got an A on the paper, the message was sent: this kind of writing will not be allowed in your dissertation.I was the only Black student in the PhD program. I suspected that professors would require me to first prove I “mastered” the Western tradition. I would have to continue code-switching.2My first semester on the tenure clock consisted of very long days. I taught my large lecture course, met with teaching assistants, headed to committee meetings, and then returned to my office to maybe eke out some writing before going home.At the end of one such day, I sat in my windowless office and closed my eyes. I was exhausted. Was it the schedule, or was it the miscarriage? It had been over a month, but I was still using maxi pads due to continued heavy bleeding.Suddenly I felt another surge of blood. I headed for the bathroom, dashing past the rows of lockers in our building. Our department resided in a former high school, but renovations hadn’t included removing the lockers. It felt like those horrible dreams where you’re back in middle school and realize you didn’t study for the test, and if you fail you’ll have to repeat seventh grade—and endure all the bullying you endured for having breasts, having an Afro, having curvy hips.I caught my reflection in the dingy bathroom mirror: eyes sunken, frown lines bracketing my lips, acne clusters around my chin. You might as well be in middle school, my mind grumbled.As I left the bathroom, I realized I hadn’t checked my mail. I was waiting for directives from a journal editor. (These were the days before everyone did everything on email.) But my mailbox was empty except for a folded sheet of notebook paper on which someone had written “Professor Squires.”I unfolded the sheet and read its contents in one look, which was easy given the block letters and underlining:YOU’RE SUPPOSED TO TEACH AMERICAN MEDIA HISTORY, NOT BLACK MEDIA HISTORY.I stopped breathing. That afternoon I had lectured on the film Birth of A Nation and racism in Hollywood. Somewhere in that lecture hall, some student decided they needed to write this note. To “remind me of my place.”My heart raced. Was this just the beginning of more harassment? How would it impact my evaluations, my tenure case? I knew my department chair was still in his office. I climbed the stairs to show him the note. To ask for guidance, for help.But his response made me feel worse.“Well, that’s interesting! At least they didn’t say it to your face.” He handed me back the note.I was stunned. Angry. But I couldn’t risk showing it.I asked, “What do you think I should do?”“I wouldn’t worry about it.” He smiled and turned back to his computer screen.I mumbled an “okay,” wished him a good evening, and left.The message was clear: I would have to find help and empathy outside of my tenure “home.”I called my sister. I called my husband. I cried. I dried my tears and got back to work. Because I knew that I would have to work twice as hard at my research to have a chance to overcome race and gender-biased student evaluations.43At a departmental event, a white man, newly tenured, told me that I shouldn’t be included in the “Political Communication” group. He explained, with a knowing shrug, “You do race and media. It’s not the same.”My mixed methods and historical comparisons fell outside of the social scientific canon he considered legitimate. My extra efforts to read multiple literatures, apply qualitative and quantitative methods, were bastardizations, exiled from the subfield. I could not claim common lineage with him.4When my tenure case was under review, I went on the job market. Senior colleagues advised it. They said tenure was “never a guarantee” (I knew that); “the College wants to see that another peer institution would hire you” (Why?); and “there’s no way you’ll get a decent raise without a counter offer” (Hadn’t I proven myself worth it?).I was hyperaware that I was the first woman of color, the only junior professor who had been pregnant and mothering, to be put up for promotion in that department. I had said yes to everything I was asked to do—and to be clear, as a junior professor, I was asked to do too much. Yes to teaching the large introductory class while my white male pre-tenure colleagues taught small seminars. Yes to serving on another committee, even when I was on maternity leave after a disastrous pregnancy that ended with one triplet dead and his siblings hospitalized for two months. I was terrified to be labeled “inflexible” or “not collegial.” I knew too many horror stories of women of color being denied tenure despite their excellent CVs.The day my department chair phoned to notify me of the positive tenure vote, I was getting out of an elevator at a conference. I mumbled a thank you. I was relieved I had gotten tenure. Not happy—relieved.I took the job I’d been offered in another state. But the change of place did not lead to a change of pace.5It was 6 pm on a Sunday night. I was sitting at my desk, hunched over my laptop, sending off another email, trying to solve another problem, when I felt a stabbing sensation, like someone was pressing a knitting needle through my breastbone.I gasped for enough breath to yell: “I need to go to the ER—now!”Though I had tenure, I had published multiple books, and I had recently been promoted to full professor, I was still working twice as hard and expecting half as much. And it was killing me.That night I was admitted to the cardiac ward. I was in the midst of leading a four-person faculty hire to increase faculty in race, indigeneity, gender & sexuality studies. I was a mother of twins, one with special needs. I was on multiple committees, and mentoring faculty and graduate students of color. I was in denial about the physical and emotional costs of trying to survive in the hostile and toxic world of PWIs. I was always on, always on the lookout for trouble, always solving problems sent my way—problems I didn’t create.Thus, my heart lost its rhythm. When I laid down at night, I felt like I was choking. My voice was ragged from always code-switching, my tongue dry from translating, my back collapsing from trying to be a bridge.Looking out the window of my hospital room, I was so tired. I asked the question: How can I be who I am and live?* * *Back in 1986, during the savage battles of the “culture wars,” June Jordan asked, “How can I be who I am” in an educational system built on anti-blackness? My field’s reckoning with #CommunicationSoWhite testifies to the ways white supremacy continues to stalk the academy, continues to harm us as we try to make a way out of no way.How can I be who I am?I turned to the words of Jamaica Kincaid:The thing that I am branded with and…denounced for, I now claim as my own. I am illegitimate, I am ambiguous. In some way I actually claim the right to ambiguity, and the right to clarity. It does me no good to say, “Well, I reject this and I reject that.” I feel free to use everything…I was forced to memorize John Milton and that was a very painful thing…I’m glad to know it. I’m sorry that the circumstances of how I got to know it were so horrid, but, since I know it, I claim every right to use it.5I turned to the words of Audre Lorde:Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.6I wrote in my journal:I aim to inherit and avenge all the grey hairs denied my ancestors and stolen from my contemporaries.I had to find time and tools to heal from the complex traumas of surviving racism and a devastating start to motherhood. I needed to re-member the story of my life differently than the myth of twice as good to get half as much.I realized how much further I had to go on the path to decolonizing my mind, body, and spirit. I knew in my bones how crucial it was to shift my approach to work if I wanted to avoid the fate of too many Black women who die much too young from the toxic mix of diseases—hypertension, diabetes, lupus—that epidemiologists now know are fueled by systemic racism.7Katherine McKittrick asks: how do we “foster a commitment to acknowledging violence and undoing its persistent frame, rather than simply analytically reprising violence.”8My shift, in large part, has been to engage with that commitment across spaces of knowledge production. To affirm Black life in the midst of anti-Black violence, on and off campus. Because the second shift almost killed me.Processes of unlearning in the wake of the second shift reawakened me to that which nourishes my being and my scholarship. I had to pull apart the various dimensions of the second shift through engagements in creative writing, somatic movement, yoga, trauma studies, decolonial theory, and community story sharing.I remapped the second shift into five dimensions. One dimension is official and unofficial demands for diversity “service.” Another dimension is the work of justifying interdisciplinary critical approaches to research, after all the extra labor to engage with Black Studies and other fields to better engage with questions of racism that your field has, at best, largely ignored and, at worst, exacerbated. The next dimension is supporting BIPOC students and colleagues on campus. The fourth dimension is engagement with BIPOC communities that the university has historically been hostile to and/or participated in the abuse of through theft of land and practices of colonial, extractive scholarship.The final dimension of the second shift is the labor of repair: recovering from years of learning and working within toxic academic institutions. The second shift almost killed me because, as my memories illustrate, I was overwhelmed by the institutional dimensions of second-shift work, hoping (erroneously) that achieving tenure would somehow open ears that had long been closed to innovative interdisciplinary scholarship; to arguments about the necessity of structural change; to the necessity of centering the knowledge of BIPOC people in that process. Almost killed by the demand to be twice as good, to work at a superhuman rate, to survive.But we’re not superhuman. And when my body collapsed, I was forced to re-member, to rethink why I was working at all.9As I recovered, I remembered how to read with awe and pleasure by revisiting scholars who excited me as a student. I dove into the works of Afrofuturist writers on my shelves. I went back to the poets. I re-engaged my own family’s history with indigenous scholarship to better situate myself in relationship to the settler colonial violence that undergirds the land grant university. I embraced self-care as community care.I stopped bifurcating my life. I didn’t make recovery a side hustle on top of my academic day job. I determined to teach differently, to stop code-switching and raise my expectations of others to learn the codes I was ciphering, to make good on their promises to value intersectional work, to value and #CiteBlackWomen. I revised syllabi to include creative writing and musings, to encourage curiosity over competition, to allow students to experiment with voice. I include poetry to get at “affect” from a different angle, to infuse the power of metaphor and imagery into the work of understanding theory and method, of how to craft a research question. I collaborate on healing spaces with and for BIPOC women, on and off campus.I am a recovering academic. As I recover, I am amazed at how much more awake I feel. But I am also worried. The world seems on the brink of disaster—this year alone has seen fires, floods, plague, and rebellion. But we have an historic opportunity to shape real change.My work will continue to incorporate the healing path I am traveling. I’m feeling curious and excited again about being a professor, even as I am hesitant to believe that the reactions of the university to a pandemic and uprisings against white supremacy will be different than in 1919, 1968, 1992, or 2014.10I am grateful to the communities—ancestral, contemporary, intellectual, and spiritual—who have helped me remember to celebrate, as Lucille Clifton wrote,11 the fact that I have not been killed (yet) by institutions that still do not value Black life.
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Jun 2, 2023
Hugo Ferpozzi 