‘Good in the Hood’ or ‘Burn It Down’? Reconciling Black Presence in the Academy

ABSTRACT

This paper provides a phenomenological analysis of the navigation of academia as experienced by two Black scholars, situated in dissimilar disciplinary and cultural traditions and origins. What is shared is an interest in the academic space that exists within which Black scholars may freely roam, and the structure and function of the boundaries that are present. The policing of Black thought and Black emotion within those boundaries, the violence with which the boundaries are enforced, and the strategies and rationales employed by Black academics in expanding, resisting, subverting, and acquiescing to said boundaries is explored by way of the authors’ testimonies. Drawing on our lived experience of academia, we suggest that the academy functions as a frontier of racist violence, where the thinking that grounds state-based racist violence is taught, legitimated and fostered. Through a dialogue which brings to the fore the tensions and contradictions of the outlooks and strategies employed by Black academics, we testify to the emancipatory potential of Black pain, Black rage and Black thought.

KEYWORDS:

• Black
• Aboriginal
• Torres Strait Islander
• academia
• colonialism
• dialogue
• testimony
• nihilism

Acknowledgements

We would like to express our sincere thanks to Open Mike Eagle, who granted us permission to cite lyrics from ‘Smiling (Quirky Race Doc)’ and ‘(How Could Anybody) Feel at Home’, from the albums Hella Personal Film Festival and Brick Body Kids Still Daydream respectively.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Bryan Mukandi is a Lecturer in Medical Ethics at the University of Queensland. His background is in Philosophy, Community Health, and Medicine; and his teaching and research revolve around the health and wellbeing of those described by Frantz Fanon as ‘the damned of the earth’. He is currently working on a monograph on ‘Black Consciousness’.

Chelsea Bond is a Senior Research Fellow at the Poche Centre for Indigenous Health at the University of Queensland. A Munanjahli and South Sea Islander woman, her work focuses on interpreting and privileging Indigenous knowledges and perspectives in relation to health, race, culture and identity. She has published a number of papers in relation to strength-based health promotion practice, Indigenous social capital, and the conceptualisation of Aboriginality within public health.

ORCID

Bryan Mukandi http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0497-4166

Chelsea Bond http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5246-235X

Notes

1. ‘In other words, the Black must no longer find herself faced with this dilemma: whiten [se blanchir] or disappear, but must be able to gain consciousness of an opportunity to exist otherwise [pouvoir prendre conscience d’une possibilité d’exister]’ (Fanon 2011: 142, translation ours).

2. We are conscious of the risks inherent in generalisation. This work is informed by the experiences of an Aboriginal (Munanjahli) and South Sea Islander woman and African man working in the Australian university sector. Our expectation is that this account will resonate with that of other people of colour in academia both here in Australia and abroad, though perhaps the resonance may be most pronounced among Blackfullas (Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples) and Black folk more broadly, here in Australia.

3. The reader might object to the idea of anyone having the ability to ‘simply be’, in any context, by pointing to the distance that Jacques Derrida (1995) reads between the name and the named; or his juxtaposition of Antonin Artaud's ‘horrible sickness of the mind’, and the latter's quest to simply be (Derrida 1998: 31). The idea of the Black ‘simply being’ herself could thus be cast as madness. One could also point to the idea of the need for The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Goffman 1959); and that ‘[t]hose we encounter are clothed beings  … Life in society is decent’ (Levinas 2001: 31). Our concern has to do with the range of roles that are available to the Black, the costumes available to her, and those in which she is inadmissible, illegible or unintelligible within the academy.

4. Our project here is in keeping with a facet of the ‘phenomenological practice’ that Sara Ahmed terms ‘diversity work’ (2012: 174). ‘Diversity work can take the form of description: it can describe the effects of inhabiting institutional spaces that do not give you residence’ (2012: 176). Interestingly, in the following paragraph, Ahmed describes ‘diversity work’ in terms of hesitation. Philosophically, this paper follows a path located somewhere between Ahmed's account and Alia Al-Saji’s (2018: 332) ‘Hesitation as Philosophical Method’. The latter notes that her

positionality as “foreigner”, “nonresident alien,” Arab, Muslim, Iraqi woman sits uncomfortably – absurdly and pessimistically incongruent - with my long belonging to SPEP [the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy], this on first view U.S.-centered … organisation. This incongruence makes me hesitate. My essay receives its impetus from this unease, this hesitation.

5. On the song ‘Smiling (Quirky Race Doc)’, Open Mike Eagle (2016) declares, ‘I was good in the hood, in college I was ruined/While walking I assumed you acknowledge the other humans’. The hostility and resulting alienation that this Black man experiences in white dominated spaces is a theme that runs through the song and the album as a whole. Interestingly, on his following album, Open Mike Eagle (2017) reflects on the ‘hood’ in warm notes, all the while lamenting both the hardships within and the tearing down of buildings in the projects.

Those with a flair for puns may read the above with the idea of ‘academic-hood’ in mind. These readers might find Chelsea Bond’s (2018) ‘The Irony of the Aboriginal Academic’ illuminating.

6. 26 January marks Australia's official national day of celebration, also known as Invasion Day. Writing in 1967, K. S. Inglis noted: ‘It may be that our uncertainty or ignorance of what the day commemorates helps us to celebrate it; for if we think specifically and vividly of that day in 1788, we may find it easier to feel outraged, or uncomfortable, than to rejoice in our nationality’ (Inglis, 1967: 25). Bond et al. (2018) explore the operations and political deployment of this ignorance. It is an ignorance that seems impervious to both the symbolism described above, and explicit challenge such as that below:

We will continue to assert our position in international law and we will continue to ask the State of Australia: by what lawful authority have you taken our Nations from our Lands?

Acts of colonialism and genocide continue under the terra nullius foundation of the Australian State. Evidence of ongoing violations continue against our children, women, men and our lands.

Why celebrate this violent colonial history of genocide? Who does this? (Watson 2018)

7. The ‘hood’ referred to here is an outer suburb of Brisbane which is materially one of the poorest in the state, but socially rich and a culturally diverse community. In 2017, the suburb was the focus of an Australian television documentary Struggle Street, which chronicled the hardship and despair faced by some of its residents (Bond 2017).

8. Irene Watson (2005) asks, ‘what Aboriginal community can be pieced together in this colonising space? To take the point further, what kind of Australian community do we have in this same colonising space and to what extent does the force of homogeneity determine the evenness of the cultural landscape’? She goes on to ask

In looking at the question of settled and unsettled spaces: who is free to roam? … To what extent is our sovereign Aboriginal being accommodated by the nation state's sanctioned native title space?  … Who am I when I stand outside the native title recognition, who am I – the untitled native? Do I remain the unsettled native, left to unsettle the settled spaces of empire (Watson 2005: 40, emphasis ours)?

9. Marcia Langton (2018) describes a welcome to country as follows:

The Aboriginal way of welcoming visitors to their homelands is often a very simple affair, with just a few words of welcome, sometimes in the local language and in English … Occasionally more elaborate ceremonies are held, which involve singing traditional songs. Participating in these rituals is the best way of showing respect for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander hosts and guides. (2018: 64)

10. Lorraine Hansberry’s (2015) understanding of the politics of the ghetto is instructive:

To be imprisoned in the ghetto is at best to be forgotten, or at most to be deliberately cheated out of one's birthright. Equipment, books, actual building space are all cut back on when it comes to the ghetto child  … From its inception [our grade school] had been earmarked as a ghetto school  … and therefore one in which as many things as possible might be safely thought of as expendable. After all, that's why the building was built, that's why the ghetto itself was and is maintained, not to give education but to withhold as much as possible, just as the ghetto exists not to give people homes but to keep them out of as much decent housing as possible.

11. Perhaps not Descartes himself, but Lilli Alanen’s (2004) characterisation of his correspondence with Elisabeth of Bohemia as a philosophical dialogue –

a philosophical dialogue in the Socratic sense of a common search for truth too or, to use a metaphysically less loaded term, of clarification. It can be seen as an opportunity for critical rational discourse, for mutual giving and asking for reasons, a shared effort to articulate, clarify and reflect on one's own views or commitments, to find some common understanding of things one can mutually accept and commit oneself to. (Alanen’s 2004: 213)

12.

I shall attempt to formulate, in a manner as elliptical, economical, and formal as possible, what I shall call the law of the law of genre  …  I would speak of a sort of participation without belonging – a taking part in without being part of, without having membership in a set. The trait that marks membership invariably divides, the boundary of the set comes to form, by invagination, an internal pocket larger than the whole; and the consequences of this division and of this overflowing remain as singular as they are limitless. (Derrida 1992: 227–228)

This incorporation of ‘The Law of Genre’ is my attempt to assert both inclusion and exclusion - to claim this present work as a work of philosophy, but one so marginal it may not to be seen as philosophy.

13. ‘The Academy is killing women of colour’, suggests Jennifer Vest (2013a: 485), who elsewhere describes herself as ‘a Black/Native/mixed-blood queer disabled feminist philosopher’, whose experience of the academy has been one of ‘institutional and individual hostility to Otherness – especially when that otherness is multiply positioned’ (Vest 2013b: 32).

14. Linda Martín Alcoff (2006) explains it this way:

Epistemic authority is shifted away from a professor of color when he or she addresses issues of race, away from women addressing issues of gender. Suddenly, white students lose their analytical docility and become vigilant critics of biased methodology. The visible identity of the teacher counteracts all claims of objectivity or earned authority as knower. (Alcoff 2006: 193)

Vanessa Andreotti (2016) comes to a similar conclusion, noting that ‘as an educator and educational researcher … the greatest challenge that I face is one of intelligibility’. She links this lack of intelligibility to ‘analyses that implicate the audience in ongoing harm’ and ‘conversations where their self-image and world views will not be affirmed’ (2016: 105).

15. This, unfortunately, is not unusual. Frances Henry et al., for instance, chronicle the difficulties experienced by Indigenous and racialised faculty in Canadian universities. Among others, they raise ‘the questions about these scholars’ foreign credentials if not obtained in Europe or North America’ (2017: 310).

16. ‘Our marginalised existence ensures that, for the most part, we keep our heads down and do our work’ (Henry 2015: 592). Does this tendency reflect a response, an implicit acceptance of an imperative to disappear?

17.

I remember well when the shadow swept across me. I was a little thing  … The exchange was merry, till one girl, a tall newcomer, refused my card, – refused it peremptorily, with a glance. Then it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil. I had thereafter no desire to tear down that veil, to creep through; I held all beyond it in common contempt, and lived above it in a region of blue sky and great wandering shadows. That sky was bluest when I beat my mates at examination time, or beat them at a foot-race, or even beat their stringy heads. Alas, with the years all this fine contempt began to fade; for the worlds I longed for  … were theirs, not mine’ (Du Bois 1994: 2).

18. Martin Nakata (2007) describes his experience of this dispossession as follows: ‘Enrolling at university, it did not take long for me to feel a sense of disquiet. My initial success brought with it only subdued elation because of the sense of alienation I felt, in particular from much of the cross-cultural and Australian Indigenous components of my course. To me, they seemed to be less about ‘me’, ‘us’ or ‘our situation’ and more about what people with academic knowledge — the ‘experts’ — thought about these things. It was as if Indigenous people were an object of study viewed from the confines of a fixed vantage point’ (2007: 2). Nakata also notes: ‘We were taught the Queensland curriculum — by teachers who probably did not know we existed until they found out they had a transfer to the region’ (2007: 6).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Office for Learning and Teaching [grant number FS14-0219].