Great Essay on PoCs in academia
hat tip to unusualmusic over at snr.
Scott Bear Don't Walk was accepted to be a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford. This is his account of what he found there ( Read more... )
Scott Bear Don't Walk was accepted to be a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford. This is his account of what he found there ( Read more... )
I think it's also incumbent on those of us who join the professorate to also think about non-departmental ways of supporting students of color and other marginalized folks. A lot depends on what kind of school you're at and what kinds of supports are available. Big name schools tend to have more resources (of course) and it's up to faculty who care to get a sense of which resources at your school are worthwhile and which ones aren't.
These kinds of resources are key if you are junior and one of the few PoCs in a predominantly white faculty. You may find that you get overwhelmed with young people who come to you even from outside your department. In this situation, it's vital to get some sense of how much is available outside your own personal resources because you have many different tasks to accomplish yourself. And one can get burned out very quickly if one tries to fix things or even just be a sympathetic ear for everyone who comes to see you. Paranthetically I think women get put under this demand much more than men do.
You also need to find out how to tap into peer networks at whatever level you're at. These can be very hard to find but are crucial in overcoming the burnout factor. I got lucky in that I fell in with a great crowd of black folks at the Divinity School of all places (I was in Arts and Sciences) when I was in grad school. If I hadn't found them, I think I probably would have quit too.
Part of the problem is that we have internalized the idea that we can only solve these problems on our own. This is a general idea in US culture and it's a foundational idea in US academia, and one of the key reasons that so many of us have so shitty a time.
Putting the time and energy (and yes, it IS an investment in both) into a vibrant peer network can make the crucial difference. If Scott Bear Don't Walk had a bunch of other Native people with him, I think he probably would have been able to make it through. On his own, he was toast.
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