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By Nichole Guillory - Mothering in Color
I have tried many times to write this post. For weeks, I have wrestled with what to write to make sense of everything that has happened over the last three months (that go back 400 years).
I am terrified. There’s just no other way to say it. The confluence of so many traumas, each on its own difficult to get through, has been too much all at once. Death did not take its time getting here. It crashed full speed into our lives. The pandemic hit first. We stayed home and watched the death toll climb and climb to unbelievable numbers, and now we continue to re-open as if the deaths of 120, 000+ people in this country mean nothing. Grocery stores and restaurants and gyms and barber shops and nail salons in my community are teeming with unmasked people. Because I fear bringing a deadly virus home to my immunocompromised son, simple grocery store runs are now fraught with so much emotionality and time-consuming disinfection protocols that they too are exhausting. The unmasked—who have access to the same death toll counter as I do—communicate a clear message that we do not matter. While emotionally exhausted, we are among the privileged. My son is well, we don’t have immediate family or friends who have contracted the virus, our monthly paychecks have continued, and we have medical benefits in case we get sick. By slowing down our lives, the pandemic left us no choice but to bear witness to even more death descending into our living spaces through our televisions and social media feeds. Bear witness to the public murders of Black men. Bear witness to the unseen murders of Black women. Bear witness to Black mothers crying new tears for their recently murdered children. Bear witness to other Black mothers crying old tears for lingering injustice because their children’s murderers are still walking free. Free to murder again. As painful as our bearing witness has been, let me be very clear in acknowledging that my child is still alive and I am not mothering her child’s legacy instead of his future. What do you write in this context? I sit reluctantly at my computer trying to find the right words to make sense of this moment not only for myself, but mostly for my 12-year-old son. I have rehearsed late at night what I’m going to say to him tomorrow, how I’m going to circle back to explain something I didn’t get quite right the first time, to answer his many questions about all that is taking place. I have discussed with him the superficial mainstreaming of “Black Lives Matter” in the public sphere alongside the hundreds of years of Black lives not mattering in this country, and I have reminded him that young Black queer women built his generation’s Movement for Black Lives. I have had to answer the most painful question he has ever asked his father and me, whether he mattered in this country—all of this has been some of the most exhausting, high-stakes mothering I have ever done. He seems so much older to me this summer in comparison to last year, when our most difficult discussions centered around the implications of his decision to grow out his hair. Now he and I trace the origins of police violence and anti-Blackness, not because I want to, but because I have to. This mothering moment epitomizes the impossible line between protecting my son’s innocence and saving his life. The impossible line between making sure he isn’t walking around naïvely about how Black boys are often perceived in this country while at the same time insisting that he define himself on his own terms. The impossible line between how much to reveal so that he isn’t walking around in his body terrified to live while at the same time preparing him for a possible encounter with the police. No mother should have to walk such impossible lines. Parenting across these intersections for Black mothers means we have to make hard choices between nurturing our children’s innocence and resisting our own adultification of them because raising our children is a matter of life and death. Literally. I wish I could end this post on a hopeful note, but that would be disingenuous. White supremacy will rage on, I’m sure of that. I take each day as it comes, trying to be present for my family and resisting my tendency to time travel to my son’s future. I continue to connect—virtually—with a very small circle of friends who remind me that I am not alone and who allow me to show up exactly as I am, no matter how good, bad, or ugly the day has been. I write in my gratitude journal every day thanking the universe for the small wins, remembering that the small wins become the support structure for wins yet to come. And finally, I remind myself to just breathe, and when I do, I call on the ancestors to protect all who are fighting for justice on behalf of those who no longer can.
Author
Nichole Guillory, PhD, is Professor of Curriculum and Instruction at Kennesaw State University. She publishes on the experiences of women of color in the academy, including WellAcademic's Mothering in Color series. She is mom to Nicholas, the love of her life.
Nichole Guillory, PhD - Mothering in Color
I am thankful that you made the hard decision to release the video footage of two police officers arresting six- year-old Kaia at her charter school, the Emma and Lucious Nixon Academy, in Orlando, Florida. As a mom who is raising a Black child in the South, I can only imagine the great risk you took in making the decision to release the video of what I’m sure is the most traumatic moment in young Kaia’s life. The site of the arrest, specifically that it took place at Kaia’s school, is what compels me to write.
I have been an educator since 1993, first as an English teacher and now as a teacher educator, and as such, I have spent much of my adult life in schools as well as studying them. Being a teacher educator has afforded me the opportunity to work in a variety of schools: big and small, private and public, well-resourced and under-resourced, child-centered and teacher-centered, career prep and college prep, and the list continues. I know schools well. Watching the arrest, which would have been horrifying in any setting, I cannot help but think that in the one place where adults are always ethically and legally bound to keep children safe, we failed miserably. Yes, I use “we” on purpose here. While I am not the teacher who called the administrator who called the police officer who arrested your daughter, I am a teacher educator who understands that my work is tied to a village of educators, which as I see it, makes us all collectively responsible for providing (y)our child a safe school environment. Our village failed Kaia and you. For those unfamiliar with events surrounding Kaia’s arrest, I offer here a detailed account culled from the many news reports I reviewed, and while these news reports do not capture exactly what happened to Kaia that awful day, I offer this account in hopes that the adults reading my open letter—especially teachers—will see just how many times adults who were entrusted by Kaia’s family to keep her safe at school not only failed to protect her, but also continued throughout the day to inflict psychological and physical harm. I am intentionally repeating Kaia’s name and her age often because I hope to remind readers of her humanity, that she is someone’s precious child, sister, niece, cousin, or granddaughter, because all too frequently these days, it seems that some of us continue to ignore that school-aged Black girls are children, that Black girls are human beings. That I feel it necessary to write that last statement and it’s worth repeating—Black girls are human beings--shows just how hopeless I feel some days as a Black mom during these troubled and troubling times. To have to remind law enforcement that a six-year-old baby should never be escorted out of her school in handcuffs is bad enough, but to feel a need to remind that child’s teachers and principals that they did not treat Kaia like one of their own children, like an important and deserving member of our village, is even worse. Kaia isn’t the nameless “Six-Year-Old First Grader Arrested” that has populated news headlines. Kaia is a baby—and I don’t mean that description figuratively. Kaia was six years old at the time of her arrest in September 2019. This is the same age that my own son learned how to tie his own shoelaces well enough that they did not come untied throughout the day. Before Kaia’s arrest, she allegedly engaged in behavior described as “kicking and screaming.” School officials’ statements say that on the morning of the arrest (around 8 am), Kaia wanted to wear sunglasses and was “screaming and pulling on her classroom door,” which was reportedly witnessed by the assistant principal. News reports indicate that the assistant principal and two staff members then took Kaia to the office. In her statement, the assistant principal says that Kaia “hit her in the stomach and chest area” and was “aggressive.” Multiple news outlets report uncertainty about who was responsible for calling in a school resource officer to intervene. An excerpt from the official school statement says that no one at the school asked that Kaia be arrested. The police bodycam video shows us what happened later that school day. The video shows a school staff member reading a story to Kaia, who is clearly not kicking, screaming, punching, or yelling. Noticing the officers, Kaia asks why they are there and what the zip ties were. When one of the officers tells her that they are for her, she begins to cry. She begs and pleads with them not to handcuff her and to give her a “second chance.” S. Ramos, one of the police officers who is visible in the video, then zip ties Kaia’s wrists together behind her back and (perp) walks her to the backseat of a police SUV. In an interview with the Orlando Sentinel, Kaia’s grandmother says that Kaia was initially charged with misdemeanor battery and fingerprinted and photographed, and because she was not tall enough to reach camera height, Kaia had to use a step stool. In a clip from a local news station, Kaia’s grandmother said she reminded school administrators of Kaia’s sleep apnea, which she says the school was aware of and which she connected to her granddaughter’s temper tantrums. Several news stories indicate Dennis Turner, the other officer who arrested Kaia and was serving as a school resource officer, went back to the school and bragged that Kaia broke his arrest record of youngest offenders, that his youngest arrest before Kaia was seven years old. News stories also report that this officer—who is a Black man—arrested a six-year-old boy the same day of Kaia’s arrest. The Orlando Police Department has since apologized to you, and they report Dennis Turner, who was already retired, was fired from the school resource officer pool. S. Ramos, the officer who handcuffed and walked Kaia out of school, was cleared of all charges because the police department says he followed protocol in calling a supervisor to get approval for the arrest of a child younger than twelve years old. I could use the remainder of this letter to reflect on the horrific actions of the two police officers, or more importantly, Florida law that would even allow a six-year-old to be arrested in the first place. Or perhaps you’re hoping I discuss the systemic dimension of racism and how an already complicated arrest of a Black girl student is made even more complicated because the arresting police officer is a Black man. These are all worthy of serious discussion. However, as an educator, I am most appalled by the actions of other state actors also culpable in the violence perpetrated against Kaia: school administrators at Emma and Lucious Nixon Academy who called a resource (police) officer in to settle a situation with a six-year-old child that did not warrant intervention by law enforcement. I saw at least one member of the school office staff telling Kaia she had to go with the police officers and that the handcuffs would not hurt; this is the same staff member who was reading a story to Kaia when the police officers arrived. The video also shows at least one other adult at her desk, sitting in silence while Kaia begged for help as the policemen walked her out of the front office. I’m well aware that perhaps these two women were not administrators at the school and remained silent because they had to in order to keep their jobs. However, because I have spent a good amount of time in schools, I also know it is not too big of a leap to assume at least one school administrator was also likely present in the school main office—even if not visible on the police bodycam video—and within earshot of Kaia’s plaintive pleas for help and to be “let go.” I understand school administrators have a responsibility to keep everyone safe in their buildings, but what danger did six-year-old Kaia really present to school staff and students? I fear what is more likely is that the adults responsible for her arrest wanted to teach young Kaia (and all the mostly Black students in the school) a lesson in control and submission, to teach Kaia that her Black girl body was out of control and had to be tamed, that non-compliance was unacceptable. Kaia had to become less human—less Black person, less girl—to all adults responsible for her arrest. Otherwise, how do you explain the many chances adults had to intervene, to reverse bad decision-making before it became harmful to Kaia (and her classmates), to stop inflicting violence on a child who needed help not handcuffs? I want my teacher colleagues to know Kaia is not the first six-year-old Black girl to be arrested and handcuffed in U.S. schools, nor is she the youngest. The list of Black girl students to be policed and overdisciplined in schools is too long. See, for example, the case of eight-year-old Jmiyha Rickman in Alton, Illinois. AND six-year-old Salecia Johnson in Milledgeville, Georgia. AND five-year-old Ja’eisha Scott in St. Petersburg, Florida. AND six-year-old Desre'e Watson in Avon, Florida. I urge all teachers to read Black Girls Matter: Pushed Out, Overpoliced, and Underprotected, by the African American Policy Forum, and Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools, by Monique W. Morris. These books are some of the best research on the school to prison pipeline for Black girls, but, sadly, there is much to study and much that has been studied. In moving forward from that awful day, your family had the added burden of finding (and paying for) a private school that does not have a police officer on site. Kaia deserves to be in a school with adults she can trust, who see her particular brilliance, who can bring some safety and normalcy back to her school life. You have visited Florida House Representatives to urge state legislators to pass the Kaia Rolle Act, which requires Florida schools and law enforcement agencies to have a policy in place against the arrest of children under 10 years of age. We know you wanted the original bills that—if they had made it out of committee—would have prevented the arrest of children under 12 years old. I write to make you a promise, no matter how small an act this might be. I promise I will never forget Kaia Rolle. She will forever be at the forefront of the work I do as an educator. I feel a renewed purpose for building more classrooms where Black girls in particular are shown care and love such that they cannot help but love and care for themselves and each other. From this point forward, I will remind the teachers I work with that we are a village with a communal responsibility to recognize the humanity of Black girls, that they belong to a family and a community who love them more than life and in whom all their hope is bound. I sincerely hope Kaia is in a classroom where she will learn how to dream again and build into existence the future she imagines for herself.
Author
Nichole Guillory, PhD, is Professor of Curriculum and Instruction at Kennesaw State University. She publishes on the experiences of women of color in the academy. She is mom to Nicholas, the love of her life. We couldn't be happier that she has agreed to pen the Mothering in Color series for WellAcademic.
By Nichole Guillory (WellAcademic Guest Blogger) - Mothering in Color
It’s that time of the semester when students and faculty alike are exhausted. This time is always the point at which my students start to break down. Their absences are more frequent. Their requests to extend assignment deadlines increase. They start to panic about their final grades.
This is the time that exhaustion also creeps into professors’ bodies. We start to get sick. We hit snooze more often. We need extra shots of caffeine to get through the workday (and in my case sixth grade homework). Sound all too familiar? I am feeling more emotionally exhausted than usual, and when I considered the reasons, I realized that I could not point to one cause. What I realized instead is that I’m feeling the cumulative effects of a consistent stream of challenges, including macro and micro aggressions. Because there are so many, I chose a list format to catalogue them in this post. As a restorative to my own emotional well-being, I decided that a wish list was an appropriate way to remind us all how we might be/do better for each other.
I have one final wish, and this one is big. It’s my wish for everyone reading this post because it’s why I continue to stay in academe.
For those of you who have such friends, you know the deep gratitude I feel every day. For those who don’t (yet), keep looking because authentic, compassionate friendships are possible. And we need each other now more than ever.
Author
Nichole Guillory, PhD, is Professor of Curriculum and Instruction at Kennesaw State University. She publishes on the experiences of women of color in the academy. She is mom to Nicholas, the love of her life. We couldn't be happier that she has agreed to pen the Mothering in Color series for WellAcademic.
By Nichole Guillory (WellAcademic Guest Blogger) - Mothering in Color
If you’re looking for a post to help you get your new school year off to a smooth, positive start, this isn't it.
I dread the beginning of a new school year, and this year is especially difficult (more on this later). I am known to go into depressive states until around October, when the realization hits that I have to let my beloved summer go and move forward—even if painfully—with the rest of the academic year. Summer is my F-A-V-O-R-I-T-E time of year. Unlike other seasons, I’m not bound by the schedule of my son’s school or limited by heavier traffic patterns on my usual routes or overwhelmed by an exhausting list of tasks for home and school. Though I teach a lot in summer out of necessity, I am privileged to be able to work mostly on my own terms. I actually have time to rest, exercise, write, and think. I consider myself a better mother in summer, but a more accurate way to characterize how I feel is that I struggle less with mothering. I make fewer mothering mistakes in summer. I am more patient, more forgiving, and more kind toward my child. I am less likely to say something I have to apologize for, and I am less likely to act in unkind ways. My number one reason for loving summer so much is that I have been able to more carefully take note of Nicholas’s growing up because of our long stretches of uninterrupted time together. He’s starting to imagine himself in college because he’s visited my campus so many times; with a little “encouragement”—really incentivizing—from me, he has broadened his summer reading choices to include actual literature and not just junk book series; he has had time to do some deep diving into learning about things he loves like roller coasters, cruise ships, and airplanes; and though still a work in progress, he is becoming more practiced working through his fears and trying new things. Not all changes over our summers together have been easy to negotiate, however. He is talking to me a lot less; he will no longer allow me to hold his hand in public; he says he has a constitutional right to his own opinion, which is not always an opinion I share; and his dad is now his go-to parent for advice. Times are changing, and I am writing this post to celebrate my son’s continued childhood and to lament what is most likely in front of him. The beginning of this school year marks a very important shift; Nicholas has begun middle school, which is simultaneously frightening and exciting. I am excited because he is excited about this next chapter. He is beginning to think about what being his own person means—our repeated message to him about being confident in his own skin and making his own decisions. Heading into next school year, Nicholas is deciding on a different path, and while this decision is literally about what being his own person looks like, it has come to mean something much more to me. Nicholas has asked to loosen the rules around his hair. Last year he asked to cut his hair into a Mohawk style and to dye it blue. I gave in on the former, but blue dye was and forever will be a hell no while he lives in our house. Our previous understanding was that he could do what he wanted in summer with his hair, but when school started we always went back to his regular hairstyle, which we call the “Even Steven” (also known as a “Caesar” or a “Regular”). For those unfamiliar with Black barbershop lingo, this is basically an almost bald shaved cut over the entire head. This summer he asked to grow out his hair into an afro. He also asked to renegotiate our agreement because he did not want to shave off his summer fro when school started this year. An afro on a Black child marks him/her—positively or negatively, depending on who’s doing the marking, and the bigger the fro, the more complicated meanings the fro engenders. To some (his dad and I are in this group), the fro is a visible marker of Black pride that connects the wearer to a political and cultural past and present. For others, it prompts fear, shame, disparagement, among other negative responses. We decided that Nicholas could keep his summer style. It is a visible reminder to me every day that my child is growing up, a sign of his growing independence, a marker of the (Black) pride he feels when he looks in the mirror. [By the way, the fro had a short life and has morphed into a high top fade. For those of you who know Nicholas, be sure to tell him how much you like his new hairstyle.] As this new school year begins, I must face that my child is heading into a new stage of his (educational) life and that the choices he makes as he grows older may have different meanings than before. Because racism too often causes the adultification of Black children, Nicholas will become more and more vulnerable to misperceptions related to how he presents himself and how he chooses to present his growing racial consciousness in what he wears, what he says (he's adept at code-switching), how he walks, what music he listens to, how loud he plays his music in public, and…a whole host of other choices. Imagine my fear that at such a critical time in his life—the beginning of adolescence—he has to figure out who he is within/against our current national context. I’m working hard to make sure that my fears don’t get in the way of us having fun as we navigate this exciting new journey together. He deserves to not feel pressured to protect me as I try mightily (and oftentimes in vain) to protect him.
Author
Nichole Guillory, PhD, is Professor of Curriculum and Instruction at Kennesaw State University. She publishes on the experiences of women of color in the academy. She is mom to Nicholas, the love of her life. We couldn't be happier that she has agreed to pen the Mothering in Color series for WellAcademic.
By Nichole Guillory (WellAcademic Guest Blogger) - Mothering in Color
We are in the middle of annual reviews, which means we have been busy documenting what we have “accomplished” in the areas of research, teaching, and service in the last year and describing the quality and significance of that work. We rate ourselves in each of the three areas, and our department chairs also rate our work as exceeding, meeting, or below expectations.
I know what you’re thinking: annual reviews are a function of neoliberal audit culture in higher education settings, where increasingly across the U.S., professors have to “prove effectiveness,” some might say prove our worth. For faculty women of color, annual review time can be especially stressful. Student evaluations do not always reflect the effectiveness of our teaching and instead reflect how racism and sexism intersect to influence students’ perceptions. Faculty women of color whose research is situated in marginalized disciplines (like critical race feminism) also may have a harder time demonstrating quality and significance of our publications using traditional measures (like impact factor of journals). Sometimes the service faculty women of color do that supports our institutions’ diversity missions, like mentoring of students of color and supporting other women of color colleagues, is invisible labor which does not get counted fully. For a long time (before and after earning tenure, by the way), I put pressure on myself (and way too much time) into annual reviews. With my research, teaching, and service situated in marginalized education fields, my focus was often on “convincing” my superiors that my work was as good as the work of my colleagues in traditional disciplinary fields. Because the academy has historically recognized as legitimate only a few indicators of quality and significance, a higher bar exists for demonstrating how my work “measures up.” This higher bar, and all the extra work it requires for a successful annual review, takes a lot of time and emotional energy. Explaining my teaching evaluations in a larger context of research on Black women faculty teaching diversity courses, providing additional documentation to demonstrate how big of an impact my scholarship is having in my field, justifying how mentoring of students and colleagues from historically marginalized groups is more time-consuming and energy-depleting than regular service yet still so essential to the health of the university, and proving that my public scholarship (the blogpost you’re reading now, for instance) is indeed scholarship and deserves to be “counted”—all of this extra labor for annual reviews is not uncommon for faculty members who do “diversity” work. We understand the costs when we make these commitments, but even with this knowledge, having to count and measure and justify and prove our “value” to the university can still be dehumanizing. To counter this effect, I made some changes over the last five years in how I approach annual reviews. I view my annual review for what it should be: an opportunity to stop and take stock of all that I have done over the past year; to think about how my work is aligned with my pedagogical commitments, especially related to social justice; and determine what adjustments I need to make in the upcoming year so that my work is more integrated and purposeful. The most difficult change was developing a different framework for and attitude toward annual reviews—and I’m still a work in progress. I resist seeing the review as my one shot at proving that my work and I matter in the space. I know that I matter, I know that the work I do matters, and I know that my mattering is never going to be measurable using the means that institutions privilege. I am no longer looking for ratings on an annual review to tell me how effective I am as a teacher, researcher, and colleague; what to do more of, what to do less of; or how close I am to what sometimes seems like a moving bar. The bar I set for myself is always going to be higher than one set for me, and sometimes this has meant that I don’t earn the highest scores. I’ve made some practical adjustments as well that I invite readers to consider. First, I set a timer to the work I do completing annual reviews. A very firm timer. I give the task no more time than this. No exceptions. Second, I use my own template which has sections with reusable content and sections that I fill in with new stats each year, and so far, this template works with the university template I am required to use. Third, I set goals for research, teaching, and service in 2-3 year increments, so I don’t write new ones until I have achieved these or until they change after this window of time has passed. Lastly, I know what my university’s handbook says is required of department chairs and me in this process, which can be helpful especially when department chairs change frequently. I also learned from Roxanne Donovan to schedule a session to work on annual reviews with a couple of colleagues who do similar work so that you can create statements of quality and significance together. Even though I’ve made changes over a number of years prior to my recent promotion to full professor, I understand that being able to work around some institutional norms is a function of my privileged position in the academy. I also understand that my individual approach to changing my mindset around annual reviews is not going to solve a more systemic problem nationally, where evaluation of professors has become increasingly more high stakes. But I have effected change for myself, which is sometimes all we can do. I also invite administrators to use the approach of my current department chair—shout out to Dr. Anete Vasquez. She added a humanizing frame to the annual review process by sending an email to faculty members acknowledging that review meetings often trigger the sympathetic nervous system (fight or flight) and stating her intent to trigger our parasympathetic nervous system (rest and digest). To do this, she gave us a brief set of questions to answer in advance of our meeting which asked us to reflect on what was working—a strengths-based model—in our teaching, research, and service, and to offer solutions if we noted any problems. She also stated that we would work collaboratively in our meeting to draft the letter together—with ratings in each area—that accompanied my annual review to the next level. In my meeting with her, she asked me to help her make a case for positive ratings, which sparked a conversation about my accomplishments the previous year. I never felt like I was defending my work. Instead, my work was understood, and I felt acknowledged. I hope you’ve found a way—big or small—to use what agency you have to make annual reviews more formative and less high stakes, generative and not destructive, and collegial not adversarial. That’s what we deserve after all the work we’ve done throughout the year.
Author
Nichole Guillory, PhD, is Professor of Curriculum and Instruction at Kennesaw State University. She publishes on the experiences of women of color in the academy. She is mom to Nicholas, the love of her life. We couldn't be happier that she has agreed to pen the Mothering in Color series for WellAcademic.
By Nichole Guillory (WellAcademic Guest Blogger) - Mothering in Color
I lost a colleague from this side of the heavens on December 28, 2018. I said my last goodbye in person on December 19th, nine days before her passing, and I knew then that the end was probably near though I hoped for a different result. So I knew when our mutual friend texted in the very early hours of December 28th what the sad news was before I even returned the call.
Charlease Kelly-Jackson was 42 years young. A fierce mom of two. A loving daughter. A loyal sister in a family full of brothers. And a badass scholar in the STEM world. Before I wax nostalgic about our relationship, let me be clear that my post is not meant as a tribute piece. I could never properly capture Charlease’s impact. Furthermore, tributes are often written by those who are closest to the deceased. I do not want to exaggerate our closeness. I find it offensive after someone’s passing when folks mischaracterize relationships. We did not have a girlfriend’s type of friendship. We never took a trip, had drinks after hours, went to the nail salon, or did retail therapy together. I characterize our relationship of several years in a different way. I call myself her older academic sister—though her footprint in the field of STEM grants outsized us all. And this is the relationship I wish to highlight in this post. I remember our first lunch; a colleague who knew us both separately thought I might be able to ease her transition to our university—this place can be culture shock for even the most seasoned academics. I don’t know if I eased her transition with the advice I gave that day, but we became closer as a result of some mentoring through her tenure and promotion process. In the last few years, I have found that mentoring, especially as it relates to getting underrepresented faculty tenured and promoted, is one way to advance my commitment to social justice. We developed our professional relationship through our work with a small group of public schools our college partnered with; she worked at the elementary schools and I worked at the high school. We both felt at home in these schools, working to better prepare teachers for “our” kids. I pride myself on knowing how to work respectfully and thoughtfully with teachers, families, and communities. But Charlease had me beat. Every. Single. Time. She had five schools, I only had one. We often joked that we worked with our teacher colleagues much more easily than our university colleagues. Our closeness came through countless phone calls. I can hear her fast talking now. Guillory, you got a minute? I have a situation and I need your advice… Guillory, am I making too much out of… Guillory, let me read this email to you so you can tell me how to respond before I go off… Guillory, have you worked with such and such before? She’s asked me to do a grant with her… Let me pause here to say that many women of color in the academy will be familiar with the topics of these exchanges. They come from having to navigate a higher education system where our experiences, regardless of institution, go something like this: Woman of color enters the academic space. Woman of color works and works and works some more. Woman of color is dismissed/devalued/disrespected. Rinse and repeat. Women of color find myriad ways to survive this cycle, and one important strategy is to seek support from other women of color who have traveled our same path. We offer advice, an encouraging place to land, and knowing affirmation while we help each other make sense of our individual experiences within a system that too often diminishes our humanity. Charlease was not always receptive to my suggestions, but she always accepted them. We had this familiar process. She called for advice. I’d give advice. She’d argue with me about the advice. I reminded her that she called me for the advice, and I’d ask her again if she really wanted it. After she was less mad, she’d tell me that her mom told her to do the same thing that I had just suggested. And I always reminded her that her academic big sister might not always be right, but her mama always was. And then there were the heads-up phone calls. You know how we do. We call each other to share important information which helps us to navigate an unexpected or difficult situation because there’s never a shortage of struggle for women of color in toxic, oppressive academic spaces. And then there were the calls for the last two and a half years that were mostly about her cancer, its effect on her children, and the full-time battle she waged on top of an already over-full plate. She kept me informed—I feel privileged that she trusted me to know some of what she went through at each stage of a new treatment plan, a new clinical trial, another doctor’s opinion. I wish for any one of those calls now. I wish she was on this side of the heavens. As is often the case in the aftermath of death, you reach clarity, which has been the case with me too. What seemed big at work before I left for the holiday break seems really small now, so inconsequential in comparison, especially when I think about Charlease’s family. And perhaps this is why I felt compelled to write this post. To make a public promise to continue to mentor others in her name. To answer the late night call to dictate an email that settles a stressful situation before morning, to weigh options when a new work request comes through, to mirror someone’s worth back to her, to pay forward all the laughs we had together. And to remind us—and myself especially—that mentoring relationships have a lasting impact on the mentor too.
Author
Nichole Guillory, PhD, is Professor of Curriculum and Instruction at Kennesaw State University. She publishes on the experiences of women of color in the academy. She is mom to Nicholas, the love of her life. We couldn't be happier that she has agreed to pen the Mothering in Color series for WellAcademic.
By Nichole Guillory (WellAcademic Guest Blogger) - Mothering in Color
This past summer, I received an invitation from a leading scholar in my field to do a keynote address for a conference where other leading scholars showcase their work. He had asked before, and at that time, I said no. I said no, not because I didn’t want to do the keynote, but frankly, I didn’t even think I—or my body of work—was worthy of the ask.
Let me say that again. I did not even think I was worthy of the ask. Sad, right? Like too many other Black women in the academy subjected to consistent devaluation as scholars, I have struggled with/against Impostor Syndrome since I entered the academy as a professor more than twelve years ago. I am the poster child for what psychologists identify as a condition of self-perceived intellectual phoniness. Doubting my accomplishments, thinking I am not deserving of my achievements, fearing exposure as an intellectual fraud—this is the internal script that has been on constant replay in my head. To this day, when people I meet for the first time ask me what I do for a living, I don’t say “professor.” I say I teach. The next question is invariably about where I teach, and when I tell them my university’s name, they tell me that I’m a professor. Did you catch that? Perfect strangers have to tell me that I’m a professor. So when I received the invitation to do a keynote this time, my first reply was not just no, but hell no. Doing a keynote with this group in particular, my closest colleagues in curriculum theory, engendered my worst fears about myself. I do not belong in this space. I am not a real theorist. I work in teacher education, not in a curriculum theory program. What someone else has to say is far more important than I what I have to offer. I didn’t think that I could stand in front of large room full of scholars whose work I had read and studied. I felt like that they would see me just as I saw myself—an academic fraud, a phony, an impostor. I didn’t send the “regrets” email right away though. I told myself that I would sleep on the invitation and reply the following day. Some of you reading this who are not Black women scholars may also feel like impostors in your workplaces too, but I just want to make clear that for marginalized groups, feeling like you are fraud and are not deserving of your achievements is often intensified by systemic racism, sexism, cis-genderism, and ableism, to name just a few. Systemic practices in the academy which value us for our service more than our scholarship, for our obedience more than our critiques, for our silence more than our voices are dehumanizing and do real damage to our productivity, not to mention our physical, emotional, and spiritual health and well-being. So back to my decision about the keynote. I eventually said yes for one reason only. I am trying to teach my son to practice bravery when situations arise where he might be fearful. I don’t want him to allow fear to drive his decision-making like it did (does) mine for a lot of my life. I am not a perfect mother, but I am always an honest one, even when it’s hard. So I figured that I could not say no to the keynote and then turn around and tell him to say yes to doing things he fears. Mothering always pushes my boundaries. I’m not always grateful for the nudges, but this time proved differently. The writing of the keynote—not delivering it in front of an audience—was the hardest part for me, mostly to calm the noisy voices of doubt and fear long enough to produce thoughtful and provocative analysis. I learned that I write best with an academic babysitter, which Roxanne reframes as writing “in community,” and without my writing partners—Roxanne and Megan—the voices would have won. The second hardest part was to quiet my comparison mind because conference organizers sandwiched my talk in between keynotes by two popular big name scholars whose work I admired from afar for all of my career. I told myself that they were the badasses, not me; that people would come to hear what they had to say, not me. Having given the keynote last week, I now have the space to recognize that saying yes was one of the best decisions I made for myself (and ultimately for my son). Not because what I said was positively received, but because of the lessons I learned about myself and my work. I am not an impostor after all. The academy has done its best to convince me that I’m not a scholar, but no more. It’s time we step back from the expectation of institutions that don’t value us in the first place and step up on behalf of ourselves. My institution and all of its problems seem very small now in comparison to the work/writing I have left to do, and I realize that I must center my energy on intellectual work, which is my writing on Black mothering as a resistance practice, both as theory in my academic publications and as praxis in Mothering In Color. People being moved by the keynote was a humbling experience that highlighted how grateful I am to all who paved a way for me to deliver the keynote in the first place. I was moved even more toward bravery by their very generous support of the work. I invite others who are suffering through Impostor Syndrome to say yes to something you are fearful of doing. Taking that risk just might quiet those impostorism voices once and for all…or at least quiet them considerably.
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Nichole Guillory, PhD, is Professor of Curriculum and Instruction at Kennesaw State University. She publishes on the experiences of women of color in the academy. She is mom to Nicholas, the love of her life. We couldn't be happier that she has agreed to pen the Mothering in Color series for WellAcademic. |
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