Choose Your Side: To Educate Toward Freedom

If you perused through last month’s essays, Why I Don’t Read White People Anymore, and the following first essay on Decolonizing Your Bookshelf, you may have picked up on undertones of academic engagement. Well, this is true: I’m an educator of Higher Ed specializing in English & Literature, quite obviously, and Ethnic Studies & Asian American studies, arguably obvious as well. Mostly, this means little beyond an intense hyperfixation and following obsession that started, generally, with story and led to and ended within the very niche field of ethnic based perspectives.

What I Didn’t Receive Myself & Yearned For All My Life

In my very first essay, I mentioned the whiteness of the classrooms I existed in and the lack of diversity in the subject we were taught. Passing from elementary school to middle school to high school to college, I somehow managed to naively imagine that things *could* be different with each new phase. Despite the continuous disappointments, my childish hope burned on.

I always felt that I was decently intelligent and that with better instruction, I had potential for higher heights, but because of my low-resourced, under-privileged schooling environments, I felt stilted by what was available around me. Of course, schools have changed a bit from then and now. We’ve seen a shifting, albeit slow, culture around education, particularly around challenging the inequitable nature of education that, ultimately, continues to not only disenfranchise much of its marginalized student body, but continues to uphold white supremacist values in its power structures, what it teaches, and how the content is taught.

That said, I do feel honored to be part of that transitional generation of black and brown folk fortifying the academic ranks after our trailblazers opened the spaces to us. We’re sitting on generations of work being done and that continues to be done despite us understanding that we’re still so very far away from anything remotely equitable.

When I was younger, I dreamed of classes in which I could see myself reflected in what we learned. I thought that one day, surely, it would come, and that my experiences as a young, brown, hyphenated, migrant woman would be validated. But even as my education shifted higher education and I entered graduate school, it never happened. I cannot express how crushing of an experience this was.

Naming the Hardship & Stepping Up to Plate

I realized that in the whole of my academic journey, I suffered terrible blows that needed to be named and called out for what they were:

1) works by BIPOC, if included at all, were included in passing

2) courses about BIPOC were few and very far between and rarely accessible (for every five offerings of British Literature there was one Ethnic Literature)

3) I legitimately did not have a BIPOC professor throughout the duration of my top tier public ivy education (you cannot say that there isn’t something wildly wrong about this).

And after realizing that all my education was not actually made to accommodate a voice, experience, or perspective like mine and knowing how many folk like me exist within the institution, I knew — work had to be done.

I decided that if I were ever make it to an academic level in which I could make choices and change experiences, I would center BIPOC voices and if I included white voices, it would be in passing. I was determined to center BIPOC experiences to challenge the narratives we’ve been told matter and to allow our diverse student body to actually see themselves reflected in what they study. I made it a point to be unapologetically diasporic, migrant, decolonial, feminist, hip hop, urban brown girl in my courses so that our black and brown students could see that we’re completely capable of doing this too, and that we don’t have to sacrifice the very facets of our identities so thoroughly erased in the institutions of higher education in order to get there and exist there.

A Decade in the Making: How I Run My Classroom

In the first essay of the #decolonizingyourbookshelf mini-series, I mentioned how diverse stories teach readers empathy and ask us to exercise imagination to understand from the perspectives of the stories and lives we read. I should state that there is, in truth, a very real lack of white representation in my courses, but bear with me –

I knew, early on, that the lack of inclusion of white voices could be read as petty, but consider the following: first, the ratio of white faculty to BIPOC faculty at any given institution; then, second and much more telling, the ratio of full-time, tenured white faculty to BIPOC faculty at any given institution. When taking into consideration the egregiously overwhelming amount of white faculty, the voices and stories they center, the voices and stories they actually have the background training to teach, and suddenly the teaching of BIPOC voices, not as upon the margins, but actually centered upon, becomes an act of radical inclusion despite it, in actuality, being a gentle introduction into lives outside our own. Last, if my prior essays haven’t proven yet, what is literature, but a pathway in which to explore our shared humanity? Literature is one narrative font of many that, if utilized consistently and correctly, can allow us to learn empathy. If we circle back to schooling that remains centered on the monomyth and the single narrative, then how can we possibly achieve this sense of better understand for one another?

I’ve been called out for this, for sure. I’ve even been reported to the department under the argument that my text selection was racist for failing to center the white experience as the depiction of American experience. But, taking on potential fire is part of the job and, on the other side of the work is how grateful, empowered, and proactive the marginalized students become in my and my colleagues classes. Sure, I won’t deny that being a familiar and approachable face helps them feel safe as well as the fact that I remain uninterested in the authoritarian model of the classroom, but I bet anything that the center of the magic truly is them reading and engaging with work that is actually relevant to them — work that, ultimately, helps them toward their own freedoms.

Gratitude & Testimony

So many students have approached with me gratitude for being allowed to read work that is important to them. Each time I hear this, it makes me want to cry — the commentary is always the same — they didn’t know stories about lives like theirs even existed. They then go on to share that they used to hate their humanities classes because they hated reading because the traditional discourse of eurocentric, western literature, not only discludes them, but much of the work hosts language that in actuality is quite hostile toward them. And, for who knows what reason, we’ve been accommodating this.

These students, or my students and arguably so many of the students across college campuses across the nation, are, in fact, minority and black and brown and migrant and low resourced and at-risk and first generation and coming into academic communities from which, prior to this point, they have not had the opportunity or resource to navigate. These students are indigenous and queer and feminist and multilingual and part time workers and full time workers and parents doing what bulk of society has told them is too late.

I realized that we can change the relation these students have with their education if we actually include them in the discourse we teach. When it comes to white voices, I tell them frankly — if you specifically want white literature, if you want the traditional American canon, then by all means, I’ll help you find a professor who teaches it well — that subject matter isn’t hard to find. In fact, it’s a dime a dozen and incredibly accessible. But, if you want diverse work, if you want work that challenges your own worldview, regardless of your own life positioning, then hold on to your few educators that, not only offer it, but have the training, knowledge, zeal, and passion to do so. It’s honestly hard to do this type of work, but when students hold on, when they let us know, it’s that type of encouragement that keeps us going.

Remembering bell hooks & How We Move Forward

This section wasn’t part of the original essay, but I was compelled to include this last commentary after the passing of bell hooks. Throughout my early days in academia (never from a class, but out of my own volition), I had read a number of her books. Later, I went on to teach from various chapters and essays of hers on varying topics of race, class, feminism, and love. Surprisingly, despite her many famous titles, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom was my very first read of hers. It ended up being life-changing for me and I came across it at a time that really impacted my decision to become an educator and what type of educator I wanted to become. You’ll probably find an essay on it in my upcoming Required Readings series, haha.

To close, I simple want to remember that hooks taught the world so much on race, class, gender, privilege, and education amongst many other things, but it was always her lessons of love and healing that we hold onto. She taught us that healing, and the freedom to heal, is not an individualized act, but a communal one. I hold this close to my heart. As an educator, I’ve always had to remember that the way I choose to stand in academia is not just movement toward my own healing, but a movement to stand beside and engage with as many others as is possible in our collective healing toward near futures that we’ll have the freedom and autonomy to dictate for ourselves. Slowly but surely, I believe this is just one of the thousand steps many are taking toward ushering in equitable change.

Mabuhay, I’m EA Garcia, and I’m a thriving eater of story. I reflect on all my reads across genres, forms, and categories. Since I only read BIPOC work and prioritize small, indie, and micro press work, you might find a new read! I also write on academia, publishing, & decolonization, ftw.

Feel free to recommend things in the comments below! I LOVE recs: particularly books, dramas, manga, & webtoons! Try to keep it BIPOC and marginalized ❤

Read about WHY I only read BIPOC folk, get a taste for my stance on decolonizing bookshelves, or look at some funky reviews of storywork!