Whose Affective Equality?

Thinking with care

At our department we have been conducting interviews for a faculty position these last few weeks. A deliberate hiring choice: so that we are not just talking diversity, but, as I see it, beginning to reposition white bodies and white knowledge in a non-dominant relation with bodies of color and nonwestern knowledge.

This is part of the work I am here to do as I lead the department.

It is not only about knowledge paradigms and thought lineages, it is also about the bodies that occupy the space. I have so many other vital aspects to my mission, as I see it, but this remains a scratch that continues to hurt. Everyday. To be among a handful of faculty of color in the institute—the only one in the program—creates enormous psychic pressure, which I doubt my white colleagues understand. I have said yes to this weight for now because it is needed. Someone has to do it, be the first, be the one to break the walls down and let in all the others—those whom the dominant culture has happily relegated to the margins. Someone has to decode and deweaponize academicspeak that will eagerly put the walls back up, brick by brick, to keep the ‘others’ at the margins. I can do this, I whisper to the ancestors, I am doing it, even when I am misunderstood and make mistakes—my mirror is the deep of the ocean.

(And yes, I need to become much more vigilant about releasing as spiritual practice.)

So then: the interviews. The foxiness of whiteness jumps in startling me during an evaluation of one particular person, who a colleague reads as not having a “cultural fit”—let me just say because they made an assumption about a certain way of being that to me, a woman of color, reads entirely normal. The colleague is someone who has attempted to engage with anti-racist texts, and also, with some sincerity, to be an ally. And yet. An assumption is still made, the bias still creeps in.

Positionality matters. Not acknowledging this produces knowledge that is not aware of its biases, limits what we see about our seeing.

The colleague and I are both much more than this incident. Work will continue, and more work will be accomplished together—but something in me has pulled back again. I have to stop expecting I will be cared for as a woman of color in this professional space—and yet, I am committed to showing up with love and caring for the work and people I bear responsibility towards. I have to make sure my own heart is being pieced back together again—that I have circles of care where I can be without the mask people of color in professional settings often must needs put on, around white people. It takes ongoing sincere curiosity, reckoning with what and how one is seeing on a continual basis, and commitment to making different choices in order to stop reproducing dominant hierarchical logic.

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Meanwhile, a few weeks ago I had a wonderful conversation about genre with Santa Barbara poet David Starkey. What is the nature of this writing I am doing here in this space? I did not go to undergrad in the US; did not take composition and rhetoric classes (and, thankfully, did not have to teach them as a graduate teaching fellow when I first came to this land). I was not thinking of what I write here as rhetoric, though I can see how some of it functions in that way. The writings here are my sensor into self and spirit and community—not in a confessional mode, not as bellygazing vulnerability that is in need of validation by the reader—but because writing the personal is a way of making knowledge, and enacting transformation both personal and collective. This is what I have learnt from Gloria Anzaldúa, Audre Lorde, and other women of color feminists, whose audacity in giving language to what is shoved under the carpet—and then theorizing about it—shows the way forward to me and many others. These are my autohistoria.