On Sharing Space With White Intellectuals

Moving to Massachusetts has been, in general, hell for me. Navigating a completely different racial landscape, the cultural dissonances, the recurring discomforts I feel forced to be in a place that could never be home for me. I’ve already described some of my disappointments with my doctoral program, but this is something else entirely. 

I have a confession to make: I think I hate sharing intellectual and academic spaces with white students when discussing race. I know the weight of the word; that’s precisely why I chose it. What I am naming here is not an aversion to sharing intellectual space with white people in general, but how whiteness operates in relation to perspectives outside of the dominant culture. I’m talking about the utter disengagement with concepts and perspectives they feel misalign with their truth, the limited scope of what they know. If it isn’t echoed by European philosophers, theorists, and scholars, it isn’t worthy of genuine consideration. 

And I get it–you’re probably like, well damn, Kara, do you like anything? I like and love plenty of things! I love critical thinking, I love provocative group discussions, and I love readings that take me out of my comfort zone. Those are the ways you challenge yourself and continue to grow as a scholar, and I rarely back down from that challenge. I have found a lot of love and enjoyment in small pockets since moving here. I don’t ever want to be perceived as an overwhelmingly negative person, but there is power and release in naming your agitations. I only name it when it becomes too heavy to carry in my spirit. Writing through my grief is how I process and eventually let it go. It also serves as documentation for what I once felt, in case I no longer feel that way. I truly hope that one day soon, this no longer grates me. But alas.

I think I’ve come to hate the extra labor I’m forced to do. In addition to my Afro-American Studies PhD, I am pursuing a graduate certificate in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. It is in those spaces I’ve become incredibly frustrated and overwhelmed with this feeling. 

I have heard, verbatim, white feminists in liberal environments dismiss non-white and non-Western scholarship as “an interesting way to think about this, but....” And, but … nothing. That’s all they have to say. It’s all very interesting and fascinating, an optional addendum to what they recognize as the real canons, which they are all too eager to return back to. Their ambivalence to scholarship they cannot see themselves in infuriates me. 

I so deeply resent it. Abhor it. It gets my blood boiling to listen to their disengaged, uninformed, and uniquely racist and self-centered perspectives. They treat race like it is a periphery, a technical and rhetorical box to check to make them look good. They view it as a lens to challenge themselves and their worldview, suitable for intellectual kudos only to be discarded and ignored beyond the classroom. These people have no commitment to anti-racism outside of those four walls, and it’s evident in how they passively participate in the discussions. They treated race like an abstract rhetorical challenge to see how many ways they might be able to belabor their own Westernized points. Their reliance on the leading white male theorists negates the scholarship they are being introduced to. It’s a cheapening of the material, a dismissal of multifaceted, interdisciplinary, global scholarship. Because God forbid we decenter the white man for even a second!

I listen to their disingenuous comments about things that pertain only to them and their limited lives, engaging them as though they’re cute little decorations to the primary pedagogies and dominant Western epistemologies. They use phrases like “intersectionality” and “racial capitalism” and break into their slimy grins, patting themselves on the back for using their vocabulary word of the week. They invoke the Black Radical Tradition and wait like eager puppies to earn their gold star atop their papers. They talk about whiteness as though they themselves are divorced from it, like they are above it somehow. It’s as imperceptible to them as breathing.

As the only Black person in these spaces, witnessing how they bastardized Black Feminist and queer-of-color conversations was disorienting at best and infuriating at worst. These people had no investment in these fields as a form of embodiment. It has become so clear to me that they view my field and worldview as incidental, tangential, and hypothetical to their truth. My academic perspectives are not ornamental, something I put on for my bravado in class. My multifaceted identity is a part of my lived experience. Because, as their favorite co-opted phrase goes, “the personal is political.”

Attempting to engage in critical discussion with these people made me feel like I was losing my mind. I could feel them discounting my perspectives, writing me off for my Blackness or lesbianism, or both. I was defensive, uncomfortable, and indignant. Eventually, I understood that my life and positionality is on such a specific axis that they rendered me invisible because it was too difficult to try to consider. That’s one presumptuous option, but it’s most likely the simpler choice: they simply don’t care.  

And you know what? A quarter through the semester, I gave up. 

I stopped talking. I felt that I was no longer going to waste my breath, time, or intention on people who were committed to disregarding me. While they were never explicitly rude or overtly racist, it was the feeling of denial that really stunned me. It was the simple refusal to acknowledge human complexity while celebrating themselves for learning new words they would forget by the coming week. I did not want to continually frustrate myself to tears or exhaustion for people who would not even say hello to me in the hallway. These people clearly weren’t my friends, and they were barely my colleagues. Why should I try to change that?

I felt so alienated there, I ultimately chose to completely disengage with them and the space. I used to read these books with intrigue, excited to hear from my peers and see how they interacted with the material. This desire dissipated within the first three weeks of class as I discovered how limited the potential for conversation was. I was so disappointed with the elementary comments they made about anything pertaining to race. My professor, try as they might, was unable to stimulate any meaningful or rigorous conversation. The syllabus was rich with a multitude of non-Western scholarship that was new to me, but I was never able to fully dissect it because my peers had nothing to say. We were just supposed to be satisfied with how “interesting” they found it all, I guess.

I felt moved to write this essay because I worried myself into multiple illnesses, wondering if it was my fault. Was I not friendly and warm enough? Did I not ask the right questions? Maybe if I read more of these white theorists, I could—-No way! Their deference to white supremacy made me question the validity of my own theoretical perspectives, and I almost let them win. I’m glad I chose to protect myself and my mental health by wresting my energy from that space and those people. 

I realize that moving forward with a life in academia, I will simply have to get used to it. White people gon’ white people at the end of the day, and it’s not up to me to change that. I will have to build community with other like-minded individuals and find spaces of healing amongst them. Everything is a lesson, and this semester, I am taking heed to it. Here’s to finding a sustaining, empowering, and gentle intellectual space in Amherst as long as I have to be here. 

Artist: Danielle McKinney https://honestlywtf.com/art/danielle-mckinney/