On Riding the #70 Bus....
Urbana-Champaign’s most recent snow, dulled after several days’ exposure, crunched listlessly under my feet as I strode briskly to the bus station, weaving through the cluttered sidewalks of a glorified downtown. I dodged a malicious patch of ice, marveled at the fact that I felt it was “warm” because it was about 25 degrees, and kept up my brisk pace to the station, my brows crinkling in concentration underneath a green knit cap.
As I stopped at the crosswalk, I brushed a lock of hair out of my eye and thought of the intense amount of reading I’d done in the past two days. My advisor assigned five books and two articles for today’s class, and it was a minor miracle I’d gotten most of it read. The course is focused on the British Empire, but Dr. Burton threw in a bit of theory by assigning Sarah Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology, a fascinating synthesis of queer theory, Saidian Orientalist criticism, feminist critique, and race studies. As the daughter of a white English mother and a Pakistani father, born in the UK but raised in Australia, Ahmed weaves narratives of space and time and fitting in and understanding self in a way that is instantly familiar, coolly detached, and intellectually seductive. I’d eagerly filled my notebook with quotations and thoughts that afternoon at Café Aroma, my favourite local coffeehouse, and her words echoed in my ears at that moment.
Ahmed speaks of occupying space, of claiming space, of being in three dimensions. She writes, “Each time I move, I stretch myself out, trying this door, looking here, looking there. In stretching myself out, moving homes for me is coming to inhabit spaces, coming to embody them, where my body and the rooms in which it gathers-sitting, sleeping, writing, acting as it does in this room and that room-cease to be distinct. It times take, but this work of inhabitance does take place. It is a process of becoming intimate with where one is: an intimacy that feels like inhabiting a secret room that is concealed from the view of others. Loving one’s home is not about being fixed into a place, but rather it is about becoming part of a space where one has expanded one’s body, saturating the space with bodily matter: home as overflowing and flowing over…The work of inhabitance involves orientation devices; ways of extending bodies into spaces that create new folds, or new contours of what we could call livable or inhabitable space. If orientation is about making the strange familiar through the extension of bodies into space, then disorientation occurs when that extension fails…”
The light turned green, and with no small irony, the white man electronically appeared, bidding me to walk. Mindful of missing my bus, I walked faster, pushing my way through the surrounding space like a purposeful ship cleaving the waves. And in the icy walkway of the Illinois Terminal, I waited for my bus.
The #70 is rather different than the many, many other buses of Champaign-Urbana, and I’m frequently aware of that every time I ride it. Unlike most of the buses, which are filled with a large number of eager-faced undergrads, tired-looking graduate students, or Wal-Mart or Meijer-shopping bag carrying Midwest (white) locals, the #70 is almost entirely black, as it travels through the entirety of the neighborhood of Urbana north of University, and more significantly, north of Bradley-C-U’s primarily black neighborhood. I’ve had friends from C-U tell me that was the “urban” part of our metropolitan area-a laughable statement as the whole area’s population is approx. 120,000 and there’s no higher ‘urbanity’ there than anywhere else. Oh, they must mean ‘urban’ as in ‘brown and poor.’ Of course.
Often I smile condescendingly and good naturedly at my fellow Chambanans, who are afraid of the ethnic population, the poverty, the ‘difference.’ Not I, I think. I’m different. I’m a grad student of color. I’m down with the struggle. I get it. I even congratulate myself for living on the ‘urban’ bus route. True, my neighborhood is not constantly visited by police-but I live six blocks from that area, so I must be noble.
Let me tell you, those illusions vanish into thin air every time I stand and wait for the #70 bus. You see, I stood there today, in beat up tennis shoes, jeans, pea coat, and beanie-and felt entirely out of place. Like I always do.
I was surrounded by poorer black people, and I had nothing to say. I was surrounded by mi gente, if you will, and had nothing to say, no dialog to join in the midst of the local gossip, nothing to say to the group of guys and girls about my age, the women in skintight jeans and boots, puffy jackets, and slick hair; the guys in impossibly sagging jeans, long coats, work boots, cornrows. When the older black woman talks about her son in prison, I don’t have a personal story other than that of my cousin in prison for robbery, or for the countless statistics I know about ‘my people’ and the struggle.
Struggle? I’m a middle class mixed kid from Los Angeles with a penchant for indie rock, well-observed quips, and Vh1 television. I feel incredibly foreign and alien on the #70, where people ride the bus because that is their only means of transport, as opposed to grad students who don’t drive during the week to save money and worry about their fellowship money and if they can afford more beer. I feel my ‘blackness,’ my ‘cred,’ consists of mere talismans that do little. My hair, with its wild tendrils pointing in corkscrew misdirection to my diasporic roots, is safely under my hat. My name, Tyrone Jr, has been abbreviated, domesticated to a T.J., only unearthed for the occasional oohs and ahs of my fellow bourgeois ironyphiles. I sink down in my seat, feeling exposed, as I remember another quote from biracial, queer Sarah Ahmed:
“Racism ‘stops’ black bodies inhabiting space by extending through objects and others; the familiarity of ‘the white world,’ as a world we know implicitly, ‘disorients’ black bodies such that they cease to know where to find things-reduced as they are to things among things…Colonialism makes the world ‘white,’ which is of course a world ‘ready’ for certain kinds of bodies, as a world that puts certain objects within their reach…In a way, then race does become a social as well as a bodily given, or what we receive from others as an inheritance of this history.”
Insert edgy race photo here.
Today in class, we talked about the utmost importance of a scholar’s positionality; how we need to know who we are and why we’re saying it. I know that I’m a bourgeois middle class mixed kid with pretensions occasionally to being the voice of the POC. I am at times a cardboard revolutionary, playing at social change yet giving nothing up myself. I hide behind my melanin yet hold to class privilege and self-satisfied by the double-standard, I don’t’ question it. Til I get on the #70 bus, and am forced to realize that I’m not nearly as together as I think I am, in this as well as in all areas of my life. And I’m ruefully amused that in a creepy way, I depend on my ‘poor black brothers’ to teach me important life lessons.
Simply put: I want to become an academic because I want to make a difference in this world with the skills that God has given me. But I find it deliriously tempting to become a self-righteous, self-satisfied pontificator, throwing Saidian theory or speaking of development, while offering little of my own for change. If I really believe in change, or hope, how do I live it? If my faith matters, how do I live that, as well as live out social justice? How do I become a real, authentic thinker, aware of my privilege and committed to helping realize freedom for others as well as myself? How do I do that correctly, rightly, justly?
These are questions I ask myself as I am oriented and reoriented in my sliding spaces on the #70 bus.
As I stopped at the crosswalk, I brushed a lock of hair out of my eye and thought of the intense amount of reading I’d done in the past two days. My advisor assigned five books and two articles for today’s class, and it was a minor miracle I’d gotten most of it read. The course is focused on the British Empire, but Dr. Burton threw in a bit of theory by assigning Sarah Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology, a fascinating synthesis of queer theory, Saidian Orientalist criticism, feminist critique, and race studies. As the daughter of a white English mother and a Pakistani father, born in the UK but raised in Australia, Ahmed weaves narratives of space and time and fitting in and understanding self in a way that is instantly familiar, coolly detached, and intellectually seductive. I’d eagerly filled my notebook with quotations and thoughts that afternoon at Café Aroma, my favourite local coffeehouse, and her words echoed in my ears at that moment.
Ahmed speaks of occupying space, of claiming space, of being in three dimensions. She writes, “Each time I move, I stretch myself out, trying this door, looking here, looking there. In stretching myself out, moving homes for me is coming to inhabit spaces, coming to embody them, where my body and the rooms in which it gathers-sitting, sleeping, writing, acting as it does in this room and that room-cease to be distinct. It times take, but this work of inhabitance does take place. It is a process of becoming intimate with where one is: an intimacy that feels like inhabiting a secret room that is concealed from the view of others. Loving one’s home is not about being fixed into a place, but rather it is about becoming part of a space where one has expanded one’s body, saturating the space with bodily matter: home as overflowing and flowing over…The work of inhabitance involves orientation devices; ways of extending bodies into spaces that create new folds, or new contours of what we could call livable or inhabitable space. If orientation is about making the strange familiar through the extension of bodies into space, then disorientation occurs when that extension fails…”
The light turned green, and with no small irony, the white man electronically appeared, bidding me to walk. Mindful of missing my bus, I walked faster, pushing my way through the surrounding space like a purposeful ship cleaving the waves. And in the icy walkway of the Illinois Terminal, I waited for my bus.
The #70 is rather different than the many, many other buses of Champaign-Urbana, and I’m frequently aware of that every time I ride it. Unlike most of the buses, which are filled with a large number of eager-faced undergrads, tired-looking graduate students, or Wal-Mart or Meijer-shopping bag carrying Midwest (white) locals, the #70 is almost entirely black, as it travels through the entirety of the neighborhood of Urbana north of University, and more significantly, north of Bradley-C-U’s primarily black neighborhood. I’ve had friends from C-U tell me that was the “urban” part of our metropolitan area-a laughable statement as the whole area’s population is approx. 120,000 and there’s no higher ‘urbanity’ there than anywhere else. Oh, they must mean ‘urban’ as in ‘brown and poor.’ Of course.
Often I smile condescendingly and good naturedly at my fellow Chambanans, who are afraid of the ethnic population, the poverty, the ‘difference.’ Not I, I think. I’m different. I’m a grad student of color. I’m down with the struggle. I get it. I even congratulate myself for living on the ‘urban’ bus route. True, my neighborhood is not constantly visited by police-but I live six blocks from that area, so I must be noble.
Let me tell you, those illusions vanish into thin air every time I stand and wait for the #70 bus. You see, I stood there today, in beat up tennis shoes, jeans, pea coat, and beanie-and felt entirely out of place. Like I always do.
I was surrounded by poorer black people, and I had nothing to say. I was surrounded by mi gente, if you will, and had nothing to say, no dialog to join in the midst of the local gossip, nothing to say to the group of guys and girls about my age, the women in skintight jeans and boots, puffy jackets, and slick hair; the guys in impossibly sagging jeans, long coats, work boots, cornrows. When the older black woman talks about her son in prison, I don’t have a personal story other than that of my cousin in prison for robbery, or for the countless statistics I know about ‘my people’ and the struggle.
Struggle? I’m a middle class mixed kid from Los Angeles with a penchant for indie rock, well-observed quips, and Vh1 television. I feel incredibly foreign and alien on the #70, where people ride the bus because that is their only means of transport, as opposed to grad students who don’t drive during the week to save money and worry about their fellowship money and if they can afford more beer. I feel my ‘blackness,’ my ‘cred,’ consists of mere talismans that do little. My hair, with its wild tendrils pointing in corkscrew misdirection to my diasporic roots, is safely under my hat. My name, Tyrone Jr, has been abbreviated, domesticated to a T.J., only unearthed for the occasional oohs and ahs of my fellow bourgeois ironyphiles. I sink down in my seat, feeling exposed, as I remember another quote from biracial, queer Sarah Ahmed:
“Racism ‘stops’ black bodies inhabiting space by extending through objects and others; the familiarity of ‘the white world,’ as a world we know implicitly, ‘disorients’ black bodies such that they cease to know where to find things-reduced as they are to things among things…Colonialism makes the world ‘white,’ which is of course a world ‘ready’ for certain kinds of bodies, as a world that puts certain objects within their reach…In a way, then race does become a social as well as a bodily given, or what we receive from others as an inheritance of this history.”
Insert edgy race photo here.
Today in class, we talked about the utmost importance of a scholar’s positionality; how we need to know who we are and why we’re saying it. I know that I’m a bourgeois middle class mixed kid with pretensions occasionally to being the voice of the POC. I am at times a cardboard revolutionary, playing at social change yet giving nothing up myself. I hide behind my melanin yet hold to class privilege and self-satisfied by the double-standard, I don’t’ question it. Til I get on the #70 bus, and am forced to realize that I’m not nearly as together as I think I am, in this as well as in all areas of my life. And I’m ruefully amused that in a creepy way, I depend on my ‘poor black brothers’ to teach me important life lessons.
Simply put: I want to become an academic because I want to make a difference in this world with the skills that God has given me. But I find it deliriously tempting to become a self-righteous, self-satisfied pontificator, throwing Saidian theory or speaking of development, while offering little of my own for change. If I really believe in change, or hope, how do I live it? If my faith matters, how do I live that, as well as live out social justice? How do I become a real, authentic thinker, aware of my privilege and committed to helping realize freedom for others as well as myself? How do I do that correctly, rightly, justly?
These are questions I ask myself as I am oriented and reoriented in my sliding spaces on the #70 bus.