I think a lot about how, when I was growing up, higher education offered the promise of freedom. It was joy coming in the morning, sunlight after the cold night, and the peace after a storm. The way people talked about college, it seemed like Mecca. I couldn’t wait to go.
I remember telling my mother that I was going to college and never coming back. I was eleven years old then. I knew nothing about anything but I knew college was my way out. And, I was right about that.
I got lucky enough times in a row and received support from community organizations that paid for my SAT exams, college applications, and even helped me buy my first textbooks. This one organization, Summer Search, was premised on the idea that, if they just got kids like me to college, that would be the key to setting us up for life.
The weird thing about all of this hype around college is that no one ever tells you that, when you are Black, disabled, poor, queer, and/or trans, college campuses will never feel like places where you belong. There’s the getting there and then there is the being there.
I was never prepared for the being there. I didn’t understand how people seemed so put off by my mere presence in classrooms or how professors could scoff in my face because I didn’t understand the science of the television as a freshman engineering major. I stumbled, tripped, and fell through undergrad at the University of Southern California just to land in graduate school at the University of Chicago, one of the most prestigious and violently anti-Black institutions in the country.
There, I learned words like “epistemology,” “ontology,” “historiography,” “academia,” and “tenure.” I learned that this was all one big boys’ network and I was an uninvited guest. I learned that my way of knowing wasn’t considered knowledge and that the people I grew up with didn’t really count because there just wasn’t enough data there (intentionally). I discovered that, if you don’t get tenure, you get nicely fired from your job because your peers have essentially said you’re not good enough to sit with them. But, that those standards would be different for someone like me because, remember, my people don’t count.
I learned that people would ask me to be smaller so they could feel taller and they would turn those requests into rules. I found out that people in academia can be really awful to one another and sometimes (most of the time), they aren’t truly committed to the ethical and philosophical commitments that our work talks about.
I’m grateful to have learned those lessons. I picked most of them up in graduate school, twelve years after I first stepped foot on USC’s campus. It took me that long to come to grips with this mammoth-like system I’ve inserted myself into, mostly by fiat.
I know now, from these lessons and others, that a place like this can never be the place where we commune and ponder on our liberation. It can never be the site of freedom that people told me about when I was a child. It can only offer us a container for queer feminist base building, political education, radical pedagogy, and the work of liberating young people from the molds and boxes someone else created for them. More than anything else, it is a waiting place.
This is the work I love. It’s the work I choose over and over again. But, I engage in this work from a site of peril, knowingly. From that knowing, I become my most powerful self. The empty promises have no holds over me anymore. Each day here, I get stronger and freer despite this place not because of it.
That’s the work. That is the call. I am answering it.