The first time I was involved in a fight about racism at school, I was so young my mom was still gently introducing me to the concept as a permanent fixture in my life. It was sometime in my early elementary years when I came home from school singing “Jimmy Crack Corn” and my mom had to go in and let the school music teacher know that her Black daughter (the only Black kid in my entire elementary school, as I remember) would not be singing minstrel songs about being a slave. Racism in school starts early.
Around the same time, students at my school were asked to make a meal from the country we came from. Easy-peasy for some kids, or at least not a tale of international displacement and enslavement and permanent “homelandlessness.” Not a reinforcement of the “where are you from?” model of multiculturalism that leaves me as a permanent outsider in the only country I’ve ever called home. I had to go home and ask my mom “Where are we from?” because being Black was not a nationality, and I had to make food from somewhere. My mom saved me from what would happen if I said I was German (on my dad’s side) to my teachers and tried her best to explain that “Africa” was about as close to an ancestral homeland that we were going to be able to pinpoint.
So we dutifully went to the library and found an “African” cookbook. We burned the shit out of a pan of who-knows-what, my mom made ginger snaps, and called them “African Ginger cookies” instead. For years she was asked for her delicious African cookie recipe. To this day I admire her resistance through a snarky-as-fuck untruth about a cookie recipe, knowing she would go forever unchallenged in her assertion that a Betty Crocker, tried-and-true recipe came from the motherland.
Lots of other racist things happened in school, and lots of lonely things too. I was always in a small minority of Black people (fewer people than you could count on one hand) in all of the schools I went to. If my test scores were too high, I was accused of cheating (once this almost cost me a perfect provincial exam score, and once it resulted in me leaving a chemistry class forever, cursing as I went). If I didn’t excel at athletics (which I certainly never had) it was confusing, and my teachers and classmates often pushed the limits of racism, just to see what they could get away with (“Well, would it be so bad if I called you mulatto?” was asked in more variations than I knew was possible).
One memorable event that coloured my K-12 experience was a high school performance of To Kill A Mockingbird. I think I was in grade 10. There were maybe three Black students at my school at the time, and clearly, none of us were into drama. Or at least not Harper Lee’s kind of story. So, the drama teacher recruited any of the ambiguously-ethnic-to-possibly-Italian students, burned some cork, and outfitted them in blackface to perform caricatures of Black folks from a book that I think we all know is pretty damn racist.
To be honest, blackface didn’t actually seem all that out of place in a play based on a book built on underdeveloped Black characters, white saviours, and a white protagonist thrown in to make the whole damn thing seem “relatable to readers” (I know, I know). I went to the play –why, I don’t know – and I left feeling pretty exposed and alone in my school. And pretty disappointed in the adults in charge of making decisions that should create a safe school space for everyone.
We also read To Kill A Mockingbird in my grade 11 English class. I was definitely the only Black person there. I hated that book so much. I’m pretty sure I tried to talk about all of the things that were wrong with it, but sixteen-year-old me wasn’t able to say “when you assign something this racist it makes me want to leave school forever and ever,” and I was pretty outspoken (big surprise, I know). Also, how do you start to safely talk about how people should do their own damn work on their own damn privilege, or at least read The Autobiography of Malcolm X or I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings or The Bluest Eye or any book by any Black author about Black people, before taking the word of a white author about how things were back then? I already felt like I stood out too much.
I skipped most of grade 12 and took off to a new city two months after I graduated with just $900 in my bank account and no plan – other than to never, ever go back to school.
But at 21 I decided I was ready, and back to school I went.
I attended a community college in a smallish university town, where my academic achievements were celebrated, where there was no gym class, and where I even won a small bursary for Black students attending college (the very fact that this college had Black students was a big deal). By and large, it was pretty okay. I had a few weird professors, particularly those who had spent time in “Africa” and felt we had a special bond as a result. But I was good at school, and I loved it, and I decided I would transfer to the university and complete a four-year degree.
University was tough for me as a Black woman. There were more Black folks, and I quickly met and made friends with a rad multi-ethnic community of great people. But we were spread across the faculties. My program of study had an anti-oppressive focus, but it was a work in progress in many senses. I was split up from half of the other students of colour in our cohort (where again, there were less than 5 of us to begin with), and was told at one point that it was beneficial for the learning of non-racialized students if we were intentionally split across the two classes. No mention of what might make a safe space for us to learn.
The Indigenous faculty members and the programming that they created for Indigenous students kept me from losing all hope in the program, because I saw that people could make safe spaces for themselves. It was not my space, but it inspired me, and the time, and friendship, and advice that these women and men shared with me made me stronger. I worked hard to give back what I got from these folks, because their powerful work helped me to believe that things would get better as Black folks gained critical mass in the academy. And I held tightly to that hope.
Still, the hope I found could not save me from a brutal and racist practicum placement, from constantly being called on to be the expert on racism, to read articles that were written about my experience for a white audience, and to never, ever feel like my learning experience was a consideration of the program. I really struggled.
I stayed to do an MA that focused specifically on Black issues, and again found myself alone as a Black person in my classes, although my population was often the focus of racist, outdated, and offensive literature. I was really tired.
Sometime during my MA, a student group decided to put on a version of Othello. And because their efforts to recruit Black students didn’t yield any success, they decided to go with a white student in blackface. I heard this through the grapevine, maybe one day before the play, and I went through all of the regular human rights channels to see the issue addressed, with no success. I won’t go through all of the calls I made, the emails I sent, the tears I cried, or the hopelessness I felt. Eventually, I reached out to an ally who worked at the university, who made some calls up the chain of command, and on the day of the play, the blackface was disallowed. I sent many emails sharing my disappointment with those who were responsible for maintaining an anti-racist campus, thinking of my mom taking a stand on “Jimmy Crack Corn” all those years ago. I felt defeated, angry to have to fight these fights that our people have been fighting for so long, and ready to go far away from the university.
I moved to another city to write my thesis, and I didn’t write another word for two years. My topic was so heavy, and my university experience was so disempowering, and I could not process the weight of the racism that I was writing about in an academic context. So much of my academic experience had been an exercise in racism, I couldn’t find a way to make my work within those confines anti-racist. So I worked in the community, and eventually I slept for a couple of months, and then I wrote. And I did myself proud. I defended my thesis successfully, and I walked away from the university with my head held high.
And I decided to do another Masters at another university. As a way for me to integrate my social justice beliefs into my daily practice. I was scared. I was scared the school wouldn’t want me. I was scared that I wouldn’t be able to be me. I was scared that I might be the only Black person in my cohort again. But I wanted to be a better practitioner, and I wanted to bring my now-more nuanced and practiced understanding of intersectionality back into the classroom, to apply it to theory, and then back to practice.
And it’s been exhausting. There are some great folks in my program – faculty, staff, and students. I have made some excellent friends, and have grown to admire many people. But, I find that the material is often exclusionary, untrue, or outright discriminatory. And this is not just about me as a Black woman. I find myself raising my voice about transphobia, and about narratives that erase the impacts of ongoing colonialism on unceded Indigenous territories, and about fatphobia, and about all kinds of racism masked as the challenges of being a “culturally competent” practitioner (don’t even get me started), and about weeks that have “discrimination” as a special topic, without addressing it at any other time, and about social determinants of health that do not address intersectionality wholesale, but rather pick and choose only a couple of marginalized identities, and about a sexual assault alert email that tells women to be more cautious, but doesn’t tell men not to rape. And, and, and, and. Every week I listen to fighting music on my way to school, so I can raise my voice, because if I don’t, and no one else does, what happens when things get left unsaid?
I keep on wanting academia to get better, because I don’t think that feeling like this is supposed to be a part of accessing it. I often say that I’m paying what every other student is, so shouldn’t I be guaranteed the same experiences of safety that they have? And I don’t see that being delivered.
I can only self-care so much erasure, and discrimination, and exclusion away. I can try to balance the feelings of disempowerment with the feelings of power I find when I read a transformational text about social justice. I can be as intersectional in my practice as I know how to be. But I can’t climb above where we are at as “the academy.” And I can’t really accept that things are much better just because the language around these issues imply better practice. And really, from minstrel songs, to being separated in learning environments, to going in every day ready to fight just to see more equity in the classroom, I sometimes wonder: will it ever get better for me in the academy?
Tags: blackface, higher education, jessie-lane metz, racism, to kill a mockingbird
Wow, this was really heartfelt, fantastically written, and instructive. Thank you for sharing your experiences. I am trying to learn more and more about the effects of racism on peoples’ lives, and this really told me a lot. I am really sorry about the way things are.
Jessie-Lane, you are an inspiration and a strong lady, and I’m sorry you’ve had to be as strong as you have.
(I… did not know Jimmy Crack Corn was about slavery. I’ve only heard the Bender/Futurama version though.)
Jessie-Lane Metz’s mom is clearly the best.
J-L M, this is a great expression of your power, and I hope it does get better for you at The Academy, and without every scrap of that improvement being generated by your efforts to start with.
Kudos Jessie. Nothing makes me happier than reading your words <3
You’re so spot-on. I’m really speechless and a little teary. You’re doing such amazing work and I just think that the fact that Black students and other students of color face so much in academia is not addressed. I’m sorry it’s such an uphill battle.
This articulates everything I feel I can’t: “But I can’t climb above where we are at as “the academy.” And I can’t really accept that things are much better just because the language around these issues imply better practice. “
I can only self-care so much erasure, and discrimination, and exclusion away
This nicely puts the lie to so much of what is out there about “revolution from within.” There are powerful social factors that actively contribute to people feeling terrible about themselves and their lives. No one lives in a vacuum, nor can they be expected to live that way.
FWIW I knew a (white male) professor who was a nationally recognized civil rights attorney. He once said that the practice of public interest law was often two steps forward and three steps back. If it was like that for him…! !
Jessie-Lane, thank you for having the courage and fortitude to tell the truth over and over again.
The world is exhausting and will try to eat you, but you’re out there every day, nudging it in the right directions. Keep fighting.
Ugh, yes, definitely. Chicago Lyric Opera is doing Otello (“Stop calling him ‘Otello,’ it’s pretentious”) this season, and they’ve cast a white man as the lead. I just… this makes zero sense to me. If you don’t cast a black man in the role, then you don’t have an Othello, and you cannot do Othello. I personally think race-blind casting should only be used as an opportunity to see more diversity on our stages (in roles where being of a certain race or culture is not INTEGRAL TO THE STORY, AHEMAHEMOTHELLOTOKILLAMOCKINGBIRDAHEMAHEM), not as an excuse for keeping everything so very white.
Jessie-Lane, thank you for these posts and for doing the exhausting, I-wish-it-was-unnecessary work that you’re doing. I always get excited when I see a new essay from you is up.
Thank you for this, its really great and oddly motivating and inspiring. In the sense that I start teaching high school next week and this is getting me all worked up to create a safe inclusive environment.
Is there anything you remember from history classes in High School that particularly made you “want to leave school forever and ever”? I would like to avoid doing that to any student at all costs and would appreciate your perspective.
We actually didn’t have history where I went to school. Just the hybrid combo of geography, politics, and the past called “social studies”. That was where my perfect exam score was called into question, because, well, you know…
What would I say about history? Honestly, none of it ever applied to my life, and lots of it brushed past all of the terrible colonial history of our continent. Even things about Black people weren’t really about Black people. The British in the Caribbean, the Italians in Ethiopia, the Quakers in slavery, and surely there has never been a Black person in the whole history of Canada, and if there has been, am I related to them? The same applied to Indigenous history, with it being all about the “glorious” history of colonization. And somehow not a whisper about GENOCIDE.
I just got real tired of learning about white history through a Eurocentric lens that sees “progress” as what I would consider to be the very opposite of progress entirely. And certainly there are more than three kinds of possible world governments (the USSR – even though this was the early 2000’s, Sweden, and Canada)? Or whatever. Who knows?
That’s about all I can think of right about now. Let me know if you have any other questions.
And good luck next week!
Jessie
Thank you! Yea the white-washed euro-centric macho view is not a thing I want to perpetuate at all and will relish dismantling every day. I will sow the seeds for the inter-sectional misandrist revolution in the psyche of the young.
I hope you have support in doing so! In the states, I think the Texas dominated textbook industry makes it even harder than it should be for teachers to, you know, teach.
I’m currently doing a health science degree and the social determinants of health thing was a huge bugbear for me, too – it’s SO much more complex than what they have covered in our course.
It’s so important, particularly because probably 95% of my class is white and I can tell that some of them definitely do not recognise their inherent privilege.
BRB, resolving to bring this up during class today.
English student here: I didn’t pass my American literature survey class because, life, with a previous awesome professor. She included a wide variety of amazing authors from all social classes and cultures in her course. (Sorta on topic here in the class I did pass with her, “Masterpieces of Literature” we read Beloved and Their Eyes Were Watching God and Souls of Black Folk) So I am taking the survey class over again with a different professor because she retired. The course deals with post-civil war literature onwards. There is not one Black author on the new professors syllabus. I am going to admit something sad here, but I don’t think I would have consciously realized the absence of any Black authors in my new course if I hadn’t read this post. I have some obvious work to do on my brain wiring.
I wrote a long response to this today but my work computer wouldn’t let me post it (possibly because I was supposed to be working, I guess) so I will simply say: (a) your mom is clearly awesome and I would like to hang out with her (b) thank you for writing this and I’m sorry that everything is such an uphill battle and I really, sincerely wish that we had all inherited a very different world and (c) I would love to read a piece about your “fighting music” or even just a link to a playlist.
This right here sums up why I don’t think I can go into academia. No more pieces of my soul left to give.
I am in the same situation. It has taken me 7 years to get my BA because of bullshit experiences like those listed above. I finally found an academic environment where I felt safe enough to learn but I can’t become Dr. thelovelyjazmin here. I am in the process of researching graduate programs and the fear is exhausting me.
This is beautful, and I’m so sorry, and I’m definitely going to bring up To Kill A Mockingbird as racist when we study it in my Children’s Lit class.
This post really spoke to me. I am a Black woman. I have a master’s that was supposed to be a doctorate before the trauma got to me and I walked away. you sayin that you didn’t write for two years is also relatable because I have been on the outside of academia for going on two years now and I’m still not doing any formal writing. I choose to find hope in the fact that you eventually wrote again. How did you get started? I feel like I will have to switch projects if I’m ever to go back to my work because all I connect with it now is trauma. Anyway I really appreciate you telling your story. If you ever need inspiration might I suggest Telling Histories: Black Women Historians in the Ivory Tower it was a touchstone for me as I was deciding my next steps with academia,
Thanks so much for your kindness. How did I get started writing again? For my thesis, I had already done the research, and I really, really felt that I needed to tell the stories of the men that I had interviewed. Also, I really wanted to be done with that school for a long, long time. And, I knew I needed to start thinking about the economy and the workforce that I was entering, and I knew I needed to go back and do a more practicable degree, and it seemed like I should just finish what I started first. I stayed off campus until the day of my defense, kept email communication to a minimum with the school, did most of my “what to do at your defense” research online, and left campus the second I was done.
In terms of writing on the internet, I kind of tweeted my way into this gig. I had lots of short things to say, and those things turned into longer things when given the opportunity.
This time around in school, I’m not doing a thesis route, I’m focusing on the invaluable practicum experience, I’m listening to fighting music, I’m holding my friends close, and I’m sleeping a lot. April is the light at the end of my tunnel, as is the work I’ll be able to do when I’m done.
I hope to hear more from you soon. You can find me on twitter at @jessielanemetz if we aren’t already twitter acquainted?