When Margins Become Centered: Black Queer Women in Front and Outside of the Classroom
This incredible and affirming article will likely resonate with many—especially Black Queer and/or Trandgender or Gender Nonconforming (TGNC) people in higher education.
In my attempt to include statements in my manuscripts which highlight the ways in which science has historically and currently been weaponized to deny the rights of many, I’ve enjoyed reading Black Queer Feminist literature and exploring questions like “what does it really mean to center Black Queer and/or Trans women in our work for collective liberation?”
Many of these ideas were created by Black and/or Indigenous Queer women (e.g., Moya Bailey is credited with the term “intersectionality”) yet seem to be taken out of their original contexts and used to advocate for centering non-Black people and identities. This could be interpreted as an unintentional byproduct of white supremacy—to de-center and decontextualize scholarship born from the labor and experiences of Black and queer and women who exist on the margins of the margins in many global societies.
“For example, Sherrée Wilson’s “They Forgot Mammy Had a Brain” lists seven common problems that Black women have reported in studies about their engagement as faculty and administrators at predominately white institutions:
1. The constant challenges on being viewed as “other” and therefore believed to be inferior;
2. the lack of professional support systems;
3. the excessive scrutiny by peers, superiors, and students;
4. an unstated requirement to work harder to gain recognition and respect;
5. the assumptions that positions were acquired through affirmative action and that therefore the faculty members lacked the necessary qualifications;
6. the “tokenism” - that is, being viewed as a symbol of race rather than as an individual; and
7. the denial of access to power structures normally associated with their position(s) (qtd. in Gutierrez y Muhs et al. 2012, 65).”
This reminds me so much of the book; “All the Women are White, All the Blacks are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave.” The ways in which whiteness and/or patriarchy are maintained in academia—even in other oppressed communities like the Black community or Queer communities—often fail to support their most marginalized members. These members not only face a disproportionate violence that white queer people and Black straight people do not experience, but the ideas of Black Queer and/or Trans women and femmes are routinely re-packaged as others’ ideas to ensure continued access to resources for those who are white, straight, or male.
The authors touch on so many incredible topics, like the ways in which we internalize Black respectability politics and police ourselves in highly policed, surveilled institutions like higher education in the USA; these spaces (both peers and institutions) already excessively surveil the actions and bodies of Black and many melanated peoples in predominantly white institutions (PWIs).
“As Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham (1992) asserts, “respectability politics” are the self-policing practices of marginalized communities enacted through the belief that if groups conform as much as possible to dominate social and moral codes of behavior, they will be regarded as equal citizens.”
The article also raised some very interesting questions for me, like why do white queer and straight scholars feel more comfortable being out about their identity(s) and partners in predominantly white institutions while Black scholars may not? One initial thought might be the built in safety and built in professional network that comes along with being the dominant racial identity in the United States and other white supremacist, colonized nations. Another thought is the cultural contexts for Black southern people who have a completely different culture from non-southern Black folks or non-Black folks in general. Is it internalized heterosexism? White privilege? Antiblackness? Or some combination of all of these dynamics concurrently?
“I never elaborated to the department because I learned early on that as a Black person in academia you do not volunteer that sort of personal information. ”
Another thing I found fascinating was the ways in which these Black queer faculty described the every day, inseparable occurence of Blackness, queerness, and gender. They write, “I try to incorporate the tools that I have gained from feminist spaces outside of the classroom, as well as from disability studies and feminist theory, to come up with ways of engaging in the classroom that support diverse learning practices among my students. These strategies have been codified and lauded by white queer academics, but in my class are represented less favorably in evaluations.” Evaluations have been shown to have clear racial, gendered, and sexuality biases, but rarely do we center or acknowledge the disparate burden Black queer women experience in the same setting.
In reading this piece, I especially loved the level of intentionality with pedagogy and how these women tried to get students to empathize with others—an act that is much harder to do by only reading about other people who are severely underrepresented in higher education. The authors write, “I remember a graduate-student instructor friend of mine who invited a trans woman of color to class. Students had to struggle with their own issues in a way that they would not have done if they had only read about transgender identity.”
Another point that really resonated was the unexpected loss that comes with aspiring to academia as a Black queer woman. The authors write, “As doctoral students we wanted to secure positions in the academy. We thought this achievement would bring happiness, and did not consider the feelings of loss and isolation that we would experience in being removed from our Black queer community in Atlanta.” I find that most Black queer scholars find community outside of their field(s), programs, departments, or institutions more broadly. (This makes sense when the number of Black folks is often in the single digit percentages, and queer communities on campus are majority White and/or White and Asian.)
I highly recommend this article to those white, brown, and Black; straight, questioning, and queer, and truly anyone who is interested in understanding why centering those on the margins of the margins is one formidable method for ensuring better outcomes for all—especially those whose race, sexuality, and gender render them even more vulnerable.
“In our culture, many understand white supremacy as extreme conservative fanaticism: Nazi skinheads and the like who preach all the old stereotypes about racial purity. Yet, such fringe groups rarely threaten the day-to-day workings of our lives; it is the less extreme white supremacist beliefs and assumptions, easier to cover up and mask, that maintain and perpetuate everyday racism as a form of group oppression (hooks 2003, 29).”
