Category: race

academic reorganization · backlash · guest post · race

Guest post: I talked About Racism in Canada in a Public Venue. Here is what happened

erinewunker11 Comments
By Misao Dean
I gave an interview on my research last March on the CBC program The 180. In it I talked about colonialism in Canada, picking away at some of the myths that sustained my childhood sense of “Canadianness,” and arguing that we should read them as representations of colonial power.
These ideas are not that radical in Canada; they’re absolutely conservative, in the context of recent interpretations of Canadian law. But it seems that when you bring those abstract ideas down to specifics – this piece of land, that cultural practice – or when you mention whiteness – well, some people get pretty excited. And someone wrote a reaction to my interview on a British right-wing website called “Heatstreet,” and that got a comment in the Times Higher Education Supplement, and a tweet was picked up by Fox News, and then things went a bit bananas.
On October 23rd 2016 I checked my e-mail and found a request for an interview about my research, from a podcast that is produced in Chicago. My first thought—as a researcher and scholar based in Victoria, British Columbia was WTF? The request referenced a tweet from someone I’ve never heard of, who according to Google, is a sociologist from the UK. My feelings shifted ever-so-slightly from incredulity to careful interests. Maybe my research is really getting some traction, I thought. People are talking about it, excitement, I thought.
By the time I got to work there were more requests for interviews, this time from ESPN, and there was something else: a steady stream of e-mails all consisting or two or three words, calling me a cunt and a fool, an idiot and an “SJW,” (derogatory internet slang for ‘social justice warrior.’) These emails had something in common: they were all lamenting the way I’m poisoning the minds of students. Many of them suggested I commit suicide.
Take a moment and pause on that: I was receiving emails from strangers telling me to commit suicide.
By the time I finished teaching my first class in addition to invitations to be on international news, and the hate-filled trolling, there were also e-mails to the Dean and my department chair, and someone in the Dean’s office had contacted me, offering “support.”
I’m ok, no big deal,I said. When the first death threat appeared in my inbox my stomach dropped, and I started to wonder why I did that interview.
I mean let’s stop and think about this again: I talked about systemic racism in Canada and I got death threats. Me—a middle-aged white university professor whose idea of a good time is a visit to the National Archives—got death threats talking about facts of Canadian social and political history.
My daughters asked me, What did you expect? Talking about race in the mainstream media just makes you a target. I gave this some thought. It doesn’t really help that I was attacked using my own words, taken out of context. This kind of irresponsible and de-contextualized quoting has become an art form among Trump followers who think it’s hilariously funny to post stories that make it look like famous “liberals” have said something entirely opposite to what they actually said: for example, that Michael Moore endorsed Trump, or that a woman academic doesn’t know the first thing about her own research topic.
I don’t know what I expected, but I didn’t expect hundreds of abusive and obscene accusations from people who didn’t even know that the interview was talking about Canada.
I didn’t expect my Rate My Professor  page to be flooded with complaints about my teaching from people I’ve never met, and who can’t find my university on a map.
And I didn’t expect my kids to find abusive comments about me in their Facebook feeds.
I expected a conversation, but this isn’t conversation. Hate isn’t a conversation.
Listen, I’ve been called an idiot before, and survived (after all, I grew up with brothers). I’ve still got my job, and all the privileges that go with it. But last week I was asked to review a grant application for SSHRC and evaluate, among other things, a “knowledge mobilization strategy” in which Some Poor Sap, PhD., wrote that when his book comes out, on an important topic that really needs sophisticated discussion in the public sphere, he intends to create a website, and make himself available for media interviews and panel discussions, and really get his results out there.
I wanted to tell him, publish that book, create those new courses, teach those great ideas, but keep your head down, and don’t talk to the media, at least not before asking yourself these questions: Are you tenured? What will happen to you if colleagues or students Google you and find that the top results assert your incompetence?
And what does this self-policing of necessary and hard research questions do to researchers, to scholars, to our students, and to the public who is meant to receive that mobilized knowledge?
Research like ours, the complicated, risky, challenging ideas that really teach you something: this isn’t the stuff of public discourse anymore, and it’s disingenuous of SSHRC to suggest it is.
Have I learned something from this?  If the CBC calls again I will probably talk to them; the producer who organized the original interview called to apologize, and I think he honestly does feel bad about it. But the stuff is still out there, articles and blog posts and tweets that make me ashamed and defensive about my years of successful peer-reviewed research, and the fact that there’s nothing I can do to correct it makes me feel ill.
Miao Dean is a Professor of English at the University of Victoria. She teaches courses on the Canadian novel, and is interested in non-fiction prose and travel writing as well. She has published extensively on early Canadian women writers, on the literature of wilderness travel, and on animals and hunting in early Canadian writing. Her most recent book, Inheriting a Canoe Paddle, is on the way the discourse of the canoe is mobilized to justify Canadian sovereignty in the context of aboriginal title.

change · collaboration · community · race · social media

Listen: Learning As Community Responsibility

erinewunker

This morning my social media news feeds are a mix of reflection, rage, and resolve. Here is what I am seeing: Many of my friends and acquaintances were able to be in Edmonton for the last days of the hearings for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. I’ve been reading their reflections and watching videos of speakers like Cindy Blackstock in order to learn and listen from here. This afternoon I’ll be teaching Marie Clements’s play Burning Vision. Here at home, though, I am altering my class lectures to make room for discussion about the editor of the local paper who made the egregious decision to run a photograph of a person in blackface on the cover of the paper.

What do these things have to do with one another? A lot. Specifically, I think that together they model or open opportunities to talk about responsibility, community, and learning. Who are your teachers? Who are mine? Who gets listened to when? Whose voices are consistently and often violently left out of conversations? And how might we–with all the diversity that collective pronoun might mean–start having those conversations.

As most of you know I do much of my teaching and research under the auspices of literary studies, so let me talk about Clements’s play in order to start to unpack what I mean by a model of learning as community and responsability.

Burning Vision is a play in four movements, and it is a play that moves across time and space and between cultures. It has been described variously as a complicated play, as a postmodern play, and play about environmental justice. It may be all of these; I want to suggest it is also a model for learning as community responsibility.

The facts informing the play are these: in the late 1880s a Dene Seer prophesies a burning vision that will come in the future. The timeline in the play depicts how his vision comes to be. Between 1898-1925 radium becomes a valuable commodity. Between 1931-1932 the Canadian government issues a publication that warns of the health hazards associated with radioactive ore. 1930: The LaBine brothers discover highgrade pitchblende stake on Great Bear Lake. 1932 Dene men are hired to carry ore out of the mine and transport it to Fort McMurray. 1938: The Nobel Prize is granted to Enrico Fermi who has discovered the fissurable properties of uranium. 1941: Japanese Canadians are required to carry identification cards. 1941 the US orders eight tones of uranium from Great Bear Lake to conduct military research. 1942: Japanese-Canadians are forced into internment camps. 1945: Atomic bombs are dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 1960: the first Dene miner dies of cancer. And in August of 1998 six Dene residents travel to Hiroshima to pay respects on the anniversary of the detonation of the first atomic bomb.

As I said, the play works across time, space, and cultures. It is about Canada’s colonial history and its historic and ongoing violence against First Peoples. It is about systematic racism. It is about ecological devastation and mass violence. And it is about building communities of responsibility.

What I hope to discuss with my students in the comping classes are the ways in which this play models community responsibility and demonstrates the necessity for learning as a life-long process. Here’s what I mean: Burning Vision brings together historical and cultural specificity. As readers (or playgoers) we encounter historic injustice from our own cultural, racial, and gendered experiences. Crucially, Burning Vision does not let us stop there. The play–which draws on fact–requires that readers engage with injustice, historic violence, and reconciliation in the present. Let me be even more direct: as a white reader this play requires me to check my privilege. It does not allow me to relegate injustice, racism, and violence to the past or to something I might want to pretend is in the past. It reminds me that my silence or my limited knowledge is a kind of complicity. It teaches readers–it teaches me–that learning history is an on going process and that teachers don’t always, or even often, stand at the front of a classroom. Burning Vision opens a space to talk about historic inequity in the present. It also opens a space to talk about learning as a collaborative practice.

Let me turn back to the third of my opening examples: what can be gained by talking about the local paper’s decision to run a photograph of a person in blackface? I’m not going to reproduce the photo here because, as El Jones made so clear on CBC this morning, turning the discussion about the racist history of blackface into a single talk about one person and one paper sidelines the bigger, more urgent conversations we need to have. If you are in a position of privilege–when that privilege is unearned (ie. whiteness, maleness, cisgenderedness)–it is your responsibility to listen. Listening is responsible engagement. Listening is learning.

Far too often ears are shut. Often, I find myself at the front of a classroom and realize that I’m not the teacher. I don’t have all the knowledge. In those situations it becomes my responsibility to make space for that knowledge to circulate.

I’ll close with an opportunity and an example of learning as a community project, as a project of building communities and of listening. Tomorrow #30daysofprisonjustice will begin. It is a collaborative teach-in happening on social media. It is being initiated by El Jones and is, as she notes, a collaborative project.

To participate in #30daysofprisionjustice use this hashtag. Please note: 

Dehumanizing language about prisoners will not be permitted (monster, evil, animal.) Respectful questioning and dialogue is encouraged in order to critique, clarify and understand. Everyone is encouraged to both teach and learn, with the recognition that personal experience, lived experience of prison/racism etc. should be respected and listened to. This list is only my list, others are encouraged to add. Teaching can take many forms as in posting videos, articles, beginning disucssions, asking each other questions, sharing stories, drawing attention to cases of injustice, etc. Grammar policing or classist/racist values of what proper discussion look like is not welcome – all are encouraged to post.

Who are your teachers? Who are mine? Who gets listened to when? Whose voices are consistently and often violently left out of conversations? This is one way that we–with all the diversity that collective pronoun might mean–can start having more of those conversations.

backlash · faster feminism · race

"Merit," Casual Racism, Gender Balance, and Snow Days

aimeemorrison1 Comment

I guess the administration at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign takes as dim a view of the dangers of wind chill as does the University of Waterloo. Students there complained much as students did here, only a significant number of UIUC students organized themselves into racist, sexist Twitter campaign under the hashtag “#fuckphyllis,” Phyllis M. Wise being the Chancellor who made the decision in question. Scott Jaschik reports on this in Inside Higher Ed; you can look up the hashtag yourself if you want but I’m not going to link it. Buzzfeed has screencapped some, and put together an overview.

I’m appalled but not surprised that the perhaps legitimate beef about the closure rapidly turned to to gender- and race-based expressions of hate. I’d like to compartmentalize that feeling and direct it at “American schools,” nice and far away from me, but I can’t. Because Waterloo has its own casual racism problem, it’s own casual sexism problem.

Did you know that a common nickname for my instutition among students is “Waterwoo”? I’ve had teenagers as well as adults reply with a laugh when I tell them where I work: “Oh! You’re at Waterwoo?” Har har. It’s got an entry in the Urban Dictionary. There is hashtag activity on Instagram, and on Twitter. This has mostly flown under the radar, but we could easily have a UIUC social media blowup on our hands, and in any case, shouldn’t we call this out as the structural issue it is, rather than wait for a crisis to tut-tut about, where we can satisfy ourselves by disciplining the more egregious outliers?

We should probably talk about “Waterwoo.”

There’s some complicated intersectionality at play: gender imbalance, racial sorting, privileging of some fields of study over others. Waterloo is considered to be a STEM powerhouse: mostly, math, computer science, engineering. These fields draw a lot of really smart kids, kids who work very hard all through high school. This includes many Canadian-born and international “Asian” kids whose parents place a premium on academic achievement, and particularly in these fields. The entrance grades are very high: “Asian students” are more likely to earn these kinds of grades. These fields, too, are more likely to draw male students, which also leads to the well-known fact that Waterloo is among the very few Canadian universities where male undergraduates outnumber female undergraduates. 

You can see all these elements bubbling around the edges of a controversial piece by Macleans a few years ago. Originally titled “Too Asian?” but renamed “The enrolment controversy” after heavy social media panicking, this piece describes white, Canadian-born high school students picking their universities on  grounds both explicitly and implicitly about race: lower entry requirements, better parties, which some come out and say means fewer hard-studying Asian students. Waterloo features prominently in the Macleans “Too Asian” article–indeed, we have a dour and studious reputation among our own students, who both mock the more fun-loving (and white) university 500m down the road from us, and try to attend their parties. They made a video. Then the engineers made a video. Our public relations department also made a video, responding to prominent PayPal co-founder Elon Musk, an engineer who chose Queens over Waterloo, because it had more women. For him to date, presumably, rather than to provide a more diverse and concomitantly richer set of study partners. The Macleans article references American conversations about high grades and the “model minority”–see also this article from Inside Higher Ed about how white subjects in one research study tie themselves into knots to maintain their own privilege in merit-based admission.

This usually simmers below the surface: the videos get respectable numbers of views but don’t go viral; the hashtags stay in use but never trend; the magazine retreats from actually having the conversation it started; coded language reframes issues of race around “study habits” or “party schools.”

How can we talk about this, taking everything into account? I’m not sure.

I wrote a piece about the no-win situation for women in engineering. That piece addressed gender and field of study, but not race. We have more serious issues of threatened violence against women as well, that Shannon Dea wrote about here. And in the fall I also wrote about the constant stream of men whose reasearch was featured on the university home page. I did again make explicit that they were all in the engineering, comp-sci and math fields. I didn’t note that they were mostly of Asian or South-east Asian descent. The preponderance of STEM research is what struck me as salient, while the race issue totally did not. But of course, it’s all linked in one messy intersectional soup: the neighbourhood where I live is overwhelmingly white, while campus is much more racially, ethnically, and culturally divers in ways I appreciate, but which are probably owing to our STEM dominance as much as our proximity to major immigrant diasporas in Toronto, Mississauga, and Brampton paricularly. What the (white) students complain about are inflated entry averages and a too-studious atmosphere and “accented” teachers they link to race. I am concerned about the humanities being devalued, and about the gender imbalances. It’s hard, ultimately, to tease all these issues apart.

I wanted to mark these issues, here and now, on the hook of an American controvery, before something blows up here. Maybe we can have a conversation oriented to structural, simmering resentments, exclusions, and stereotypes in a more programmatic and wide-ranging way. Before something goes viral, before something terrible happens.

accomodation · administration · bad academics · race · slow academy · solidarity · structural solutions · turgid institution

Accomodation: Where We Waver

aimeemorrison1 Comment

The Toronto Star reported the story late last week: in the fall term, Sociology professor Paul Grayson received a request for religious accomodation from a student in an online course. The student, referencing an unspecified religious tradition, expressed an unwillingness to do the one (collaborative) on-campus exercise where he would be placed in a group of other students, if that group included women. He asked to be allowed an alternative assignment. Grayson’s impulse was to say ‘no’, on the basis of gender equality. Sensing that this was likely to be a controversial request and decision, he forwarded it up the chain to his dean, and the dean to the in-house human rights committee.

Amazingly, the dean of arts, Martin Singer, while expressing “unwavering commitment to gender equality and sincere regret,” claims to have had “no choice” but to grant the accomodation, as reported in the Globe and Mail. York President Mamdouh Shoukri released a statement on the matter as well, after the matter drew public comment from Conservative MP Peter McKay, Opposition Leader Tom Mulcair of the NDP, and Liberal MPP and Minister of Training, Colleges and Universities Brad Duguid. Shoukri is struck by the “complexities” of such requests while asserting that “We must always safeguard rights such as gender equality, academic freedom and freedom of expression, which form the foundation of any secular post-secondary institution.”

Marina Nemat, an author and educator who fled Iran for Canada because her defense of women’s rights put her in danger, discusses the York issue in an op-ed entitled “I expected this back in Iran, not at York University.” Sheema Khan, a regular columnist at the Globe who served as chair of the Canadian Council on American-Islamic Relations in the early 2000s is similarly clear in her dismissal of the York decision, in a piece entitled “What York University Forgot: Gender Equality is Not Negotiable.”

I wanted to flag this controversy here, as well as the particular issues that resonate with me.

First, this is a case study in intersectionality and its supposed discontents. It comes out more like helpless postmodern relativism rather than a clear-eyed balancing of the needs of a diverse population. York’s administrators see competing but somehow equal interests here: various “minority” viewpoint that require “accomodation.” There seems to be as much risk-aversion as ignorance involved. Remember, the student’s particular religious requirements are unknown: it is not allowed to ask a student to identify his or her religion, so the request for accomodation remains vague. Grayson, unsure what to do, consulted researchers at York who worked on both Muslim and Orthodox Jewish questions of faith and practice, trying to guess at the student’s religion from his (redacted) last name: neither scholar could think of any doctrinal or scriptural basis for granting such a request.

York administrators seem to have consulted case law. They are acting in ignorance and fear, which is hardly the point of accomodation. A truly accepting and open (secular) institution could respect and understand its students, all of its students. This legislated accomodation seems more a knee-jerk lawsuit avoiding strategey–particularly since one of the reasons stated for granting it was that a student studying overseas was allowed to opt-out of the on-campus group work. Um, what?

Second, it seems pretty clear that Dean Singer’s commitment to gender equality is not at all unwavering. It wavered, and collapsed, at the very first challenge. If Singer imagines that the accomodation granted is not a significant erosion of women’s rights on campus he seems beyond help. I probably needn’t paint this picture in terrible detail for you: you live it. Women are tainted. Women are to be avoided. Women are a sinful distraction. Riiiiiiiight. How on earth can anyone not see this as an existential threat to women’s right to full participation in public life?

Third, there’s a kind of accomodation poker being played here, with the variously marginalized equity-seeking groups (women! “blacks”! “muslims”!) are each invoked to raise the stakes in the rhetorical game of chicken everyone is playing. The game goes something like this: the student doesn’t want to work with women … but what if it was blacks he requested to be apart from? What then? Or, religious accomodation is very important, but think of the women! Whose rights are paramount to us (this from the Conservative MPs). This game is disingenous. In human rights trump card bingo, only one player out of the marginalized participants can win a zero sum game whose moves are made by the powerful. In many comments I’m reading a strategic defense of women’s rights to demonize “Muslims” and their “beliefs” that makes me profoundly uncomfortable. I’m scare-quoting because, remember, we don’t know what the student’s religion is, or what beliefs the proposed group work contravenes. This rhetorical game pits every one against each other and when the powerful then throw up their hands in the face of its (rigged) unwinnable nature, they even try to accrue bonus points for caring so much to balance rights. Bullshit. You might have heard something about why we are constantly at war with religiously-defined organizations in various parts of Asia; they want to trample women’s rights, you know. The about face is stunning: both word-games are at least as dangerous as they are disingenous.

Fourth, this controversy points up the massive scale of my own ignorance. I know a fair bit about women’s rights. I know something about trauma, about mental health, about medical accomodation. I know very, very little at all about religions other than the one I was raised in. This is shameful. I’m trying to learn more about different faith traditions, different sacred days and sacred practices. Because if as student made a similar accomodation request from me, I might not be able to accurately assess it. Which makes me more like a York administrator than the intersectional feminist I aspire to be. Alas.

You know what? Grayson told the student his request was unreasonable. The student thanked him for his consideration of the request, and consented to participate, understanding the competing interests at play. There’s a lesson in that human-scale interaction, I think.

academic reorganization · change · race · reflection · solidarity

A New Politics of Loss? A Response to "We Are Not All Jims: The Colour Line and Sadness in the Academy"

erinewunker1 Comment

Last week my friend and colleague Jade Ferguson wrote a guest post on the colour line and sadness in the university. As she notes, one recent catalyst to her post was a Think Tank that I co-organized with Smaro Kamboureli at the TransCanada Institute. The aim of the Think Tank was to open a frank discursive space for addressing the continual defunding of the university, the ongoing defamation of intellectual work, and – perhaps most pressing for me, initially – the omnipresent experience of anxiety for emergent scholars. The Think Tank was for me an event I am only beginning to work through, for the spaces that were opened there were unprecedented in their genuineness, their affect, and their challenges. I knew going into the weekend that it would be hard, for the room was composed of colleagues in unequal power relations.
While this was part of the organizational point, I was nervous. But then, I live with a certain kind of anxiety that I have naturalized. I am increasingly used to performing my own experiences of occupational precarity as a means of both dealing with and drawing attention to but a few of the systematic and structural problems of the Academy. Indeed, as I stated in my portion of the opening remarks, I approached Smaro Kamboureli in a moment of profound sadness and anxiety. Sadness cleared the way for me to risk approaching a senior colleague. Sadness made me momentarily brave. Nevertheless, I was unprepared for the multifaceted and unequal experiences of sadness that constellated in that room over the space of thirty-six hours. My own unpreparedness underscores two emergent issues that Jade addresses: the colour line and what Jade terms “the public feeling of sadness in the academy.”
I was one of the nine emerging scholars. The term “emerging” in this case acts an umbrella term that covers the vastly different subject-experiences of part-time/contingent/contract/postdoctoral/ and newly tenure-track faculty. As we each framed our thinking about and experiences of “shared precarity” in either position or response papers multiple tensions came to the fore. As Jade notes, four of the five newly tenure-track faculty members were people of colour. The two contract workers – of which I was one – were white, and the two people in postdoctoral fellowships were also white. It became quickly and viscerally apparent that there were multiple experiences of “emergence.” Conversant but dissimilar questions surfaced: How do conditions of austerity reify and ossify extant colour lines? How – and can – one tell one’s own story of on-going precarity when one has the tenure-track job? How are stories of academic precarity participating in a recapitulation of racism in the Academy? How many years can one be on the job market and be an emergent scholar? How are public feelings of sadness gendered and aged? While we could all recognize the interconnectedness of these questions, we did not all understand and experience them. And this made us sad, albeit in different ways.
Employing Ann Cvetkovitch’s work on public feeling, Jade writes that our varied and difficult discussion revealed “the emotional colour line” that separates (her) black sadness from (my) white sadness. She uses the term “incommensurable” to articulate the emotional gulf between one form of sadness – for example my anxiety around my own labour precarity that I experience in my white body – and another – her experience of racism, alienation, and disenfranchisement as a tenure-track black scholar. These experiences are incommensurate because of the vastly different scales of historical experience that are marked on our bodies.
If the hard conversations we had opened a discursive space to “dwell in sadness” (Cvetkovitch 117) as Jade suggests, then I see part of my responsibility as attempting to dwell in the uncomfortable spaces of uncertainty and difficulty; to think through the emotional colour line, rather than to attend immediately to concrete political action that might address the lived experiences of precarity we had gathered to discuss. In other words, I want to dwell in sadness, to ask, as Sara Ahmed does, what happiness does when it becomes “a measure of progress – a performance indicator – as well as a criterion for making decisions about resources” (“The Happiness Turn” 7). The neoliberal discourse informing the Academy’s actions is predicated on instrumentalizing happiness as a measurement of progress. What this means is that happiness – that “stupid” form of optimism, according to Lauren Berlant – becomes a regulatory structure that both informs how we operate and how we identify one another. “Happiness” exposes assumptions about who gets to be happy, and whether or not happiness is ever possible in the current social structure. Moreover, “happiness” becomes a normalizing regulatory structure that attempts to level nuanced forms of inequity. As Ahmed suggests, “the face of happiness, at least in this description, looks very much like the face of privilege” (“The Happiness Turn” 9). I fear that without a sustained and careful discussion of what happiness in the Academy means resisting the neoliberalization of intellectual work will recapitulate those deep-seated inequities that are at the heart of politics as usual. That I may uncritically be participating in a reification of the emotional colour line makes me more than sad. It makes me melancholic, and that might not be a bad thing.
In The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief Anne Anlin Cheng suggests that viewing race through a framework of melancholia might productively reveal its instability and “indebtedness to the dis-identity it is also claiming” (24). Its those double-binds and dis-identifications that need attending to if we who affiliate our labour with the Academy wish to embark on a new politics of loss that does not reinstate old and pernicious inequities. After all, it was a while ago that Adam Smith observed the affective sleight of hand employed by capitalism: it moves us from “miserable equality” to “happy inequality” (Wealth of Nations). As Sara Ahmed notes, Smith’s “nineteenth-century utilitarianism involves an explicit refutation … in which inequality because the measure of advancement and happiness” (“The Happiness Turn” 9).
In the last week I have found myself wondering whether melancholia, which I would frame as unresolved grief, might offer a productive framework for addressing the multiple tensions at work in the public feeling(s) of sadness in the academy. That (s) I have added onto feeling is important. It seems to me that one of the risks that resurfaced in the Think Tank was that risk of unintentionally flattening experience in the name of solidarity. My sadness is not another’s, regardless of the similarity or simultaneity of our experiences. And yet, with Jade I too want to think through how we – by which I mean those of use labouring inside/outside/on the margins of the Academy – can form temporary and productive coalitions that do not flatten out our variegated experiences of loss, sadness, and disenfranchisement.

academic reorganization · race · solidarity

Guest Post: We are not all Jims: the Colour Line and Sadness in the University

erinewunker5 Comments

Today’s guest post is the first in an at least two-part conversation around the challenges — old and new — of the Academy. Next week I will post a response to Jade Ferguson’s piece that continues the conversation.

_______________________________________________

A recent Think Tank brought scholars from across Canada to the TransCanada Institute to discuss the continuous defunding of the university, the increasing denigration of intellectual work, and the anxiety-ridden conditions faced by emerging scholars.* Some of the critiques of the neoliberal devaluation of post-secondary education were notable for their deployment of the discourse of race struggle. The embedding of market-logic and corporate-style management into the academy was likened to the degraded conditions of a “plantation economy.” This was not my first time hearing senior faculty describe management as “overseers.” Jo-Anne Wallace’s “wishful allegory of university administration” employs Leslie Fiedler’s well-known and controversial reading of the racial relationship between Huck and Jim (18). She writes, “it is we [faculty] who are the dreamers, the Jims, who call out … I won’t say to ‘our oppressors’ … to come back to the raft again, come back to the breast, to the dream of emancipation that is at the heart of real education” (18). I want to take up the issue of race in the struggle against the corporatization of the university by examining “the problem of the color line” (W.E.B. Du Bois’s pithy formulation for discussing race relations in the early twentieth century) and the public feeling of sadness in the academy.

One of the central objectives of the Think Tank was to devise some concrete means that may help provide mentorship and sustainability for recent doctoral graduates. Nine emerging scholars (4 part-time/contingent/contract faculty and 5 full-time/tenure- track faculty, all of whom teach and do research on Canadian literature) bravely provided stories about their precarious existence in the university. These stories outlined the pervasive conditions of unprotected work and invisible exploitation faced by recent graduates. Despite this “shared precariousness,” an underlying tension quickly emerged: 4 of the 5 tenure track faculty were people of colour and all 4 contract faculty were white. Rather than reducing this racial division to happenstance, this local instantiation of the colour line reflects in part the new racialized conditions of emerging scholars in the Canadian academy. In contrast to the anxiety-ridden conditions of the job market described by white emerging scholars (at the Think Tank and on blogs such as Hook & Eye), it often appears as if people of colour are “the beneficiary of policies that provide jobs, fellowships, and other support” (Cvetkovich 124). Like the other junior faculty of colour, I was hired ABD. I did not experience a long and arduous struggle for employment. However, as Ann Cvetkovich astutely notes, “what often goes invisible in the polite world of bureaucratic culture are the casual forms of racism or lack of understanding that make this condition of so-called privilege one that is also pervaded by anxiety and stress” (124).

The four faculty of colour each expressed their own complex affective stories about what racism in the academy feels like. My ongoing sense of alienation and disenfranchisement as a black scholar has made it impossible for any easy sense of belonging in the academy, and the burden of this untenable existence has created an inconsolable sadness that affects all levels of my everyday experience. However, I was not the only one who was sad. The university-in-crisis is an emotional catalyst for sadness on both sides of the divide. Erin Wunker uses Lauren Berlant’s notion of “cruel optimism” to describe the “affective bind of precarious employment,” but “suspended agency” is perhaps most affectively accompanied by forms of sadness that descend “when the belief that one should be happy or protected turns out to be wrong and when a privileged form of hopefulness that has so often been entirely foreclosed for black people is punctured” (Wunker, Cvetkovich 116). While listening to their stories, I found myself unwilling to fully attend to the depth of this white sadness; after all, I told myself, “their forms of sadness were incommensurable with those of the historically disenfranchised, an incommensurability that is lived affectively as alienation and hopelessness” (120). The difficult discussion chillingly revealed “the emotional color line” that separates (my) black sadness and (their) white sadness (116).

The Think Tank opened a discursive space to “dwell in sadness” (117), which our ideas for possible concrete political action in the concluding session were woefully unable to address. The turn to immediate concrete political action seemed to circumscribe the call for political uncertainty that had previously been expressed. Engaging with David Eng and Shin Hee Han’s suggestion that “melancholy’s negativity might in fact be a productive corrective to a naïve politics of hope,” Cvetkovich argues that “tending to feelings means the disruption of politics as usual” (117). Central to this work, she argues, is a “sense that we might not know what politics is,” and thus, we “need to slow down in order to see what these feelings might be” (117). The challenge left before us is to explore “the full measure” of this public feeling of sadness “without seeking immediate redemption…[or] giving up a hopefulness that remains stubbornly faithful for no good reason in the midst of despair” (117). I abruptly left the concluding session of the Think Tank because I was unable to tell my colleagues, without collapsing in tears, that despite the chasm of mis/understanding I still had hope. In our struggle to preserve the “dream of emancipation that is at the heart of real education” (Wallace 18), a more nuanced coalitional politics and political rhetoric must emerge. We are not all Jims.

Jade Ferguson, University of Guelph 

* I sincerely thank Smaro Kamboureli and Erin Wunker for organizing the TransCanada Think Tank Session on “Sustainability, Mentorship, and Intellectual Production: The Present and Future of Emerging Scholars in Canadian Literary Studies” (April 5-6, 2013), and all the scholars who openly and generously participated in the difficult and necessary discussions. My response to the Think Tank is inspired by the dialogue and struggle that occurred at the TransCanada Institute. While I have tried to capture the spirit of the event, my response is limited to my own perspective, and thus any faults in the response lie with me.

Works Cited

Cvetkovich, Ann. Depression: A Public Feeling. Durham & London: Duke UP, 2012. Print.

Wallace, Jo-Ann. “Come Back to the Ranks Ag’in, Huck Honey!” English Studies in Canada 37.3-4 (Sept/Dec 2011): 17-20. Print.

Wunker, Erin. “On Doubt.” Hook & Eye. 18 March 2013. Web. 7 April 2013.