Do The Work Anyway

Amanda Jo Cordova, Ph.D., Iowa State University

This morning I sit in a local bakery so well lit it makes it impossible for my eyes to droop during a regular Monday morning writing session. The clang of bakery pans and the precise movement of the knife blade slicing through large trays of oversized cinnamon rolls, bread, and pastries awaken my senses. Soon, my fingers follow suit tapping the keys to the rhythm of my thoughts that return to a conversation I had with a dear colleague of mine. He mentioned the book burning episode at Georgia Southern University (https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/11/us/georgia-southern-university-book-burning/index.html) first thing Saturday morning as we prepared for our teaching day together.  I share my thinking and reflection as a site of knowledge and as a form of truth made valid from the space in academia I claim as my own emancipatory venture.

My colleague seemed more shocked by this incident than me, and I began to wonder why I felt nothing but a sense of numbness. I told him, “It’s sad that I’m desensitized and have come to understand this behavior as part and parcel of what academia has always been.” It is an emotionless response crafted from continually sifting through the minutia of micro-aggressions, power-laden language, knowledge colonization, and misogyny embedded into the tapestry of everyday academic life.  I have come to expect that any form of liberated narrative poses a perceived threat to educational actors who have been handed the legacy of privilege to control the narrative of individuals and the knowledge located within.

So, when novelist Jennine Capó Crucet, was invited to Georgia Southern University to speak about her books and essays, Make Your Home Among Strangers and My Time Among the Whites: Notes from an Unfinished Education, it was of no surprise that headlines and social media exploded with video of students’ burning her book. Quite literally, the response was to make ashes of her lived experience. More specifically the response was to de-legitimize subaltern knowledge rooted in the experience of physical, economic, epistemological, ethnic, racial, gendered and/or cultural oppression. In plain terms, we live in a diverse society, but the value of knowledge that comes from diverse experiences is still expected to be filtered through the white lens of what is acceptable and valid. I make my academic home in this quandary of epistemologic warfare fully aware of the many ways my words and work become ashes. I tactically desensitize myself so that I do the work anyway. For I know all too well from the silvery flesh of ash particles that rise and lodge themselves as part of my experience I am empowered to take my place in the collective struggle to decolonize the borders and shape of knowledge production. 

In this moment of “book burning” I become all too aware of how students’ cumulative schooling experiences are informed by the ways in which education, educators, and peers systematically erase histories, knowledge, and lived experience that counter a single story mentality.

Therefore, I’m not surprised when the response of college students is to burn words, burn books, and revel in the idea of making attempts to destroy subaltern knowledge that makes visible the multiplicity of realities. Education operates through privileging and elevating culturally dominant knowledge and narratives that in turn produce students who are often divested  of questioning power, single-narratives, and the ways in which knowledge is counted; and especially whose knowledge is counted. When a student asked Crucet if she “had the authority to discuss issues of race and white privilege on campus” it is reaffirmed that knowledge is conceived as truth when it fits into the hierarchy of knowledge holders charged with legitimizing knowledge. I wonder who this student would consider an authority on Jennine Capó Crucet’s experience and the ways she makes sense of it.  I also wonder, if it is not on a college campus that these issues of race and white privilege should occur; in what spaces does this college student think they should occur?

While others might find the actions of a few students at Georgia Southern University disturbing and shocking; and still others a fight over the First Amendment I digest the moment as another reminder of the epistemological tyranny all students navigate. In other words, it is not the norm of the schooling experience to individually and collectively reflect upon knowledge imposed, nor the ways in which knowledge is generated. Certainly, it is not part of the normal schooling experience to understand, reconcile, and heal the varied historical locations individuals are propelled into without processes in place to interrogate how we arrived here and where we intend to go. This is the epistemological collision schools and colleges cannot seem to facilitate for a lack of the basic understanding that students are socialized to treat knowledge as static, binary, and without emotional or cognitive tension. We compartmentalize knowledge as disconnected from historical context, who we are, and who we are in relationship to the larger community.

Our disconnection from how knowledge is generated, consumed, located, and from what sources is the legacy of colonialism. It represents the rift in how we internalize knowledge and emanates from the ways we attach knowledge to knowledge holders. It boils down to a simple question: Are all people valued as knowledge holders? The book burning students of Georgia Southern University answered this with a definitive “No.” What I add to this “no” is every educator is culpable for how this “no” came to be. We are not set apart from the actions of students because we are in fact the very individuals of an educational system who make a living from knowledge consumption, production, and dissemination.. I stand precisely at this juncture conducting research and facilitating coursework at a PWI in my Brown skin. I am not desensitized to the work to be done across P-20+ among students and educators to collectively interrogate the insidious ways learning relationships pander to the nature of knowing severed from a historical consciousness that abides in knowledge supremacy.

Scholars like Jennine Capó Crucet who take on the task of not only claiming space in academia to legitimize lived experience, but also to make the multiplicity of realities accessible to students is a responsibility we all should bear. We must move beyond the shock of individual incidents to understand them as a reflection of everyday academic relationships. The everyday experience of students is knowledge oppression and every educator has the responsibility of building a consciousness of solidarity towards knowledge liberation. If educators want students to change, we must change. How are we building relationships of solidarity? How do we embrace all knowledge holders and the spectrum of epistemologies? How do we work to understand the very real fear of students who speak and write their truth as well as the fear of students who must interrogate how they make sense of the world? It may not be what educators want to hear. Some might say it is not their job to do the work of white students or white colleagues to get “woke”. But I think it is our job to re-appropriate these relationships and change the narrative; for if not us then who?

At this liminal space of academic relationships I stand as a proud Chicana scholar in solidarity with Jennine Capó Crucet, and any other students/educators working to legitimize subaltern knowledge masked by the historical marker of education as an operation of assimilation. But, I also stand in classrooms where I must simultaneously be willing to do the work of building bridges made from the mortar of awakened consciousness subdued by the potion of privilege and power.   It is at the intersection of these lives that relationships meet to potentially generate historical ruptures in how we conceive of, relate to, and co-exist as equal knowledge holders who invest in creating knowledge instead of incinerating it. I carve my liminal place in academia defined by me – and me alone. For if “If I didn't define myself for myself, Audre Lorde reminds me “I would be crunched into other people's fantasies for me and eaten alive.”  Speaking, writing, researching, and knowing all of this knowledge may end up in ashes doesn’t scare me; nor shock me. I am the ashes of my ancestors who gave their lives for our collective continued existence; and exist I will; resist I will; write I will; speak truth to power I will; and work in hopeful solidarity I will. Fire only reminds me of this truth.