Bad Feminist: Essays (2 page)

BET is not a network I watch regularly because I am very committed to Lifetime Movie Network and lesser cable network reality programming. Also, the shoddy programming on BET is a travesty, and considering that I have watched two episodes of WE tv’s
Amsale Girls
, my tolerance for shoddy programming is exceptional. It’s a shame how black people consistently have to settle for less when it comes to quality programming. It’s a shame so few options exist beyond BET. The networks offer a numbing sea of whiteness save for shows produced by Shonda Rhimes (
Grey’s Anatomy
,
Private Practice
,
Scandal
), who makes a deliberate effort to address race, gender, and, to a lesser extent, sexuality when she casts. Beyond that, black people—all people of color, really—only get to see themselves as lawyers and sassy friends and, of course, as The Help. Even when a new show promises to break new ground, like Lena Dunham’s
Girls
, an HBO show set in Brooklyn, New York, that follows the lives of four friends in their twenties, we are forced to swallow more of the same—a general erasure or ignorance of race.

Where BET is concerned, we settle for nothing at all unless it is airing reruns of
Girlfriends
, which is criminally underrated. It took me a long time to appreciate
Girlfriends
, but that show was onto something and never got the support it deserved. Sometimes, though, I feel like looking at people who look like me. Brown skin is beautiful; I like seeing different kinds of stories. The problem is that I see people on BET who look like me, but that’s where the similarities end. This is partly because I’m in my late thirties. In BET years, I am ancient. As much as I am plugged in to pop culture, there are things I don’t know about. Geography and my profession don’t help. As I began writing this essay, there was a show airing on BET called
Toya
. I’ve seen the name when I’ve browsed TV listings, but I’ve never really watched it. I eventually saw a couple of episodes and don’t even understand why this show is a show. What is the premise? I consulted Dr. Google and learned Toya is the ex-wife of Lil Wayne, but that’s it. She’s not even a backup singer or video ho, I don’t think. The threshold for fame weakens ever so rapidly.

I watched the
Toya
show, and there was nothing about any of it I could relate to other than caring about my family. I vaguely got the sense that Toya cares for her family and is trying to help them get on the right track, but it was fairly unclear because mostly the show involved people talking about boring things. During the show she dated someone named Memphitz (they are now married), who was looking at gorgeous diamond rings. Is he a rapper? What do these people do for a living? Lil Wayne’s child support can’t be that good. I wish BET did more to represent the full spectrum of black experiences in a balanced manner. If you watch BET, you get the sense that the only way black people succeed is through professional sports, music, or marrying/fucking/being a baby mama of someone who is involved with professional sports or music.

Once in a while, I would love to see an example of black success that involves other professional venues. On most television shows, white characters provide viewers with a veritable panoply of options for “What I Want to Be When I Grow Up.” There are exceptions, certainly. Laurence Fishburne played the lead on
CSI
for a season or two. Back in the day, Blair Underwood played a lawyer on
L.A. Law
. There are the aforementioned Shonda Rhimes–helmed shows. I suppose the thinking is that a person of color as a lawyer or doctor or writer or, hell, a jazz musician or school teacher or professor or postal worker or waitress wouldn’t be as interesting for the
kids
because the allure of current offerings is undeniable. And yet. At some point, we have to stop selling every black child in this country the idea that he or she only needs to hold a ball or a microphone to achieve something. Bill Cosby is kind of crazy these days, but he knows what he’s talking about, and he’s kind of crazy because he’s been fighting this fight for his whole damn life. BET frustrates me because it is a painful reminder that you can have something and nothing in common with people at the same time. I enjoy difference, but once in a while, I do want to catch a glimpse of myself in others.

In graduate school I was the adviser of the black student association. There was a negligible black faculty presence on campus (you could count them on one hand), and those folks were either too busy or burnt out or completely uninterested in the job. After four years, I understood. The older I get, the more I understand lots of things. Advising a black student association is exhausting and thankless and heartbreaking. It kind of destroys your faith after a while. A new black faculty member came to campus a couple years in, and I asked why she didn’t work with the black students. She said, “That’s not my job.” That person said, “They’re unreachable.” I hate when people say something is not their job or that something isn’t possible. We all say these things, sure, but some people actually believe they don’t have to work beyond what is written in their job description or that they don’t have to try to reach those who seemingly cannot be reached.

I get my work ethic from my tireless father. When it comes to showing young black students there are teachers who look like them, when it comes to mentoring and being there to support students, I feel it’s everyone’s job (regardless of ethnicity), and if you don’t believe that as a black academic, you need to check yourself, immediately, and then check yourself again and keep checking yourself until you get your head on right.

When I was an adviser, the black students respected me, probably, but they didn’t really like me a lot of the time. I get it. I am an acquired taste. Mostly, they thought I was “bougie.” Many of them called me redbone and laughed when I got irritated. They thought the way I use slang is hilarious because I round my vowels. They’d tell me, “Say ‘holla’ again,” and I would because that’s one of my favorite words even if I maybe say it wrong according to the kids. I kind of singsong the word. They especially loved how I said “gangsta.” I didn’t mind the teasing. I minded how they thought I expected too much from them where the definition of “too much” was to have any expectations at all.

Yes, I was a demanding bitch, and at times I was probably unreasonable. I insisted on excellence. I get that from my mother. My expectations were things like requiring the officers to show up to the executive meetings, insisting officers and members show up to general meetings at least five minutes early because to be early is to be on time, insisting that if students agreed to perform a given task they follow through, insisting they do their homework, insisting they ask for help and get tutoring when they needed that kind of support, insisting they stop thinking a C or D is a good grade, insisting they take college seriously, insisting they stop seeing conspiracy theories everywhere, insisting that not every teacher who did something they didn’t like was being racist.

Many of those kids, I quickly realized, did not know how to read or be a student. When talking about social issues in academia and even in intellectual circles, we talk about privilege a lot and how we all have privilege and need to be aware of it. I have always known the ways in which I am privileged, but working with these students, most of them from inner-city Detroit, made me realize the extent of my privilege. Whenever someone tells me I don’t acknowledge my privilege, I really want him or her to shut the fuck up. You think I don’t know? I’m crystal clear on privilege. The notion that I should be fine with the status quo even if I am not wholly affected by the status quo is repulsive.

These kids didn’t know how to read so I got them dictionaries, and because they were too shy to discuss literacy in meetings, they would catch me walking across campus or in my office and whisper, “I need help reading.” It had never crossed my mind before that it was possible for a child to be educated in this country and make it to college unable to read at a college level. Shame on me, certainly, for being so ignorant about the galling disparities in how children are educated. Shame on me. I learned so much more in grad school out of the classroom than I ever did sitting around a table talking about theoretical concepts. I learned about how ignorant I am. I am still working to correct this.

One-on-one, the students and I got along much better. They were far more open. I had no idea what I was doing. How do you teach someone to read? I consulted Dr. Google regularly. I bought a book with some basic grammar exercises. Sometimes, we just read their homework word for word, and when they didn’t know a word, I made them write it down and look it up and write the definition down too because that’s how my mother taught me. I had a mother who was home every day after school and who sat with me day after day and year after year until I went away for high school, helping me with my homework, encouraging me, and certainly pushing me toward excellence. There were things in my life my mother was unable to see, but when it came to my education and making sure I was a good, well-mannered person, she was on point in every way.

At times, I resented the amount of schoolwork I had to do at home. My American classmates didn’t have to do any of the stuff I had to do. I didn’t understand why my mom, both of my parents really, was so hell-bent on making us use our minds. There was a lot of pressure in our household. A lot. I was a pretty stressed-out kid, and some of that pressure was self-induced and some of it wasn’t. I enjoyed being the best and making my parents proud. I enjoyed the sense of control I felt by being good at school when there were other parts of my life that were desperately out of control. I was expected to get straight As. Bringing home a grade less than an A was not an option so I didn’t. This is a typical child-of-immigrants story, not at all interesting. When I worked with those kids in graduate school, I understood why my parents showed us how we had to work three times harder than white kids to get half the consideration. They did not impart this reality with bitterness. They were protecting us.

At the end of our sessions, the students I worked with would generally say, “Don’t tell anyone I came to see you.” It wasn’t that they were embarrassed to get help, most of the time. They were embarrassed to be seen putting effort into their education, to be seen caring. Sometimes, they’d open up about their lives. Many of the kids I worked with did not have parents who would or could prepare their children for the world the way mine did. Many of them were eldest children, the first in their families to go to college. One boy was the eldest of nine. One girl was the eldest of seven. Another girl was the eldest of six. There were many absent fathers, incarcerated mothers and fathers and cousins and aunties and siblings. There was alcoholism and drug addiction and abuse. There were parents who resented that their children were in college and tried to sabotage them. There were students who were sending their student loan refund checks back home to support their families and spending the semester without textbooks, without enough money to eat, because the mouths back at home needed to be fed. There were certainly students with a great parent or parents, with families who were supportive, who knew nothing of poverty, who were well prepared for the college experience or well prepared to do what it took to get up to speed. Those students were the exception. I often think about the danger of a single story, as discussed by Chimamanda Adichie in her TED Talk, but sometimes, there actually is a single story and it tears my heart open.

By the end of my last year of school, with all the other things I was dealing with in my personal life, I was completely burnt out. I had nothing left to give. All too often, the students just did not give a damn and neither did I. I’m not proud of this, but I really was dealing with a lot. That’s what I tell myself. The students didn’t show up to the BSA meetings. They half-assed their participation in club events and didn’t promote events and dropped the ball, and I no longer had the energy to glare and yell and push and prod and make them want to do better. If after four years they had learned nothing, I had failed, and there was little I could do to rectify that. They were just being college students, of course, but it was frustrating. When the last semester ended, I was relieved. I would miss the students because they were, to be clear, a great joy—bright, funny, charming, kind of crazy, but good kids. I still needed a break, a very, very long break.

The woman who recruited me to grad school had worked with the black students for about twenty years. When she retired, she was so burnt out she couldn’t even talk about them without being overwhelmed by her frustration with their unwillingness to change, the ways they had been wronged, their lack of faith that there was a different, better way, the administration’s piss-poor efforts to create change, all of it. I understood her burnout too. It took me a mere four years, but I got there. And yet. There was an end-of-the-year banquet where the students surprised me. They gave me a plaque and read a beautiful speech where they said I was the epitome of integrity and grace. They thanked me for recognizing they were talented and powerful beyond measure. They said I stood up for them even when they were wrong and that I was family, which did nicely explain our relationship—unconditional but complicated. They said lots of other gorgeously flattering things. They didn’t have to say any of it. I left grad school feeling like I had reached them. They certainly reached me, made me feel like I was a part of something even though it was my job to make them feel like part of something.

As a faculty member, I haven’t sought out the black student association yet because I’ve been trying to summon the energy. I feel guilty about how I’m dragging my feet. I feel this sense of responsibility. I feel weak and stupid.

I had a black student in my class during my first year who felt I was picking on him because he was black. I’m told this comes up often for black faculty. I wasn’t picking on this kid. For one, I don’t have that kind of time. Also, I expect excellence from all my students, without exception. He had a perfect GPA before and simply couldn’t believe he was not earning an A in my class. He was incredulous that I did not think he deserved a proverbial cookie for having been a good student before coming to my class. I was incredulous at his arrogance. I got the sense he wanted me to be impressed that he was “different,” that he was a good student, like I should just grade him on past performance instead of how he did in my class. He once told me, “I’m not like the other [N-words] on campus.” I told him he’d better check his attitude and his language. We had some very tense conversations, one of which was so tense my boss, unbeknownst to me, stood in the hallway just out of sight the entire time because he felt this kid might get rowdy. I thought the kid was going to get rowdy. It took me a whole semester to get a handle on this kid’s issue. I eventually realized he didn’t want to be seen as one of those students who come in and don’t know enough to get through or don’t care enough to get through. His way of doing that, of proving he was different, was to maintain his perfect GPA by any means necessary. That student graduated and I don’t know where he is now, but I hope he won’t spend his life negotiating respectability politics.