Per My Previous Email… : An Alternative Approach to Quit Lit
Part 2: The Impossibility of Telling Some Stories
Analogies test your ability to define relationships between words. In the question below, you will see a pair of words in capital letters. There will also be four answer choices, each consisting of another word pair. Your task is to identify the word pair in the answer choices that is related in the same way as the word pair in all caps.
FISH : WATER
A. Student : Faculty Meeting
B. Administrator : Sweater Vest
C. Professor : Email
D. Alumni : Letter of Recommendation
The answer is, of course, C. The answer is always C. For many higher educators, email is not merely a means of communicating or creating a “paper trail.” It is the atmosphere of the work we do, our tools and our tool box, the space where we meticulously choose the words that best represent who we are and who we believe ourselves to be...and reveal our inner natures via the length and formatting of our salutations and signatures.
It’s fitting then, that I start crafting my quit lit story by sharing an excerpt from an email I wrote some time ago. It is not my intention to implicate specific individuals or compromise the implied confidentiality of institutional processes. Therefore, I have made limited edits this email to avoid doing so.
While there is much to be applauded around the work we are doing to face our challenges and embrace our opportunities with regard to inclusion, equity, and diversity; I struggle constantly to articulate a deep and troubling anxiety I feel about parts of this important conversation I believe are missing. Some of you who attended the meeting yesterday had an opportunity to hear me struggle, fumble and ultimately fail to clearly communicate this anxiety first hand.
I hope to do a better job in this email.
When I walked out of my front door this morning, a pickup truck was parked behind my car. Had the driver not parked facing the wrong way on the street, I might not have noticed their rather remarkable collection of stickers (pictured below).
But I did notice. It was difficult not to. I stood still in front of my car, in front of my home, as a series of thoughts ran through my mind.
Does this truck belong to the new family that is moving in two houses over or one of the contractors finishing renovations on the house? Don’t panic. This could just be one of those misguided “heritage not hate” types who just don’t get that this is a terror-inspiring reminder of the horror of slavery, reconstruction, Jim Crow, and the violent reemergence of populist white nationalism. What if it’s not? There’s a lot of anti-government stuff here and one of the five confederate flags on this vehicle, the one that says “come and take it,” has the silhouette of an assault rifle. They could be one of those militia types. This is unreal. Take a picture. OMG, what if they see you taking a picture and they ARE the militia type?! Get in your car and lock the doors.
I got in my car and locked the doors.
How long will this truck be parked here, essentially in front of my house? Will it be here when my 11 year old gets home off the bus? Maybe I should pick him up from school for an impromptu ice cream date and we could wait it out. Will they be back tomorrow? The next day? I wish this person had the sense to park the right way on the damn street.
I am not sharing this incident because it was exceptionally terrible. In fact, there’s nothing exceptional about it. This is Lynchburg. The distance from my front door to the door of my office is exactly one mile and I often walk. I have made something of a game of counting the number of confederate flags I see on the way. Usually there is at least one (courtesy of another truck that parks on Rivermont near my home). The record is seven. There is also nothing exceptional about the way I currently feel — unsettled, uneasy, hyper-vigilant, wounded, worried and asking myself how I can continue to justify bringing my family to live here.
Which brings me to the point I would like to make. For every day that Lynchburg is an interesting, beautiful, increasingly-vibrant place to live, there is another when it is isolating, menacing, and visibly (and seemingly proudly) steeped in the darkest and ugliest aspects of our nation’s shared history. On these days, days like today, it is a fight to remain present, productive, and positive. It is a fight to come up with a reasonable answer to the most basic of questions. “Why do you stay here?”
Much has been said of the fragility of today’s students with respect to flagging retention. I agree with this…to a point. However, as a 41 year old woman who has seen and been through more than most of my peers, I struggle mightily with the cumulative impact of the weaponized symbolism of the confederacy that is so much a part of everyday life in Lynchburg. I am not an 18 year old. I am not a first generation college student. I am not on my own in an unfamiliar community for the first time, I do not lack for critical tools or the ability to put such matters in to the larger arcs of history and the prevailing political climate…and I struggle.
And confederate flag bumper stickers are FAR from the only ways that Lynchburg regularly communicates the message, “you do not belong here.” In my opinion, there is nothing fragile in walking away from a space or environment that persistently inflicts low-level emotional trauma. Today, it looks a lot to me like common sense.
As we as a faculty continue to talk about inclusion, equity, and diversity, I would like to stress the importance of ACTIVE inclusion. Some of you may know that I serve as the Diversity Ambassador for the Brewers Association in a faculty consulting role. At a national conference, I recently cautioned craft brewers not to mistake “friendliness” for “inclusivity.” Offering a metaphor, I said “the lack of overt bias or hate speech is often taken as evidence that your product or space is equitable and inclusive. This is akin to concluding that a lack of off-flavors results in a flavorful beer. The two are at least on some level related, but are by no means equivalent.”
I am suggesting that for many of our students (and at least one member of the faculty), making sure that we do not share the “off-flavors” of Lynchburg may not be enough to ensure that our space feels inclusive. I am suggesting that as we see the demographics of our student body (and of the population of college students nationwide) shift, we need to acknowledge that simply being a friendly place that “respects diversity” may not be enough to overcome what is on the other side of the red brick wall. I hope we step up to the challenge to become a place that doesn’t just respect diversity, but actively commits to cultivating, empowering, and advocating for diversity inside our walls and beyond, while being attentive and respectful of the everyday resilience that many of our students demonstrate in silence. In doing so, we might just become a more visible presence in our area and make some lasting change in our community.
Thanks for your time.
Rereading this email fills me with the same crawling sense of exposed embarrassment that I could not shake in the days after I pressed send. My efforts to conceal how deeply shaken and emotionally unmoored I was feeling with academese and “we language” are truly cringe-worthy. I remember walking the halls of my building, certain I’d made a tremendously poor decision in sending this email, certain I’d shown both too much presumption and too much vulnerability, and agonizing over what I would say when one of the members of the committee I’d mailed it to responded. As it happened, the embarrassment passed quickly. No one ever responded.
No one ever mentioned it.
Stop. Don’t continue down the path you were probably headed down — the one down which it is assumed that my colleagues are callous people, too clueless about the realities of the contemporary political moment to entertain a rather pathetic emotional outburst from their sole black tenure track colleague. That’s not where I was headed. Because, if I am honest, I have no idea how the fuck I would have responded to this email either.
Instead, follow a path that leads nowhere so defined. A path that is, if nothing else, a space of in-betweenness, of conflict and complexity, and of questions without easy answers. Somewhere in that murk is the quit lit story I want to tell.
It’s a story about feeling lucky to be working alongside a group of brilliant, talented, and caring people and a story about gaps in understanding that doggedly refuse to be bridged. It’s a story about investing deeply in something worthy that constantly calls your own worth into question. It’s story with far too much dialogue, unrelatable characters, and plot that goes absolutely nowhere.
There is a funny episode in this story, funny because it is repeated to the point of absurdity, where I meet someone new in a bar — I spend a truly academic amount of time in my neighborhood bars. The new person asks where I work and I tell them. They ask what I do at my place of work and I tell them…and they aren’t quite quick or subtle enough to hide the expression of disbelief or suspicion that the word “professor” inspires. [Cue laugh track]
There is a deeply personal undercurrent to be sussed out in this story — one that reverberates with fear and guilt and culpability with respect to one of the truisms of academia that non-academics find most difficult to wrap their heads around. We do not get to choose where we want to work. We go where the jobs are and we mercilessly tow our families along. When we arrive, exhausted and elated to be on the tenure track, we gorge on the benefits of an artfully-crafted bubble of high-minded values and purposes and conveniently ignore that our partners and children do not have the same access to or experience of that bubble.
Hypocrisy will be a recurring theme in this story.
If you thought this was going to be a linear “what had happened was…” kind of tale, you are no doubt pissed off right about now. Honestly, you should have known better. If, however, you are picking up what I am putting down and understand that some stories just can’t be told in conventional ways, there will probably be a Part 3.
And it will be just as self-indulgent and meandering.
