"Let's start by pointing out that intersectionality isn't such a scary word, and gasp, plenty of people who haven't been university-educated are capable of looking it up and understanding it. Here's a good definition. It's not that hard to understand. It's essentially a useful way of saying that things like sexuality, race, class, religion, and ability overlap. For example, a White woman's experience of sexism may be vastly different from a Black woman's. Has your brain died from exhaustion yet? It's so condescending to suggest that non-academics just aren't smart enough to get this."

--le projet d’amour: On Feminism: Intersectionality

(via Tudo Bom(b)) 

Take a look! It's in a book!

I officially have my copy of the undergraduate research journal that published a version of my junior independent work!!!

Yup, this makes me an author, rather than solely a writer. And I'ma play up those semantics, haha.

I can be cited: 

Reid, Maya Ange'le. "Learning to be Adults: The Effects of University Structure on Students' Transitions to Adulthood." Sociologicsl Insight: Undergraduate Research Journal. University of Texas at Austin. Vol. 4, May 2012. 73-95.

I try to be transparent in my assumptions, theories, frameworks, and arguments because intellectual work is political work.

--Chauncey De Vega 

I may be a Sociology major. I may want to be a Sociologist. But African-American Studies MADE me.

It was the first thing I fell in love with on this campus. Everything that I do, I do because it said I could, because it changed my implicit definitions of "scholarship" and "intellectually significant". It made me realize how much I didn't know about my people, about myself, and about what learning should feel like. And so, while I was off the map when Schafer Riley attacked those graduate students and the discipline I think of as home, I'll be damned if I stand for it. The work we do is important BECAUSE it's not mainstream, because despite all of the post-racialness people like Riley proclaim, no one will do this scholarship if we don't. #Blackademicsunite 

Without Black Studies, what would we know of black protest of Jim Crow, slave revolts (and white suppression of records of these revolts), or the medical exploitation of black and brown bodies? Who would chronicle not just the struggle, but the achievements, creativity, and joys of black lives and experiences? Do naysayers really imagine white scholarship, on its own, has given an honest account on these topics? Or are such accounts simply irrelevant to them?

If anything is intellectually fraudulent, it’s scholarship that, consciously and not, excludes POC scholars or ignores race and ethnicity as categories of analysis. We all, white people included, need Ethnic Studies. Both academic scholarship and our understanding of the world are better, more honest, more robust with them than otherwise.

None of this is to say that black studies is perfect. Like many academic disciplines, it can be deeply bound to “traditional” approaches that marginalize scholarship from or about women, queer, and/or trans people. But it’s also the case that substantive critiques of Black Studies by scholars who take race and racism seriously (i.e., not Sowell and Steele) already exist. That critics are wholly ignorant of both the contributions and critiques of Black Studies is an example of what Spelman anthropologist Erica L. Williams describes as the “emotional labor” PoC scholars “must perform … beyond our job descriptions” and not just in the humanities. The considerable stresses of educating and producing scholarship are compounded by the suspicion and racial hostility PoC scholars routinely face.

PoCs are constantly expected to be emotional midwives to white people. Attempts to claim space or identity for ourselves—without deference to whiteness—are inevitably met with suspicion, anger, fear, and guilt (witness white anger over the President’s racial self-identification). We’re expected to have a conversation on race and racism that centers and assuages white emotions, to speak about race in terms and frameworks that are neither by, for, or ultimately about us. What little space we’re afforded in mainstream media is taken up with 101-level education, demands that we justify our existence, and prove the merit of our perspectives and accomplishments beyond the shadow of a doubt. White critics and, occasionally, other people of color, often feel a casual entitlement to pass judgment on PoC narratives of our own experiences, and on our scholarship, without putting in the effort to learn about or engage with either.

--T. F. Charlton

(via Racialicious) 

I may have coined a term on Twitter the other day.

I tried Googling it and came up with no hits, so maybe I'm the first (in spaces privileged enough to be cataloged on the internet). And now, like any good academic, I am going to define it.

sex subject (n.) a person enthusiastically engaged in the attainment of their own sexual pleasure, with or without the involvement and pleasuring of another person(s). Viewing yourself and others as sex subjects entails the recognition of sexual partners as whole persons with valid sexual desires and the right to choose whether or not to act on them at any particular time rather than just sources of sexual pleasure, as well as an awareness that your partner(s)' body and company are privileges that your partner(s) choose(s) to share with you, not rights or de-personified items to which you are entitled. Ant: sex object

(Now you have something to cite, ChoosingPancakes.)

I welcome commenters with ideas to flesh this term out a little.      

Bullshit?

I think I've been hoodwinked. I think the vast majority of us have been bamboozled. 

Here on campus, I've participated in quite a few discussions about "the art of bullshitting". I've often heard it referred to as the number one skill gained by a Princeton education: the ability to sound like you know what you're talking about when you're really making it up as you go along. Just a few weeks ago, I was marveling at my own ability to read 30 pages of a 200 page book and still answer questions my professor asked the class during lecture. A few nights ago, I was talking about a course I took last Spring that I tried hard to do poorly in (I was taking the class pass/fail) by not doing the readings, bullshitting in precept, making up fairly outrageous paper topics and writing the papers the night before they were due, etc. I don't know exactly, but I'm almost positive I got at least an A- in the class. 

This and other experiences/conversations have called me to reconsider the nature of bullshitting. The OED defines the verb "to bullshit" as "to talk nonsense (to); also, to bluff one's way through (something) by talking nonsense". Urban dictionary agrees, defining it as "to generate stuff that is made up for the purpose of placating someone, or passing an exam, or getting elected to office. Most often false or ridiculous."

I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say that that's not what we're doing in class/precept/papers the vast majority of the time. "Nonsense" is too strong a word. What we're saying is informed by something--if not the course's "required" readings, then by previous knowledge gained from other classes, things picked up in lecture, or even personal experiences which can be quite relevant and illuminating. ...I think that what we so often call "bullshit" is actually "original thought". No one called philosophers and founding scholars of various disciplines bullshitters when they sat around thinking and wrote their various treatises. They were contributing to scholarship and developing intellect and I think that, on a much smaller scale, obviously, we're doing the same thing.

So I'm making a resolution to stop referring to my work in academic settings as bullshit, even when I didn't put as much effort into it as I could have. That feels like selling my academic work, my academic self, short. It feels like I'm not giving myself credit for that of which I'm capable. It sounds like I'm denying that what I think and say and do is important. I feel like existing in a culture that refers to such work as "bullshit" most of the time encourages us to distance ourselves from our scholarship, to not take pride in our work, to discredit that which we are and do. And THAT is some bullshit.       

(1)ne Drop: A project i'm DEFINITELY interested in:

You know anything that touches upon what it means to be Black today will find its way onto my radar sooner or later. When academics and artists join forces, what can result but beauty and a sense of the profound? This project aims not only to challenge people's understandings of Blackness, but also to challenge the way we expect understandings to be challenged, and that in and of itself is beautiful. Watch the promotional video:

A big role to fill:

"Intellectuals are the vanguard or ideological proponents of both well-entrenched and nascent social orders. It is their task to explain what has been, to justify or to overturn what now exists, and to chart what must become tomorrow." -- Manning Marable, How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America (pg. 18-19)

So I'm Taking this Class Called Diversity in Black America

And any of you who has been paying attention knows that recognizing and celebrating diversity within the nebulous group of peoples labeled "Black" in this country is a matter of utmost importance to me. We come from different places (or kind of from nowhere/everywhere), different socioeconomic backgrounds, we have different cultures, we have myriad interests and tastes--we're just as multifarious as any other groups of people. ["Multifarious": adj. meaning "having many different parts, forms, elements, etc. Studying for the GRE is a bitch.] Monolithic representations of our peoples are so last season, you know? 

[Related reading if you're not a regular reader: Tyler Perry brand monolithism, on being black and different, why Awkward Black Girl is awesome, on colorism, on others' perceptions of my blackness, on identity v. solidarity, on being Black and Woman simultaneously, on being Black and non-Christian] 

So when I saw that Imani Perry, who is kind of my academic idol (young, hip, studies fabulously interesting things, gorgeous, fashionable, curly-hair-wearing, social-networking-like-a-boss), was teacing a class this semester called "Diversity in Black America," you know I signed up for that with a quickness expeditiously. I'm more excited by this class than I have been by a class in a long time, and I'm hoping I'm not let down by it. 

I really really wish we were reading this, but as it doesn't come out until two days before the semester starts, I doubt we will be. Whatever, I'm going to read it. Yes, I've become one of those people that reads scholarly works for/by/about Black people out of pure interest/for the fun of it. bell hooks is up next on my reading list, and this will be after that: 

 “If there are thirty-five million Black Americans then there are thirty-five million ways to be Black. There are ten billion cultural artifacts of Blackness and if you add them up and put them in a pot and stew it, that’s what Black culture is. Not one of those things is more authentic than the other.” ~ Touré, Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness: What It Means to Be Black Now  

"Post-Black" as a term doesn't sit well with me, but from that tiny glimpse it seems as though he's referring to Post-narrow-conceptions-of-what-it-means-to-be-Black, which I plan to spend every day of the rest of my life fighting for. And Michael Eric Dyson is an incredible orator, very orotund and impetuous (loud, clear, and passionate), as I learned at Yale's 2010 Black Solidarity Conference. Maybe I'll love it, maybe I'll get pissed the fuck off become livid, but either way I'm excited to read this.

I love writing academically.

People always roll their eyes at me when I say that, but it's the truth. I get EXCITED when I have a new project to research. I love the process of scouring the internet and libraries for the background information I need. I love wearing out all my highlighters, scribbling lots of notes in the margins, and marking the important things according to a star-rating system that is far from systemic. I love introductions, setting you up to play a specific part in this narrative I have created--the part of the believer. I love drawing you in and walking you through my argument step by step, with you trailing me faithfully, drinking in my every word and falling farther and farther into belief. I love MS Word's Readability Statistics, switching up sentence structure, thinking of fancier words when the mood strikes, and treating every sentence--no, every phrase--like a miniature work of art. You know those pictures that are made from lots and lots of smaller pictures, but as long as you're standing at a reasonable distance you can't tell anything but the overall picture? That's sort of how I treat writing a paper--I spend lots of time crafting every little part, but in the end I want you to miss the trees for the forest (though I will be very pleased if you stop to comment on particularly beautiful trees). I don't want to sound like a future lonely old academic when I say this, but I find the whole process of writing a paper to be incredibly comforting. It is predictable and familiar and somehow feels...safe. It feels a little like home. Perhaps it's just the safety of knowing it's something I do well.

She feels the same way I do, it seems:

"Most times when people talk about losing yourself, it has a negative connotation: the overworked girlfriend who lives at her job, the head over heels friend whose made her man her life. I consider those kinds of loss to be falling. To dwell in a state of calm in what you love, so much so that you disappear and there is only passion, that- is losing yourself. And after a week of not opening the file, my professor forced me to click on the file and I dwelled there. Any hesitation I had about the future was gone when I was writing. What I was putting together stopped being a paper or a grade, it became a refuge. And whenever I was in that place, I was putting together something that felt like it was more than my problems, insecurities and doubts." -- Leslie Pitterson, Clutch Magazine

Things that make me go :D

So I picked my tote bag up to put my books back into it as my meeting with my Independent Study professor was coming to a close, and she interrupted me to ask, "What does that bag say? 'I'm not stuck up...'" "Oh," I said, lifting the bag up somewhat hesitantly. This 30-something black female scholar was either going to give me a rant about how stuff like this divides the community, or she was going to love it. And...she got about halfway through before she started to CRACK THE FUCK UP. Like she had to calm herself down so that she could continue reading and then she got to the end and was in hysterics all over again. And then she noticed that it has, in very small font, blacksnob.com, so she starts typing. And she instantly goes to the store and sees they have LOTS of bags and starts reading some of the other ones and laughing and laughing. So I tell her she should check out the blog too, and then I mention that I read almost 140 blogs and if she likes this she might like BougieLand, and when she checked that out she said "Girl, where do you find this stuff?! You're gonna get me addicted." We were just laughing and laughing and I told her I was glad I could provide entertainment and that I would see her next week. 


It makes me feel REALLY GOOD to be entertained by the same things that entertain her. I feel all sophisticated and like my tastes are mature and shit. [Oh, she also is evidently comfortable enough with me that she said she'd write my Mellon Mays dean a letter confirming that I'd read "a shit-ton of books". :D] This little moment we had, it provided a little bit of validation that the career track I'm planning on is for me, like I know I'll fit in. Because in that moment we felt like peers, rather than professor and student; almost like under different circumstances we could be friends. In that moment I imagined her on the trip she'd just taken to Florida with her girlfriends from college who are also academics, and I just craved that lifestyle. It also sort of reminded me of being in Chicago, where my closest friends were all real adults with real jobs and real lives. Also, I think she likes me, and that means I'm going to make sure I keep in touch even after we aren't working together anymore, because it's always good to have established members of the academic community in your court.  

On the Road Back to a Scholarly Attitude

The conversation addressed in the previous post helped remind me why the work I want to do is important. This quote just posted by a friend on Facebook makes me want to get to it. 

2nd 30 Day Letter Challenge--Day 11: Letter to your Future Employer

Dear ___________ College/University,

This letter is hard, because I've never really thought about what I want from you before. That probably isn't good, so I'm going to try to rise to the occasion. 

First off, I suppose I should thank you for taking a chance and hiring me. I was just one more in a sea of eager grad students waving their dissertations in your face trying to show you that I was just a little more interesting than the guy next to me...and you believed me! For that, you have my eternal gratitude. I hope this works out well for us. 
I work best under loose structure. My hope is that you'll provide assistant professors with a mentor, a higher-up in their department who can show them the ropes and help us make the transition from being a student to teaching them. [My work deals with the sociological social psychology of identity in the midst of transitions, so I expect that I will feel a little lost  during this shift. I would like a professional shoulder to lean on, if possible.] We're going to get along great if I can pick what I want to teach, or at least choose from a list of available options. I would like to design my own syllabuses, or at least have the opportunity to modify established ones. I expect the freedom to come to class as I am, curly fro and all; I don't want to be one of those stuffy old professors who wears a suit every day. Again, my work is on identity: I hope we can find a way to let me be me while still representing you. 
I can't tell you how excited I am to have an office. As a student, I was always fascinated by those professors whose offices mysteriously contained just the right book/journal to help you, young grasshopper amidst countless volumes and mountains of paper. There was always something to be inferred by the condition of one's office: the carefully organized shelves professor v. the precarious stacks making the floor a maze professor, the comfy chairs to sit and chat in professor v. the two wooden chairs in front of his/her desk professor. I'm thrilled at the prospect of decorating a place of knowledge, even of having a physical space of knowledge to call my own. 
I hope you're the kind of school where professors precept and office hours are widely attended. I want to get to know my students. I want to help them. I'm not sure yet whether I want to be a PowerPoint professor or a chalk-stains-on-my-pants professor, but I want to inspire them. I want to teach an intro class and an advanced one--I want to reel students in the way I "caught the SOC bug" at Princeton, and once they're in I want to make them ask the harder questions. I won't be afraid to ask the harder questions. I hope that's why you hired me. 
I hope you're an institution that favors interdisciplinary work. I want to be friends with social psychologists (yes, even though I'm a sociologist!). I want to work for (or even in) your African-American studies department. In your Gender and Sexuality department, too. I don't want to be put in a box; I hate boxes. I hope you're a fairly liberal institution...I don't want to be afraid that I won't get tenure because you're scared of what I have to say. I hope you're not scared of controversy. I hope we serve each other well. 

I'm really looking forward to working with you,

Maya

Meh.

The struggfest between my inner academic and my inner couch computer-chair-potato is madddddd real. 

I have a describable and achievable goal, the means by which to get to my end, the time to do it all without feeling rushed...and yet I'm not being productive. I feel...uninspired. I need to refocus. Someday in the not-too-distant future, books and notes like these will be one of the biggest chunks of my life. Remember that fervor we had when we first started our JP readings, Maya? How we devoured article after article and book after book and carried that giant tote bag of library books just to show Alex how dedicated we were? Get that feeling back. Or at the very least, learn how to progress in its absence. #ValuableLifeSkills