Black Women Ivory Tower: Revealing the Lies of White Supremacy in American Education

[Music] hello and welcome uh to in the margins I'm your host my name is David plos and I'm so uh glad and grateful uh to have today as our guest uh Dr Jasmine Harris uh who serves as an associate professor of African-American studies and coordinator of the African-American studies program in the department of race ethnicity gender and sexuality studies at the University of Texas San Antonio um Dr Harris is also the author of a new book titled black woman Ivory Tower revealing the lies of white supremacy and American Education Dr Harris welcome thank you for uh joining us here for in the margins uh so glad you could be with us today I wanted to start off asking you about your background your in your book of course you wrote uh vividly uh about your experiences um in the runup to um going to vaser uh for your undergraduate uh education and the path there and the challenges you face there of course um as one of very few uh African-American females um at that institution I was wonder if you could talk about your own uh Journey uh through education and higher education as a black female and how your experience has informed uh the research you do currently yeah I um so I grew up in Minneapolis which you know is not the most diverse City uh especially so when I was growing up there in the 80s and 90s but I was always interested in learning I started reading at a young age I started trying to write books you know seven or eight um to to sort of mimic the things that I was reading and at home and you know with my family that was all well and good um but very early on um in my educational experiences in Minnesota in particular I realized that there was an unwelcomeness that I didn't exactly have the language for at the time obviously um but but something felt to me where I I understood that I I like to learn I like to read right um but that in the classroom or at school the experiences that I had were not positive right um and by that you know I I talk about in the book being you know pushed down in the snow by a little white boy that I that I was riding the bus home with um and there are those sorts of things right but there's also just the sort of General unwelcomeness non-belonging is something that I talk about a lot in the book that I could sense but I couldn't explain right um through elementary school middle school high school that that continued to to present itself and I you when it was time to apply for colleges I was sort of at a loss you know I I had good grades I was um deeply involved um on campus um and I knew that I wanted to go to college but I wasn't exactly sure where I would fit in um in in those experiences and and I leaned heavily on my mother who um was a college graduate she of understood the that sense of non-belonging but also was very Savvy about how I might overcome those things and and still be able to utilize the networks that you develop by you going to particular colleges and universities like G um and you know for me I didn't know what was awaiting me there you know and I I I knew that it was going to be mostly white students I knew that I would be one of the very few black women students on campus but I didn't necessarily understand what that meant um and it wasn't really until I got to graduate school um in my doctoral program and I started to think about you what I wanted to write my dissertation about what I was doing there really um having left a pretty successful public relations career um to go back to school and that's when I started reading the boys and hen and getting to read these experiences of black people in schools and in predominantly white settings more broadly that you know suddenly provided a language for um the things that I was experiencing that I didn't have before and as a sociologist that's my PhD is an in sociology I was able to really do an analysis of experiences and my dissertation is on the career trajectories of black women in um the Minneapolis and St Paul area and that topic was driven by watching my mom's experiences as a professional woman in uh black women in that area and so um it wasn't I was having all these experiences in education right but I didn't know how they fit together I didn't know what they were explaining to me um and you know highlighting to all of us about the structure of and culture of Education in in the United States and once I started to have the language and I started to learn the methodology for this kind of study I was hooked right um and since then all of my uh research my teaching my service on um campuses is really dedicated to trying to understand the experiences of black people um in predominantly white settings and higher education for this book um but you know more broadly as well for some of the other research that I'm doing and I think you know in the in the vein of the boys and the in the vein of uh P Hill Collins that it is important work you know it's important that it is black people black women um studying other black women's experiences and not letting um white people in the discipline white people in these institutions decide how to explain and describe and address the experiences that we have there you know you mentioned of that you um had a successful career um in uh public relations before um deciding to go back to graduate school and I do want to ask specifically why a career in the academy um you know we know of course the process of publishing and of course teaching and the tenure there's so many uh challenges uh in the academy that caused many even who choose that path to to get off that path so why a career in the Academy I was going if you talk about um what ultimately uh convince you to go that route honest and say I hated the nto5 schedule structure I am someone who needs um to to have some sort of control over day my schedule the things that I'm I'm working on and while I really enjoyed the work work of public relations I just realized that the the business structure that sort of typical corporate structure wasn't for me I remember I moved out to San Francisco after I finished I have a master's degree in public relations so I moved out to San Francisco to work in PR out there and after the first week it was Friday in the first week I called my mother as I was walking home and I was just in tears like you've been doing this every day for for 25 years like this is awful and it's not helping right and I think it wasn't in that moment that I realized that I wanted to do something that was more I talk about this a little bit in the book I don't know at the time I was 25 that I realized that going back to get my doctorate meant that I was also going to have a career in the academy and I honestly you know didn't know what it meant to have a career in the Academy I one black professor in college um who was you know admittedly very busy with the the few of us that were on campus and so she had to you divide her time um and and and that made it so we didn't get to interact perhaps as much as I would have liked and and had professors but I didn't know what that job entailed or um you know you talked about tenure and all these things I had no idea I had never written um an academic a scientific academic paper before I went back uh to to get my doctorate and so a lot of it was na right um where there are so many of my cohort mates colleagues who have parents who were phds or grandparents aunts or uncles um or who had sort of been following this track as a goal for a long time I came in essentially with nothing and you know in a lot of ways that put me behind many of the other students in my program at the University of of Minnesota and so I know that that's not like the the sexy answer but I honestly didn't know what I was getting myself into and when students came to me and ask me about being a professor about going to a doctoral program the thing that I always tell them is one big takeaway that I have is that especially for black women the process is about perseverance right it's not measuring any intellect right it is about the ability to jump through hoops your ability to commit to this sort of particular culture and structure of of doctoral programs and the the socialization that they do to turn you into a professor uh in in a lot of ways and and and I'll also say because I came to that without any of that information or experience I you know also buted heads with the you know the people in power in my program a lot because it didn't what they were asking was very sort of culturally blind right um and so for example at the University of Minnesota first year doctoral students were required to attend workshops and I can't remember what day I think it was Tuesday or Wednesday one one day a week they would hold these workshops where they would bring in other academics to give talks about their research and you know anybody from the Department was encouraged do right so it's like staying on top of the the current research in the discipline but for first year doctoral students not only were we required to go where for everyone else it was um a voluntary uh appearance we were also required to sit at the table sort of in the middle of the room and ask the first question I did this for a couple of months um and I just it felt like hazing to me um one um and as the only uh one um black student in my doctoral program and two these workshops happened at 4 o'clock in the afternoon and I was a doctoral student who was on Fellowship but I also had lots of jobs I remember trying to sort of commiserate with some of my cohort mates about you why we shouldn't be required to do this right um and they while they agreed nobody was really interested in in pushing uh the envelope and so I did you know I reached out to the director of Graduate Studies and I said you know this feels like hazing and it doesn't fit into my schedule and I understand you know I had a cortt mate who was right out of undergrad he's living at home being supported by our family and that is true of a lot of doctoral students in part because you have to have a particular class identity um you know to to be able to make doctoral programs work even if you're fully funded but that ignores that lots of people of color that are trying to get doctorates can't ask family members for monetary help they can't live at home they're doing this and doing other things and and the idea that this is a requirement and if I don't do it I can no longer be in the program well that's how you end up with a lot of great phds right um and you know luckily being uh someone with a background in PR I was able to make this argument you know very um clearly and directly and convincingly um and they acquiesced and they said understandable you know you know you don't need to to go and I stopped going unless it was something that was really of interest to me and that allowed me to work and um and make money but you know I think something that we that we often forget when we talk about the Academy and who's there and who's not is what the structure and culture of higher education is that perpetuates that absence or um the sort of over representation of particular folks and so you know I think a a lot of people again in this sort of vein of Class A lot of people are unaware in part because of the messaging that they get in in the media that most fact facy members especially assistant and associate professors are making less than $100,000 a year and I will tell you that my PhD CA more than 100,000 doers right um and and so when we create this and perpetuate this culture and this structure of higher education we [Music] are asking certain people not to be there and and in a lot of ways mom my lack of knowledge about higher education uh is what really allowed me to to persevere because you know I think if I had come in with this sort of clear understanding of the expectations and you know what Academia was going to be like for me postdoctorate I probably wouldn't have done it I tell my students that all the time you know but because I just came in with this thirst for knowledge right this uh this interest in the corporate structure interest in educating people um and that was sort of my finite goal I want to be able to educate people whatever that looks like allowed me to sort of shift and move throughout Academia and ways that are unexpected but that continue to push the envelope of what this institution what this job can be you know I want to ask you about this National anti- Dei push you know uh obviously you are in in Texas and of course in Texas and in many other states of course there's this overt um political push against diversity uh Equity uh and inclusion and of course you know you are uh he helping uh to build uh a black studies program in Texas amid this big anti- Dei push and just very interestingly you know we talk about and you talk about the challenge as a black woman in particular uh navigating um the majority spaces uh in higher education of course many in the community uh celebrated uh the Ascension of um uh Dr cloning gay at Harvard as as president and you know interestingly enough um you know though we see you know of course she steep out and we see the fural over anti-Semitism but what's coming behind that I find interesting what's coming behind that are people saying this is uh one of their many salvos against Dei we took down uh Dr Gay and and we're going after uh so uh many others uh and so I was wondering if you could uh talk about your work um in this climate of anti-de in Texas in particular uh but also uh I wonder if you take a national view as well because you know it appears as if the uh the Champions um of those who want to take down Dei are having some victories which is alarming many in the community yeah absolutely and it's alarming to me as you said you know someone who's trying to build an africanamerican study program in Texas um where the Texas legislature is directly contesting what we do at colleges universities in this state and in fact our um Dei office the office of inclusive Excellence at UTSA um was recently closed to be in compliance with the antii bill that was here um and and that is concerning because just six weeks ago our own Administration was telling us that it was simply going to be sort of a raming and a re of shuffling of the office itself right um and then all of a sudden right after the new year was actually we're we're going to to just uh to shudder it and you know the mistake and I think this is a purposeful mistake in in thinking about the Dei is around this narrative this this fallacy narrative right that black people get things that they do not deserve um and in particular things that they don't deserve that white people want right and so when we talk about thei offices at colleges and universities it is this idea that those organizations and the people who are working within them have a vested interest in the uplifting of black people that in this you know fallacy narrative can only happen if you are also um degrading the experiences of white students and white people in these institutions and I think um that it's really interesting that they're making these connections to anti-Semitism because Harvard and you know the IB Lees uh schools that are um molded in Harvard's image were first concerned with an overpopulation of Jewish students on their campuses that is how we get admissions offices before 1910 Harbor didn't have an admissions office or admissions policies right right you wrote a letter and um you know the the administration sort of looked at it and made decisions or you knew someone or your father went there right it was this very sort of closed Network um and you know preor War One you start to see more immigration um and um Jewish people in particular gravitating towards these schools and there are actually all of these letters that are written between presidents and administrators across these institutions Harvard Yale and Princeton in particular that are hand ringing about the number of Jewish students that they have there right and what do we do to ensure that these schools remain in the sort of protestant upper uh class white male image that they were created right and so it is anti-Semitism that leads us to institutions making decisions about who gets in and who doesn't based on you know their race their ethnicity their religion in uh the 1940s that's when they started thinking about black people right because before that there wasn't even an option for black people to attend there were some anomalies here and there um boys for example who had to go and study over in Germany before he could come back um and and study at Harvard but in general black people were not allowed right um and post World War II you have all these black veterans coming back to the United States with the GI bill to now pay for tuition and there is all of this messaging which was you know meant to encourage folks to uh to to take up arms and go to war right but all this messaging about what you can do with GI bill when you come oh even basser which is an all girl school right they took in some uh male students post World War II via the GI Bill zero of those people were black right um and so you what you were saying earlier about what comes down the pipeline after in in the example of pling gay they use these accusations of anti-Semitism as a way to make her vulnerable right and once her reputation became vulnerable then you can you know start in with the antiblack mix right then you can start to question um whether or not she plagiarized her dissertation or um or other articles that she's written and you know I have what folks don't understand right in Academia is that citation practices are variable at best across disciplines and you're talking about things that were written in the late 9s these early 2000s when a lot of Articles weren't even digitized yet right and so if we're going to and and the the billionaire uh who was sort of at the impetus of these um accusations of plagiarism now his wife who is also a professor at Harvard um has been accused of plagiarism by Business Insider apparently whole sections of her dissertation were taken from Wikipedia right but and in in his uh in his discussion about this right he's like well my wife is human and she makes mistakes and the implication in that is that Dr Gay is not human she's not allowed to make mistakes right because black people be in places like Harvard or basser or Princeton we we don't just have to be better right I mean there there's all that your parents tell you have to work twice as hard right do twice as much as white people to get half as much as they get not just that right it's that even when we get to those places we are still dehumanized right we are still consistently vulnerable to these questions about whether or not we belong in those places and I think it's really interesting that President Mill at University of Pennsylvania who also testified you know at the the the ing um and was also accused of anti-Semitism because of her continued um support for free speech which is the same thing that Dr Gay was saying she also resigned from the University of Pennsylvania right but without all of the questions and accusations about her belongingness right without all of this dehumanization of her as a person and that's because she was a white woman and Dr Day is is a black woman and that allows those things to be called into question and so nationally and here in Texas we are not just fighting to be seen and be heard right we're fighting to be thought of as human and in a like Texas that is so diverse right and here in San Antonio it's a majority Mexican population to still have white politicians in Power white University presidents buying into that and complying with that oranization it doesn't bod well for you know what's what's happening naturally and then the last thing I'll say about this is it's not by coincidence that this hearing Dr Gay the president of Harvard Dr McGill the president pen Dr corn BL the president of MIT and also I don't know uh the president of Columbia's name but they also asked the Columbia president to attend and they said no which probably is what everybody should have said right but that's not by accident right these are the schools that are at the center of sort of the cultural Zeitgeist of of higher education they move the needle in terms of broader social understandings of higher education even though majority of people with college degrees are never going to attend those schools right Harvard admits what 4% of students every year think MIT is close to that maybe pen is a little bit higher at six you know six to eight% but these aren't the schools where most people are going but if you can do this at these schools right if you can call in to question the black women president at Harvard then you're really going to have an easier time getting the president of UTSA to comply with these things yeah you know I wonder if you could talk about um the book um black woman Ivory Tower you know it's just very interesting um looking at how white supremacy um has manifested itself uh in different places you talk about um Texas where you know it's it's it's overt right we have lawmakers passing bills um but in other states that have more quote unquote liberal reputations you know we see uh white supremacy a little bit uh undercover um but you mentioned you know attitudes at a place like Harvard right um attitudes that dehumanize black people and black women in particular and so I was wonder if you could talk about um the book and why you wrote the book and how you think this book is relevant it seemed as if it's coming out right on time you know so much has happening not that um you know um these issues were not always pressing but you know the age that we're living in um the attack against um Dei is so is so fervent I if you talk about why you wrote this book uh and what you hope to accomplish with this book given the times that we're living in uh yeah it's a great question so um I was previously at small Lal arts college outside of Philadelphia called or sinus and while I was there must have been my third my third year there I wanted to bring Bor faculty member she wasn't a faculty member uh there when I was a student there um but she is black woman English Professor had just written a book um about black women that I thought was really interesting and was a part of the sociology Department we had some funds to bring uh someone to campus to give a talk and and it was approved and as a you know part of that someone will come they'll give the talk and usually there's some other events in this case we held dinner after her talk for some of the other black um faculty and a non-black faculty who expressed interest in meeting with her and conversation so we have The Sinner and and I tell this story in the book although the person same here um we are having dinner and we are it's the end of the fall semester and we are you know commiserating about weird requests that we get from students about changing their grades you know about accepting late work and and all of that very light-hearted conversation and um a white woman faculty member who was in attendance attempts to sort of join into this conversation and she says something to the effect of um I had a a black woman student come to me and ask me to raise her grade from an A minus to an a because she's a senior and she wants to go to Medical school she's concerned you know um about this grade this is a science class um this grade in particular affecting you know what schools she's able to get into or not and the woman says and I just told her don't worry about it you're a black woman of course you're gonna get into med and she laughs right and the rest of us just are silent um and we I think we're a little stunned right that she would even you know say something like that to us we are uh a little upset definitely um but we don't we don't really say anything nobody responds somebody says something else changes the subject then it's over until until it's over right we all go to our um our respective homes and then the phone calls start right we're we're all on the phone like oh my God I can't believe she said that I have to call you know the woman who is my guest right and apologize um that she was you know exposed to this while on campus and and I brought her here um we're we're trying to talk about you know who do we tell what do we say you know is this something that is you know if we start talking about it is going to blow up I was an assistant professor at the time so you know thinking about tenure as well and and this is a woman who was already tenured and you know sort of stepping on all those feet and it was just a mess I I felt embarrassed I felt uh you know ashamed I felt upset um but I wasn't exactly sure what to do none of us really were and a few days later I was talking to my mother about it um and not just that one instance but just more broadly like this is the crap that that we have to deal with all the time and it's so frustrating you know that we can't even have a dinner right without all this racism just like bubbling to the surface and and this person not even recognizing the racism and the things that she's saying yeah and and my mom she said something that that really uh you know put a light bulb up for me she said every time we get on the phone and you talk about your job you have a story like this you should just write about it and and I should say that my mother is one of those people who has s of very grandiose plans you know like if I'll say something she like well you you should call Oprah and see if she can do it and it's like oh okay yes I will figure out how to get that in front of op right she she's never ever thinking about how difficult something is she's just like seems like something we can do can you do that and I laughed it off at first and the more that I thought about it you know I started taking taking notes in my in my notebook just writing little stories down like oh yeah then that happened to me and then that happened to me and it just started to build itself right um and it starts with me right and it starts with my family the women in my family um but what became really interesting to me very early on was the sort of history of black women in higher education and our invisibility even though we have been a part of higher education for the last you know 25 years that persistent invisibility means that a white woman Professor can tell a black woman student not to worry about her grade because she's definitely going to get into to medical school because that's that again that narrative fallacy right that black people just get and really that started with Ronald rean a lot of Ronald Reagan right when his again false narrative about this Welfare Queen that's taking advantage of all the social services and that really snowballs into this idea that we don't have to work hard right when in reality we are actually working harder than almost anybody else black men included right um because in a lot of ways that shared maleness is something that can not completely overcome but create a common ground in higher education that black women don't have right and so for me it was I want other black women and girls to know that this is common but it's not you right I said earlier that I spent a lot of time recognizing that I didn't feel comfortable at school I didn't feel you know um a sense of belonging talk about getting to basser and then realizing that the people that I was there with had parents and grandparents you know who you've been attending the school for a century yep and um and I didn't have any of that right and I wanted to write something and and and for me it was a little scary right because it's like are people going to read this are black women going to read this and saying yeah you know yeah this happened to me right and it took me a a while a couple of years as I was writing this to realize that that's okay I want them to read it and say yeah that happened to me oh yeah that happened to me oh yeah that happened to me right and that wasn't about my life right or my mistake or you know something disqualifying about me but that I can fit that experience into this broader culture of higher education and these structural systems that are sort of perpetuating that culture and so I wanted to write something both in style and tone that an a 17 or 18 year old black woman High School could read and see herself in and uh 65 old you know black woman full Professor who has been in this industry for 30 years could also see her and I think it's important um it's not about being voiceless right we all we often talk about minority groups and like being voiceless right it's not being voiceless we all have voices right it's using that voice and it's being heard and what I what I really thought about this book and and the stories that I have and the stories other experiences is we have to be fullly yelling this in the streets right when clud and gay is forced to resign um and you know accused of not just anti-Semitism but not being not being right for the role right quote unquote right that is the sort of impetus of all of this right we spent first of all shortest president tenure in Harvard's history six months right we spent two weeks in July talking about how amazing it is at the original higher education right Harvard is the the first Harvard and William and Mary would argue about this but it's likely Harvard that was the first institution of higher education in the United States right and to have a black woman there after almost 400 years of existence should say something about how we are moving forward as a society but when that tenure gets truncated at six months because of you know conservative attacks on Dei on affirmative action and on this woman as a symbol of those things that tells me you know you talked about the in for this book being great it certainly is um but it it's a little sad in that way right that it's like we're in 2024 and we you know we just watched antiblackness remove the first black president at Harvard University and so we need to be saying these things when when Dr gate she just wrote an oped for the New York Times and she talks about that right she talks about this being um a a very clear example of racism and anti-blackness in in higher education and the way that she has being compared to these other women who also testified and that tells me that the book is needed right and and hopefully it won't always be needed but but it is well Jasmine I want to just thank you so much for this fascinating uh conversation um I believe that our audience uh will resonate strongly uh with some of the things of course that you mentioned and the themes of your book and so just want to thank you again for joining us was a fascinating conversation and look forward to what you will continue to do uh in the future thank you Jasmine appreciate your time thank you all right take care [Music] byebye [Music]

Channel: Diverse Issues In Higher Education

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Length: 42min 4sec (2524 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 07 2024