I felt the need to recalibrate this morning. I was feeling anxious.
Interestingly, my favorite social media app, Threads, never shows me headline news. Based on my algorithm, the world is full of babies being born, marriages and proposals being filmed, 35-year wedding anniversaries being celebrated, job promotions, burial of loved ones, medical reports with no evidence of cancer, and this hilarious new blog written by a comedian who joked about missing news affecting Black people’s emotions, satirically called the “Negro Newsletter.”
All of that to say, my algorithm loves me and does a great job of protecting my psyche and nervous system.
Still, some things linger. As Phil Collins sang, “I can feel it calling in the air at night...O Lord.” Even without reading, seeing, or hearing it, some truths are just in the air. I feel it. O Lord.
That’s why I needed to recalibrate today.
Privilege,the Canon, and Courage
I keep a satchel in my car filled with my favorite inspirational books. Each week, I return to their wisdom: Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider; Dr. Imani Perry’s Looking for Lorraine (a biography on playwright Lorraine Hansberry); and They Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965-1985.
All of these books include blueprints for Black women committed to a livable future.
My inspirational canon also includes Social Justice in Action: Models for Campus and Community, edited by Dr. Neal Lester. Today, I revisited highlighted passages from Maureen T Reddy’s “The Uses and Abuses of Privilege.”
What I love about this text is the balanced awareness that there is a place where one’s privilege can be of use to the common good, and that the same privilege, even in the hands of well-meaning people, can also be an abuse. It depends on where you locate convenience and comfort. Whose comfort is protected? What truths are silenced because they disrupt the status quo? I love these questions.
But Dr. Reddy was definitely “in her bag” when she talked about one way to access or use your privilege: diversify the reading materials. It works. She describes and cites the “canonical text being taught from canonical perspectives,” which basically reinforces the values of the ivory tower and maintains the status quo. You’re free to hold it up to the light, just place it back where you found it.
QUESTION: If the professor is regarded as the authority in the classroom, what happens if they expand the canon?
ANSWER: It reinforces courage and models to scholars-in-training the impact of extending the table to include ideas and voices present but denied access to the hallowed halls.
Because that level of courage has not always been encouraged, I have never been interested in chasing the academy's carrot. Chasing their brass ring feels too much like a childhood memory of a woman from my old neighborhood named Marie chasing a trifling guy named JoJo. He lived with his sister and her two kids in a two-bedroom apartment. He was not winning at life, yet he was Marie's daily waking desire. Tragic all around.
So, to me, the academy’s carrot feels like Marie chasing JoJo - settling only for what I can see, and still never catching it. Hard pass.
Instead, I focus on providing content for the present. Who still lacks a voice? Whose story has been poorly told by others? These questions guide me.
Hope as a Scholarly and Moral Practice
Dr. Reddy’s article snapped me out of my silent rage and prompted me to challenge the ‘empire's lie’ that nothing can change and that the best course of action is to succumb to numbness and despair. I read her essay and was challenged to believe that change is real and that hope is alive.
I understand professors needing to protect their spots, and that some still value the dangling carrots. I would never encourage them to take my ideas as the ultimate for their lives.
But I was most encouraged by the idea that professors are standing at lecterns and podiums, committed to including voices that mirror my reality.
Larry Neal, in his essay “Any Day Now,” says, “Liberation is impossible if we fail to see ourselves in more positive terms.” This insight holds two demands: the need for us to see ourselves, and for what we see, what is mirrored back to us, to be positive, and not someone’s distorted idea of who we are.
For the scholars-in-training, I pray they are soaking up like sponges the wisdom and witness of those who understand the weight of their responsibility, using their privilege to activate and seed goodness - running from exclusion, and chasing after wild, yet unknown possibilities.
Something good is growing, and it will be nurtured by those who dare to use their power in service to the common good.