The New Yorker, January 30, 2021
The Political Scene
How Black Lives Matter Came to the Academy
By Kristal Brent Zook
On a Saturday night in early June, Shardé Davis, an assistant professor
in the Department of Communication at the University of Connecticut, was
sitting on a couch in a rented apartment in San Diego, scrolling through
her Twitter feed. She was in California to do research on a project that
was funded by a Ford Foundation postdoctoral fellowship—plans that had
been affected somewhat by covid-19 and the widespread protests for
racial justice. Davis herself had gone to a Black Lives Matter protest
in La Mesa the previous weekend. The event had started out peacefully
but turned ugly when California Highway Patrol officers squared off with
thousands of protesters on the I-8 freeway. There were reports of
bottles thrown, tear gas unleashed, arson, and looting.
A week later, after attending another protest, Davis still couldn’t calm
down. As she sat alone on her couch, ruminating about the murders of
George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and news coverage of the La Mesa
protest—the crowd had been mostly white and Latinx, she said, but the
media made it seem as though Black folks were the ones destroying
property—she felt more and more enraged.
She asked herself repeatedly, “What can I do?” She was already thinking
about what it would look like for universities to cut ties with police
departments. “I think I was just drawing the very obvious connections,”
she said. “Academia is seen as a very liberal and progressive place, but
systemic racism is running through all of these different institutions.”
Although she was not an avid Twitter user, Davis came up with the
hashtag #BlackInTheIvory, thinking it might be a good way for Black
people to share their stories about racism in her sphere of influence.
“Folks tout the liberal ivory tower,” she told me. “They hide behind it.”
She texted a friend, Joy Melody Woods, a doctoral student in the Moody
College of Communication at the University of Texas at Austin, to see
what she thought of the hashtag idea. “I love it,” Woods replied from
her iPhone. “Already tweeted it out.” Davis followed suit, using the
hashtag while retweeting a physician named Shaquita Bell: “Black
individuals in the United States have endured events in our everyday
life without an audience or validation of our experiences.”
The next morning, Davis and Woods found their notification in-boxes
filled with hundreds of tweets from Black academics and graduate
students, sharing their stories of exclusion and pain. By Sunday night,
#BlackInTheIvory was one of the top twenty hashtags in the country.
#BlackInTheIvory is being asked during your first week of college if
you’re sure you can handle it, many said, or being asked on campus if
you’re in the right place or “lost.” #BlackInTheIvory is having campus
security constantly ask for your research-lab badge, residence-hall
identification, and/or driver’s license. Marc Edwards, now an assistant
professor of biology at Amherst College, recalled that, in graduate
school, at another institution, a dean suggested he wear a tie to class
in response to incessant profiling. #BlackInTheIvory is being thrashed
in student evaluations for discussing racial injustice, Danielle
Clealand, a political scientist at the University of Texas at Austin,
wrote. And my personal favorite: #BlackInTheIvory is being asked to
serve on endless diversity committees and write endless diversity
reports, without regard for one’s labor or time, also known as the
“Black tax.” To drive the point home, Woods and Davis posted Venmo bar
codes on their Twitter feeds for anyone who might care to contribute.
The movement took off, with feature stories in Nature, The Chronicle of
Higher Education, NBCNews.com, and the Boston Globe. Davis and Woods
created a Web site, which sold branded merchandise and launched an
effort to match Black graduate students in need with donors. “Not the
Diversity Hire,” read the text on one coffee mug.
“You’re finally seeing people opening up and sharing these experiences,”
Woods said. “We had been feeling like we were alone.”
When Woods and I spoke in June, she told me the story of her own
experience as an incoming graduate student. In the fall of 2016, she was
the only Black student on her track in a master’s program in public
health at the University of Iowa. The college had no Black faculty, and
Woods said that professors made it clear that she didn’t belong, that
she wasn’t smart enough. One professor told her directly that she
“didn’t have the skills to be a graduate student.”
“I was feeling maybe I am dumb,” she said. “I thought I was going
insane. I would just be on the floor crying.”
Toward the end of her first semester, Woods tried reporting one faculty
member to the university’s Office of Equal Opportunity and Diversity,
but the complaint went nowhere. “It’s hard to prove microaggressions,”
she said. “That’s why we think we’re going crazy.”
In Woods’s second semester of graduate school, a private psychologist
tested her for learning disabilities. She discovered that she had three:
a reading impairment, a visual-spatial processing disability, and a
nonverbal learning disability. The psychologist told Woods that she
didn’t know how she had managed to finish high school. Yet her
professors refused to provide learning accommodations, as is required by
law. (In response, a spokesperson from the college said that “we have
made progress since 2016, but it is not enough. We are determined to do
better.”)
So she left. “Walked right across the bridge,” as she put it,
transferring to the College of Education, where she found three Black
professors, an Asian-American adviser, and far more Black students in
her classes. “I was never the ‘only’ anymore,” she said. The course
readings also featured more diverse authors, and, because they
explicitly addressed issues of inequality, it was easier to have open
conversations about racism. In her new program, Woods completed a
master’s degree in Educational Policy and Leadership Studies with an
emphasis on the sociology of education.
But, in many ways, Woods is an exception. Both of her parents have
bachelor’s degrees in electrical engineering, and her two older sisters
have graduate degrees in medicine and science. Many other Black students
leave graduate programs in despair, but Woods felt that her family
simply wouldn’t accept her defeat.
She persisted, but her education came at a cost. “These experiences are
traumatic,” Woods said. They can be isolating and emotionally battering.
The problem of being the “first and the only” Black person in any
institution is that being alone makes it much easier for white
majorities to dismiss one’s perceptions.
As a doctoral student at the University of California, Santa Cruz, I
experienced the same isolation and resentment that Black women are now
once again shouting about from their Twitter-feed rooftops. I know all
too well what #BlackInTheIvory is about. I was already writing about my
time in graduate school when I came across the hashtag. It took a moment
for its meaning to sink in. For so long, I had recalled my experiences
in isolation, pushing them to the corners of my memory and doing my best
to make them small. #BlackInTheIvory reminded me that, like Woods, I
wasn’t alone.
In 1988, I was the first Black woman to enroll in my Ph.D. program in
ten years. I was there, really, only because my undergraduate mentor,
Elliott Butler-Evans, a Black professor in English at the University of
California, Santa Barbara, had insisted on it. He had attended the
program and received his own Ph.D. there, some years earlier. He told me
about the dearth of Black women with tenure in the U.C. system. In his
eyes, getting a doctorate was my civic duty. So I went to graduate school.
There were seven incoming students at the history-of-consciousness
program at U.C. Santa Cruz that year: five white men and women, me, and
a Chicano from Los Angeles named Raul. One afternoon, the conversation
in our first-year seminar turned to race.
Our professors for the seminar, Donna Haraway and Jim Clifford, were two
of the most formidable minds I had ever met. The conversation was
stimulating, as I recall. Something about how racial meaning is socially
constructed, perhaps, rather than strictly biological. I was only just
beginning to wrap my head around post-structuralism and “theory,” and
the concepts were still fresh and new. But it soon became apparent that
a young woman in our cohort was becoming agitated. I’ll call her Mary.
She shifted in her seat as though biting her tongue.
“It’s just that I’m Italian-American and . . . I get really tan in the
summer,” Mary said. She paused, searching the room. It seemed that no
one had a clue what she was getting at. Raul and I exchanged confused
looks, waiting for her to complete her thought.
“I mean, I get even darker than her,” she said, crooking her chin in my
direction. And that’s when she hit me with it. “So . . . I don’t
understand, why does she get to be Black?”
I wish I could say that anyone had a good response to what Mary had
said. If they did, I don’t recall. I remember only the silence.
I was isolated in a program in which not a single student or faculty
member looked like me, or my mother, or my grandmother, or anyone in my
family. All around me were hippie-like surfer students, white kids who
found it perfectly acceptable to walk the woodsy paths barefoot on a
warm day, or to wear their straight hair in clumped mats. For so many of
them, college was an inevitable part of growing up. They treated the
privilege with a certain casualness that I, as a first-generation
student, did not share.
And, although I didn’t think of it that way at the time, I crossed a
bridge that year in search of bolstering, just like Joy Woods. I made my
way across campus, over to Kresge College, where I found the writer
Gloria Anzaldúa working on a doctorate in literature. Gloria called
herself a Chicana-Mexicana-mestiza. She had edited a seminal book for
Black and brown feminists, “This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by
Radical Women of Color,” that was mandatory reading in women’s-studies
courses across the country. I also found Ekua Omosupe, an
African-American single mom from Mississippi. We three became friends. I
was no longer alone.
“I’m putting together another anthology,” Gloria told me one day, “and I
was wondering if you have any essays or poems you’d like to contribute?”
She did that thing which is so often missing from our lives as Black
scholars and academics. Nurturing.
“It doesn’t have to be polished. Just send me what you have.” My essay,
which I called “Light-Skinned’ded Naps,” appeared in “Making Face,
Making Soul/Haciendo Caras” the next year. It was my first published
piece of writing. I was twenty-three years old.
Not long afterward, the literature department brought the novelists Toni
Cade Bambara and Buchi Emecheta to campus, as distinguished visiting
professors, and my life changed again. I became their teaching
assistant, crossing campus regularly to commune with my newfound Black
community.
One day, after class, I walked with Toni back to her office. The day was
bright and impossibly blue—which made her next words seem incongruous.
She pulled a small AM radio from her pocket. “Always carry a short-wave
radio,” she told me. “For when the revolution comes.” I loved her
commitment to revolutionary ideas, and to Black people, and to me.
I plopped myself down in a chair in her office, continuing our
conversation. Mostly, I was hungry for her affirmation, which she gave
freely. Years later, I found an old cassette tape of an interview she
gave for my dissertation, on nationalist desire in Black television,
film, and literature. Playing it back, I was mortified to discover that
I had done most of the talking. Toni listened patiently, offering
“mm-hmm”s in all the right places.
With Buchi, a Nigerian novelist, one day in particular stands out in my
memory. She stood before a class of white students, pausing to survey a
Douglas fir outside the window.
“For you, the trees and the forest are very beautiful,” she said.
“Beau-ti-ful,” she repeated, enunciating each syllable with her thick,
British accent. “But for me I see something more in the forests.”
Uh-oh. I surveyed the room, sensing what was coming.
“I see fear and danger.” She pronounced this last word “dan-jah,”
allowing it to linger in the coffee-scented air for a beat or two. “You
just don’t know who might be behind those trees.” The class considered
her words in silence. She was right, and they knew it, although I doubt
that a Black person had ever said this to them before in quite that way.
“And, if something happens, well, then . . . I’m just another Black
woman gone. I wouldn’t even get two sentences in the newspaper.” Buchi
paused, allowing students to sit with their discomfort awhile. One
rustled papers. Another crossed and uncrossed her legs.
Buchi smiled, shifting the mood. “Well . . . you know.” Her expression
turned playful. “Since I am Buchi, I might get two or three lines.”
There was relieved laughter.
The next year, two Latinas and another Black woman enrolled in my
program, across campus, and, because there was now a critical mass of
students of color, we rallied and demanded that the department hire a
Black woman professor. Because that is precisely how these things work.
There is power in numbers.
The university heard our demands, and, in 1990, the scholar and activist
Angela Davis became the first person of color ever to join the full-time
faculty in the history-of-consciousness program. She arrived just as I
was leaving. And, although I didn’t get to take any classes with her,
she supported me by serving on my dissertation committee.
The resurgence of Black Lives Matter and the launch of #BlackInTheIvory
happened in June, when most universities were already online, owing to
covid-19, and wrapping up the semester. Faculty and administrators did
not yet feel widespread pressure to address race. That would soon change.
At Hofstra University, on Long Island, where I’ve taught journalism for
the past thirteen years, a handful of my colleagues created the Black
Faculty Council to address issues of systemic racism and bias. The group
outlined a list of twelve recommendations, including making public the
number and rank of Black faculty on campus (a figure that hovers between
four and six per cent nationally); providing mandatory anti-racism and
anti-Black-bias training for students, faculty, staff, and
administration; and disclosing details about complaints regarding the
department of public safety and campus policing. A coalition of Black
students sent their own eight-page list of demands to
administrators—which included a zero-tolerance hate-speech policy, more
diversity among professors, support for Black mental health, a
revitalization of the Africana-studies program, and mandatory
undergraduate requirements for courses on race and racism in the United
States.
Across the country, we’ve seen similar pockets of change, some more
radical than others. The University of Chicago announced that it would
admit only Black-studies scholars into its English Ph.D. program for
2021, citing Black Lives Matter. Similarly, the Rhode Island School of
Design said that it would hire ten new faculty members focussed on race,
decolonization, and cultural representation—a move that was made
possible by an anonymous donation large enough to pay their salaries for
the next five years. The California State University system is phasing
in a requirement that all students on its twenty-three campuses take at
least one ethnic-studies course. The University of Pittsburgh required
its first-year students to complete an online course on systemic
anti-Black racism in the fall.
Students and faculty nationwide have expressed their unwillingness to
continue on as before. They’ve insisted on confronting white power
structures directly and challenging the myriad ways in which America’s
racial hierarchy is ingrained in academic institutions. In November,
about seven hundred and eighty students participated in a two-week
strike at Haverford College, in response to what they saw as an
insensitive e-mail from the school’s president, Wendy Raymond, who had
been serving as the interim chief diversity officer at the time. The
e-mail urged students not to participate in protests after police
fatally shot Walter Wallace, Jr., a twenty-seven-year-old Uber Eats
driver, during a domestic dispute near the college. Students ended their
strike after receiving a commitment from college administrators to meet
the majority of their demands.
White officials like Raymond aren’t the only ones struggling. In August,
after a difficult conversation with Shardé Davis over the future of
their movement, Joy Woods announced that she would no longer be
associated with #BlackInTheIvory, removing her name from the Web site
and Twitter account. Many who had donated funds felt betrayed, vowing to
return merchandise purchased on the site. Both the site and the official
Twitter handle @BlackintheIvory have been inactive since September.
Still, #BlackInTheIvory lives on, having taken on an identity that is
larger than its founders. “The visibility of this hashtag allowed
institutions to start to have conversations that people have been
begging them to have for years,” Woods told me when I caught up with her
in November. “I still get messages from people saying, ‘You gave me
courage to finally say something.’ ”
Davis agreed, citing a recent speech she had given about
#BlackInTheIvory at the University of Northampton, in England. “For so
long we barely talked about racism,” she said. “Now I feel like that’s
actually happening. This has opened the door in a really powerful way.”
Kristal Brent Zook is a professor of journalism at Hofstra University
and the author of three books, including “Color by Fox: The Fox Network
and the Revolution in Black Television.” She is currently writing a
family memoir.
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