Is there anybody out there?

What’s the question I need to ask?

Just yesterday there was an item in the news about the lack of black PhD students. No s**t, Sherlock, I thought.

Over the past year I have been looking for academics in my field to help me to navigate.

More often than not, I have been ignored.

This week I followed up an interesting tweet only to find that the academic didn’t wish to share her research. When I asked for suggestions of published research, her reply was so unhelpful I realised we were wasting each other’s time.

Yes, the reasons are complex but is it hard to be altruistic? I have a hunch that there are many out there working towards their next promotion rather than making a difference.

There are some good folk, though: one research centre sent me articles and a book chapter that hadn’t even been published.

Perhaps I need to ask a different question…

BlackademicUK

On Blackademia

Navigating the Ivory Tower: a search for identity and belonging

Learn as if you were to live forever.

—Mahatma Gandhi.

This is my first post as @blackademicUK. Stay tuned for more. Subscribe below to get notified when I post new updates.

Introducing @BlackademicUK

@BlackademicUK navigating the Ivory Tower

“An ivory tower is a place — or an atmosphere — where people are happily cut off from the rest of the world in favour of their own pursuits. […] Most contemporary uses of the term refer to academia…”

Wikipedia

I am a journalist and Senior Lecturer in Journalism coming to the end of the first year of my Doctorate in Education Creative and Media aka an Ed D.

I was, or rather, I am exploring the experience of journalism students of colour in Higher Education in the UK.

I am a blackademic and a hackademic.

I’m a maker and a creator and I like to doodle.

We – me and the students – are navigating the Ivory Tower.

This is an exploration of our journey.

White privilege

This is a preamble to a post that has been in draft since 21st February 2020. The post  follows. 

I’ve just finished reading a wonderful article by Minerva Chávez with a couple of powerful autoethnographic reflections that made me think that perhaps she was standing in my shoes.

Chávez’s memory of being undermined at school took me back but also gave me a lightbulb moment of why I’ve always hated and struggled with reading outlaid.

Heaven knows how I found myself in broadcasting and now lecturing?

As I say to the students: everything is possible. However, that reflection and analysis is for another day.

The following account alludes to an incident in my most recent educational experience which has had the same impact now that Chávez’s own encounter had on her in kindergarten.

This post is from 21st February 2020

A lot has been said about this (white privilege) recently. Interestingly, it comes into my thesis – I can’t avoid it.

This week, I’m seething. I don’t know what I don’t know. I thought the point of education was to help you to find out those answers.

Transpires, that isn’t the role of a doctorate: I need to do the research myself. It seems asking for recommended reading is frowned upon – who’d have thought.

I encourage my students to ask questions –  no question is too silly to ask. Ironically, I heard the person who was putting me down say exactly the same thing … they were also  wondering why students weren’t engaging in the forum.

What the …?

This post has been in draft form since 21st June 2020. While I didn’t finish the thought I’m going to publish it almost a year later…

Since I started this doctorate I’ve been wondering what its purpose really is. I don’t want to do something that is pointless. It’s all well and good you being interested in your topic and yes, it will add new knowledge but does it have a use?

Covid-19 and George Floyd have brought it into focus.

People are talking about – not necessarily having the right conversations, mind you – the over representation of People of Colour (PoC) in the mortality statistics. Many saw the murder of George Floyd. What the two events have in common is that one highlights racial and structural injustice and the other just shows it up like it is – warts and all.

CV19 has been like a distress flare shining a light onto deep inequalities and injustice. While many of us have been living it for ever and a day, many white people now seem alert to it

Gaslighting

Gaslighting is a thing!

It’s a form of psychological abuse. The culprit undermines the victim by casting doubt over their experience and or perception.

Yes, it’s real.

It’s good to have a term for something that you’re experiencing. In fact, in my research using Critical Race Theory the authors (there are many) often talk about giving an experience a name.

I’m naming it and I’m calling it out.

My experience of racism is being denied, the gaslighters have come out to play. They are in full force. Some of them even say they are bored with the race debate. Well, [insert name or pronoun or identifying title], what do you think it’s like for people who are going through it?

If I describe an experience of being the only black person in the room with the right answer – and nobody else has even the vaguest ideas about the answer – and I am accused of  copying … yet you say it could have been a class issue, when the whole class was from the same working-class council estate…?  You are gaslighting. You are denying my perception.

If someone perceives something to be happening to them, do not deny their experience. Just listen.

#justsaying

Imposter Syndrome

Imposter Syndrome

I was supposed to hand in a literature review a few weeks ago but I didn’t complete it.

I always says to my students that I would rather they handed in something – however bad – than nothing at all. So that’s what I did: I handed in an incomplete lit review.

Yesterday, one of my tutors, on my taught doctorate which we call an Ed D (Doctorate of Education) said that what I’d written was good and he was sorry I hadn’t completed it.

I was surprised. I had convinced myself that I had handed in a Trump-BoJo set of words. What I mean by that is words that sound ok to the audience but in reality mean diddly squat.

I got a distinction in my PGCert which I did in 2018 and Leadership Certificate which I completed this year.

I am invested in my topic, I have read pretty widely (there’s always more that I could read) so why would I think that what I am writing isn’t that good?

There was a young man on the radio yesterday who said that he could get one hundred compliments but he would always focus on the single negative comment.

Am I still thinking about the teacher who accused me of cheating when I was the only student in the class with the correct answer … or was it the teachers (there was more than one) who said I wasn’t capable?

A few months ago, I came across a death notice for that teacher who accused me of cheating. I wrote in my notes:

“Died March 2017, Parkinsons – let it go.” 25th May 2019

But it’s clearly still on my mind. Food for thought.

Who am I?

What’s in a name?

I’m writing a literature review but I can’t get past the terms to describe myself and the people I want to be in my research.

In my Sociology years, I used the term Black with a capital b – radical. We weren’t yet partying like it was 1999 and the 21st Century was so far away it was categorised under sci-fi.

Years later a guy called Tony, who was a bit of a comedian, said: “Ethnic minority? It sounds like a disease.” We were on a course for so-called ethnic minorities. There was a grumpy guy who wasn’t best pleased because he wasn’t Black or Asian – he had Irish heritage. Too young to remember ‘No blacks, No dogs, No Irish’

Years later, I spoke to an Assistant Chief constable at GMP, not long after the Stephen Lawrence Enquiry, and he used the term minority ethnic. Did it really make a difference by changing the words around? I’d missed the memo.

Then, we became BME but that didn’t seem to be inclusive enough so it shifted to BAME. Nowadays people mix and match the two to avoid repetition in their writing.

Now, I find myself using People of Colour or PoC.

But how useful are any of these terms? In an age when we’ve established the rules of inclusive pronouns, can we breakdown the socially constructed racial categories to describe the majority of the population?