Knowledge and Value

This was sent to me from another fierce WOC graduate student. Her email shows yet again how hard it is to 1. be in the academy 2. change the academy 3. sustain ambition to work within its constructs (the academy). We have to voice our frustrations and not isolate ourselves..... in numbers we grow stronger.

She states: "Hope you are well, my cognate class (on law and race) is painfully horrible! yesterday we were supposed to have our only in class test. He hadn't printed the tests out before class started, so he sent them to the faculty printer, and somehow they got lost, he told us to "not talk while he was out of the classroom" like we were 5th graders or something, I asked the class if they had put in complaints about him before and the consensus was that they and others have but nothing gets done, I think it is true about U of M's treatment of athletes, (who are almost all African American) even the school newspaper has some scathing comments about athletic/personal performance of individual athletes etc.

I am also feeling a little frustrated because there was an incident during a critique, where I was shut down and ignored, and no one jumped in. basically a white student is doing a painting using images of black subjects, to in her words"provoke a conversation about race and gender" last critique I urged her to use caution when comparing Hip Hop's role of women to that of Enslaved black women, during the antebellum and the Middle Passage, I offered myslef as a resource because of my studies on this history and the images from them, (as I had said there were not many photographs available) then I was cut off my a gentleman who said he was hired by Northwestern to archive slavery photographs on a library website. (it turned out these were photographs of Africans NOT African Americans, good try mister, both Black but NOT the same).. so at this last critique the conversation was of course more formal, like color composition etc. then I kept trying to bring the conversation back to race, and bluntly asked her what her point of view was she said it was to provoke a conversation (w/ I was trying to have a conversation, no?) then turned her attention to someone else, she was obviously uncomfortable about my confrontations, and was trying to move the group onto a different painting with benign subject matter. I asked her why she was using visual references of anthropological drawings of the African Slave trade and the journey to the West coast of Africa, I asked her if she was trying to talk about the invention or the convention of race, this time she completely disregarded and ignored my question and turned to the (white) guy next to me and said "didn't you have a question?".. not one of my liberal classmates or Professor said a word, so not only was my scholarship on this subject disregarded, but my own experience as a WOC and as a WOC artist who works on race. I cant wait for the break."

Stay strong!!! Yours in solidarity: libralady