Kicking Academia’s Ass: Be the Difference that Makes a Difference By Abigail & Mengmeng

 Kicking Academia’s Ass: Be the Difference that Makes a Difference

By: Abigail Escatel & Mengmeng Liu

As women of color graduate students we have a deep understanding of the university as a space of violence. Our 8+ years in the academy has made this alarmingly clear: the crisis of education denies that racial difference matters. We rarely see alliances between international and domestic students of color, and yet, here–for this op-ed and beyond, we merge to indict the university’s racist problem. Nestled in the precarity of our identities, we know the university would rather see us as a problem than part of a radical solution. 

The university hails us to perform this multi-cultural diversity token that is both forever grateful to be here and non-threatening, effectively becoming what Stuart Hall calls “differences that make no difference.” This makes social justice-oriented scholars of color an anomaly, a damn near uni-fucking-corn because the university makes sure to purge oppositional bodies. Forced into an impossible double-bind, the university takes credit for our resilience, but they are the roadblock that holds us back. Its gatekeepers gaslight us to question our own ability. It buries our voices by this scrutiny of the perfect tokenized otherness. The university operates to assimilate us, not to foster our growth as complex individuals. 

As recipients and participants in the US education system that builds upon US imperialism, white supremacy, and misogyny, we have developed an oppositional sense of reality. Our everyday embodied struggles as socially conscious women of color rupture the vastly different illusion of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” that the university projects. That process of projection can be unpacked through two concepts: interpellation/hailing and encoding/decoding. Louis Althusser defines interpellation as a process of how dominant ideologies hail people with particular identities, and expect the hailed subjects to behave in a way within the hegemonic control. The university hails students of color as the racialized other and diversity token, and expects us to behave within rigid categories. In Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding model, the oppositional position recognizes the hegemonic system and consciously acts against it, which perfectly situates our position as women of color in the ivory tower. 

What does it mean to be oppositional to the university? For Abby, it has meant publicly crying at an academic conference discussion panel of 200+ scholars in attendance after being triggered by conversations of racism on a panel titled “#RhetoricSoWhite.” Subsequently choosing to leave a toxic department, writing a kick-ass resignation letter, and starting her PhD anew elsewhere, all with the help of insurgent scholar-mentors, of course. But it also meant, learning to organize aggrieved graduate students in her program, not being afraid to speak up and making her presence known, and learning to find her people in a space of sustained violence. For Mengmeng, it has meant being fed up with universities’ constant harassment and scrutiny of international students' needs for community, intelligence, and unique personhood: why are you always hanging out with Chinese people and speaking Chinese so loudly? Tests upon tests are constantly thrown at her to prove her worth; orientation upon orientation is set up to teach her to blend into American culture. She chose to take on the university’s racist policies regarding English requirements for international students, mobilizing students to speak up on the issue, writing strong and sharp critiques of the racist structure, and sending emotional labor invoice to the university. 

The university, its gatekeepers and its faithful actors have a long list of whistleblowers. From #BlackInTheIvory to Presumed Incompetent book volumes, the mass of aggrieved parties grows by the day. The audacity to survive in the academy is not without a fight. And we mean a fight. A fight to exist as full radical and abundant selves. We can sit here for days and compile enough stories just among our networks to write an entire book, but we elide that project to simply say we are blown away by our collective willfulness to survive.