On Becoming a Foreigner as a Result of Academe
Author's Note: This post is mostly a reflection on an ongoing struggle that I have experienced. This struggle has yet to be resolved and I am still unsure what the answer will be. I hope that I will be proven incorrect, though.
Last month, I read Robert L. Reece's piece on the sense of homelessness experienced as a black academic and it resonated with me; it reminded me of a chapter I'd read back in undergrad in a course on single motherhood and working-class perspectives in women's and gender studies as well as a piece by Stacey Patton about becoming a graduate student as a first-generation student and person of color. As I'm currently reading "Lose Your Mother" by Saidiya Hartman and recently watched Marvel's "Black Panther", I have a lot of feelings bubbling up. In this post, I will reflect a bit on the experiences I had at each point in my scholarly trajectory as it relates to my current situation.
While reading the Dahlberg chapter as an undergraduate, my resentment toward being asked to reject my working-class worldview and valorize the worldview of my upper-middle class peers and instructors was validated. My first weeks on campus taught me immediately that I was not the kind of person who was expected to arrive there. I recall a jarring conversation with some neighbors in my dorm: they'd found out I had a job on campus and they were wondering how they could get jobs, too. Me being ignorant of the realities of social class, I just shrugged and said the financial aid office had assigned me a job. The two neighbors then mentioned that they hadn't applied for financial aid; this was an institution where the annual tuition bill cost more than my family's home was valued at (and it was valued in the neighborhood of $50,000). These kinds of incidents kept on occurring the longer I stayed in college. For example, I signed up for an "externship" because that's what the school told me I should do, only to find out that I would not be attending after being paired with an anethesiologist for the simple reason that I didn't have access to a loan or even a credit card to pay for my trip there since, you know, universities assume you have money to front while you wait for a reimbursement. To add icing to the cake, I noticed myself feeling more and more like a foreigner every time I dealt with my family at home and friends who didn't go to college: I now was a feminist! And I knew about social class from being in sociology! Why, my instructors even had me analyzing my own family and community! Of course my ideas were facts, rather than mere opinion! Unfortunately, they didn't teach me that my home community probably wouldn't challenge me on these things. They didn't teach me that while, yes, I'd thrown away harmful "bootstrap" beliefs, I also had picked up an "academia can save us all" belief. Except for when academia had been explicitly racist, I couldn't identify the ways that it was separating me from my own people. I couldn't identify the ways that I was being crafted into a person palatable to the upper-middle class: learning their modes of communication, learning to feel their sense of vicarious shame when someone put the napkin in their collar rather than in their lap at a restaurant, learning to think with their inability to incorporate experiential knowledge...learning to think with their assumption that the end goal in all things is to strip away uniqueness of culture and create timeless, history-free universals (as if objectivity were possible). I just didn't realize that maybe, just maybe, those around me had a good hunch when they couldn't stomach the prospect of going into the bourgeoification factory that is the small liberal arts college. After all, the Princeton Review "objectively" told me I should want to be there since, as we all know, getting more degrees all the way to a Ph.D. can never be a bad idea!
That specific experience with the externship stuck with me for a VERY long time and affected me into graduate school: never again would I let a lack of access to capital stop me from getting ahead! I opened up credit cards and used them to ensure I went to every last conference that I "was supposed to" go to; never again would being outside the middle class put a ceiling on my academic achievement! This time, I would be spared the pain of the small liberal arts coloniz-errr-college, though, because I chose a state school. I just knew that's where I'd find "my people" since I'd sufficiently turned myself into an outsider back home. At least in a public school I could try and reacquire everything I'd lost culturally at the double-edged sword that is the SLAC. As a grad student reading the Patton piece, though, I felt a strong resonance yet again. Even though I went to a public school, I still felt like an outsider anyway. I realized quickly that by and large, the world of Ph.D. education is an extension of SLAC life. I was excited to finally have your own "full time income" at under $30,000 annually and my parents were equally excited, but far more proud: they bragged to their friends back in our hick-ass hometown about how a school was actually paying their child to study...unheard of! I was excited to be able to pay for things for my family if they needed it. I was proud to be able to tell my younger sibling that if they needed anything, they didn't have to go to mom or dad first. My peers, though, by and large didn't seem to share these experiences. They (and many others even now) talked about our funding as cramping their previously comfortable lifestyle. Even more distant from my experience, many talked about the Ph.D. as something that was inevitable or owed to them; many talked about quitting as a matter of personal shame. This was strange to me. I knew very few if any people from home with doctoral anythings, so finishing for me would be a "win for the home team", so to speak. At the same time, quitting would not be a source of shame since I had already done plenty enough: I actually finished a bachelor's degree, and not only that, but I did it surrounded by people who weren't like us. Quitting also would be seen as very logical for many of my folks back home: if I was too poor to be there, the obvious solution would be to go get a "real job". After all, I didn't grow up with money, so the "fall" surely wouldn't be a long one. This actually was huge for me because I knew the entire time I was in graduate school that I could always go back to changing adult diapers and live just fine. I guess the SLAC had done its job, though, exposing me to what lay beyond the locked door people like me were supposed to never open, teaching me to think it was absolutely worth having and that it was absolutely attainable. Career aspirations should never be subordinated to anything else and if you don't achieve those aspirations it is no one's fault but your own. If you are "qualified", you are morally obligated to try and bust through the locked door that is the social class line. Double that obligation if you're Black and first-generation...if not you, then who? Can you really be so selfish as to let everyone down? To not be the "credit to your people" that supposedly matters? After all, mighty individuals are who saves entire communities. Anyone left behind probably doesn't want it badly enough or "just needs more education". If you must become a foreigner to your own to achieve these outcomes, that's the cost of being "exceptional". You finish, period. If you haven't fucked up enough in the meantime, hopefully your family is there to act as a support network in the meantime. That being said, by the time I finished graduate school, I was firmly convinced that the only place that felt like "home" was my relationship with my life partner who I married during graduate school. The close second was anywhere with my comrades.
While reading the Reece article last month, I was reminded again of all this past experience and past feelings of being foreign. At this point in my life, I am geographically isolated from my family, I have lost the only parent who gave me an excuse to keep going back to my "home" town where I constantly was reminded of everything I'd lost...shit, even the house I grew up in was lost to us, so there is literally no home to go back to. As a Black scholar who is specifically African-American and a descendant of Africans stolen and enslaved, this is particularly painful because I often see all of the ways I was socialized away from even my own cultural group beyond just the social class distinction. As I watch my family tree's branches fall off and die, I am reminded of just how cut off I am even from my ancestral community. While my academic peers (and sometimes even my comrades) nod and pat each other on the back for furthering the cause of identity-less universals, I am reminded that, unlike them, a branch lost in my family tree often is accompanied by a loss of access to any and all knowledge about what came before. Being first-generation and African-American means your family probably didn't have the money to figure this out before. Being first-generation and African-American means you're the one who should've known better than to leave any family narrative uncollected because a DNA test only goes so far in the search for meaning. Being a first-generation African-American college graduate who becomes a professor means you're the one who knows enough that you cannot be satisfied with a belief in a mythical united, singular African culture where everyone sees you as one of their own, class distinctions and slave trade be damned. Being a first-generation African-American college graduate who becomes a professor means feeling like you're the one who is responsible for your own misery, even if you have the wherewithal to know you're probably just blaming yourself for not understanding the realities of capitalism soon enough.
I am thankful that I landed at a university where many of my students are precisely the kind of people I have for so long missed because of my excessive trust in academe to save us all. Even here, though, it is complicated: I suspect that the power differential between student and professor will never allow me to truly have what I thought I could recoup by chasing first-generation college students as my second chance. I suspect that my language and modes of expression are irreparable and I will never not be an obvious outsider every single time I try to stuff myself into communities that look like the ones I lost. I find myself routinely oversharing with my students, probably because I want so much to just have what academe stole from me. I routinely find myself overstretched with mentorship tasks, probably because I see myself in everyone around me...but fortunately, they seem to have a better grasp of the realities of academe than even I do, because none of them seem very excited about the prospect of making a life out of it. I think this is a good thing most of the time, but also question whether this is just another unhealthy overidentification. I don't believe in regretting the past, but that doesn't mean I don't still feel the pain of it all.