“If This Was Plantation Days” (Continued)

As I calmly articulate why we shouldn’t frame ourselves in relation to slavery, T makes his way to the front of the class. I can’t help but think about our bodies’ positionings in the space—his resistance arising as he takes to the front of the room and I sit in the back row that he usually occupies. Where is the house in this classroom? Where is the field? And though I readily dismiss the planation metaphor—because I don’t want T to perceive himself as white chattel or to think myself some white overseer’s lackey, lingering aloof over T on massa’s behalf—deep down it holds weight. Both Black bodies exist in relation to white authority, bound in different ways by, and up in, oppressive matrixes of domination: our exaggerated truths. We are in the fracture; we are “in the wake”: “as the meanings of words fall apart”—in my explanations that I do not buy for moving away from the plantation—“we encounter again and again the difficulty of sticking the signification” (Sharpe 2016, 77). And while slavery’s political, racialized power relations meant that slaves were denied the opportunity to gaze (hooks 1992, 115), T, in our classroom ecology, usurps that denial by racializing me as dominant “house slave” through the mechanisms of the academy. In the hierarchy of commodified objects that the wake signals, T resists by putting my governing role on blast.

—

By the last day of the semester, I grow quite attached to this group. Having had particularly difficult, lengthy, delicate, and complex discussions about Blackness, resistance, and their relationships to whiteness/institutional power, one day—prompted by Shaina’s emotional response to a video on the Ferguson Uprising—I tell my story of being a victim of police brutality in Texas. I’m so comfortable that I want to give this class a takeaway: on that final day, we watch parts of a documentary on racism. The clips address the “n-word,” as well as the question “Are all white people racist?” Following our viewing of the former, T asks, “Do you say ‘nigga’?” And before I can resp—“Are you Black though?”

At this juncture, I need to know why. What motivates the question? What preoccupies T throughout the semester, so much so that it manifests itself openly through these interjections? “I am. Like I explained before. Why do you keep asking this question though?”

“Is it the color of my skin?”

“Is it the way I dress, or the way I speak?”

“Or is it that I’m standing in front of this classroom? What is it?”

“Because you’re standing in front of a classroom,” T explains. My position as an instructor at a historically white institution means that my Blackness is inauthentic, out of place, or at the very least questionable. But it’s my Black masculinity. And my lack of urban Black male performatives. How could I be a Black man teaching this shit? That a Black male student would think that Black masculinity couldn’t be found or performed in the position of instructor in an English class at MwSU somehow implies that I am, in some ways, a whitewashed, feminized version of Blackness—and it’s true. But from his choice of my Black body’s spatial location as the root of his questioning, rather than biological markers, or my material/linguistic racial/gender performance, T identifies an impossibility in the efficacy of my possible antiracist Black agency.

By evoking the word “nigga,”14 in co-constitution with “#schoolboyLou” though, T also conjures a different kind of racial hierarchy typical to the white classroom in order to critique my space in it—one of a world in which Black authenticity relies on a hardcore-rap nexus of the hypercommodification of Blackness. We become two things in a space where Blackness must read as things. Yet, the white classroom can only exist on a hierarchy—hence T’s earlier fracturing question of our respective positions as field versus house slaves. Black studies scholar R. A. T. Judy explains, “A nigga forgets feelings, recognizing, instead, that affects are communicable, particularly the hard-core ones of anger, rage, intense pleasure . . . The possibility of the nigga rests on the twofold of experience and affect, and the fact that experience is essentially infungible” (1994, 228). T, therefore, highlights my position as an instructor in the white university (and its assumed experiential enculturation) in an attempt to destabilize my “nigga authenticity” (Judy 1994), but simultaneously fractures our understanding of the deeply ecological white space itself and how it co-constitutes our Blacknesses. For him, because of my place in surrounding whiteness—which my white fields substantiate and contribute to—and perhaps due to my lack of US Black hypermasculine performatives, affects, or experiences—my centering of Blackness in teaching needs to be conspicuously critiqued. It is suspect.

Between Poetry and Rhetoric15

To dig deeply into these differences to which Lorde alludes in the epigraph to this chapter—and to use them creatively as Lorde implores as critical of Black feminist imaginaries (1984, 110–113)—I position my forthcoming stories in a tradition of Black autoethnographic work within rhetoric, writing, and literacy studies. Below I lay out aspects/aesthetics of studies in that tradition on which I continue to build. These elements include (but are not limited to) the affordances of Jordan’s treatment of affect in relation to Black language in classroom spaces (1985), Keith Gilyard’s ecological analysis detailing the developmental process of learning race/language (1991), Jacqueline Jones Royster’s exploration of how Black voice operates as a “thing” almost outside of the Black body in institutional environments (1996), Vershawn Young’s (2004, 2007) genre-bending study/performance of Black masculinity in relation to white educational spaces, and Carmen Kynard’s (2013, 2015) overt exercising of various Black registers and positional awareness in telling stories that confront the traumas faced by Black students in educational settings. I mixtape these autoethnographic tenets in order to remix the method forward through my own stories.

In contending with T over Black language and our roles within institutional spaces, interrogating my affective responses as a Black instructor in relation to a Black student, and bringing autoethnographic reflexivity to bear on analysis through a Black feminist relational lens, my reading here follows on teacher/scholar/poet Jordan’s. Her 1985 essay, “Nobody Mean More to Me than You and the Future Life of Willie Jordan” wrestles with the Black feminist’s experience teaching Black English to a mostly Black class.16 Jordan’s (1985) pedagogical reflection takes a sharp affective turn when one of her students, Willie, loses his brother to a police shooting. Utilizing the highly politicized teaching/learning of Black vernacular, Jordan and her students grapple with responding with protest. The essay deploys storytelling as a means to center contemporaneous issues significant to Black life/learning. It demonstrates Black autoethnography’s potentials to weave through “the eloquence, the sudden haltings of speech, the fierce struggle against tears, the furious throwaway, and useless explosions” (135)—aspects of the methodological genre I engage directly. Though different from my encounters with T, Jordan’s relationship with Willie demonstrates how Black pedagogical stories might help us think through Black identity, language, and their institutionalization—a critical aim of this project.

Prompting his suspicion to its climactic head, T’s doubt about my use of “nigga,” a term fraught not only by histories of racialized violence but also by Black reclamation, underscores language’s role in racializing, classing, and gendering subjects. My relationship with T seemingly hinged on our individual/mutual relationship with the word—a use of which meant a co-constitution with/in it—here, within a historically white space. That use of Black English situates us in, and reminds us of, debates within rhetoric, literacy, and writing studies surrounding the publication of a landmark Black autoethnographic text—Gilyard’s Voices of the Self (1991). Engaged in tensions on Black students’ relationships with Black and standard English, Gilyard narrates his negotiations with literacy from “birth” to the end of high school in every other chapter of his monograph, carefully studying his sociolinguistic development in scholarly conversations in intervening ones. He justifies his methods by explaining the validity of autobiographical artifacts and a transactional analytical framework (12). In such a model, actively propelled by my own stories in this chapter, subjects like T and me “continually [negotiate] with an evolving environment” (13). Though Gilyard frames his orientation as autobiographic, the study’s scholarly analysis of his schooling in conversation with major, concurrent intellectual discussions characterizes Voices as a full-scale autoethnographic investigation into those discourses. Gilyard’s book and Jordan’s (1985) essay exemplify “critical autoethnographies” that “foreground a writer’s standpoint and makes this standpoint accessible, transparent, and vulnerable to judgment and evaluation” (Adams, Holman Jones, and Ellis 2015, 89).

The vulnerability in reflecting on my exchange with T allows analysis of various “voices” I embody as an able-bodied Black im/migrant male student/instructor in white educational contexts. In the narrative, these include my “voices of the self,” my own accentuated identity as a foreigner employed in a nonnative space—aurally identifiable through speech—as a race-radical Black instructor, as a contingent laborer for the white institution, and as a male, privileged in a middle-class space through instructional authority. I wrestle with a similar desire as Gilyard’s to embody the “hip schoolboy” in T’s nickname “#schoolboyLou”—a persona “impossible to achieve” (1991, 160).

On the selfsame notion of “voice,” Royster’s “When the First Voice You Hear Is Not Your Own” capitalizes on metalevel prospects for autoethnographic storytelling to investigate “voice” as a “manifestation of subjectivity” not only tied to the spoken/written but also acting “as a thing heard, perceived, and reconstructed” (1996, 30; emphasis in original). Here, we might navigate how “voice” constructed in ways beyond the Black body works para/ontologically (in a non/being in but outside itself) to make/negotiate Blackness. Working in the very mode she sees belittled by the white academy (“stories”), Royster multidimensionally critiques how academic spaces misconstrue voice—specifically hers—cleverly pushing against that distortion to fund her thesis. Likewise, “If This Was Plantation Days” shows how the classroom space in an ecology at MwSU works with/against my voiced identities, racializing my body in transactional contexts with notions of dominance and subordination. Royster’s article operates alongside Black feminist theorist hooks’s contemporaneous Teaching to Transgress, which, through storytelling, extends sometimes beyond narrated personal responses to teaching/learning situations to active, reciprocal encounters with scholarship, countering various “systems of dominion” (1994, 10). hooks’s call for instructors to “practice being vulnerable in the classroom, being wholly present in mind, body, and spirit” (14) parallels Royster’s (1996) emphasis on the varied, intersecting ways voice can be embodied (or move beyond biocentric notions of bodies) for Black feminist griots-as-scholars. In utilizing multiple angles of Black storytelling, both thinkers press Black autoethnography forward, demonstrating how subjectivity might be complicated through layers of analysis to resist institutional oppression.

Like Vershawn Young, in his article “Your Average Nigga” (2004) and subsequent monograph by the same name (2007), I stereotyped T based on his clothes, demeanor, and language. And while my initial reaction to T was optimistic, as opposed to Young’s reaction to his “ghetto” student Cam (Young 2004, 699), that impression does not make my profiling any less harmful. Having grown up in a neighborhood unlike Cam’s or Young’s17—mind you, not a “ghetto” in local parlance but one boasting a “drug zone,” “pipers,” and my mother’s routine question, “That is gunshot ah hearin’?”—my relationship with US Black masculinity differs from Young’s, Cam’s, and T’s. Deploying autoethnographic techniques, Young’s article contends that proponents of code-switching essentialize race construction, resulting in damaging consequences, particularly for Black urban males. The monograph pushes his use of this methodological orientation to other spaces in his personal (the ghetto, his living room, his brother’s house) and professional (the classroom, a teachers’ meeting, and a university teaching job interview) life (Young 2007, 8). His arguments stage and study scenes from them, performing a “merger of what’s often considered academic (and white) with what’s considered creative (and raced)” (10). Such emphasis on performativity and spaces in which performativity occurs marks Your Average Nigga as an amalgamation of critical autoethnography and “narratives of space and place” (Adams, Holman Jones, and Ellis 2015, 86).

Growing up, my situation differed from Young’s in that school and bookishness were not necessarily socialized as feminine. In postcolonial Trinidad and Tobago, parents, teachers, and even culture beat learning into us as a clear alternative to drugs, poverty, and violence. I distinctly remember calypsonian Gypsy’s refrain, “Little Black boy, go to school and learn, little Black boy, show some concern, little Black boy, education is the key, to get you off the street and out poverty.” But I was an inside child from quite young and, because of mixed heritage, did not identify with the song when it was popular. My relatives’ presence in “If This Was Plantation Days” also seemed, to me, to legitimize my Blackness, particularly my im/migrant Blackness and ethos in an antiracist classroom. They were other Black bodies attesting to my racial and ethnic “authenticity.” However, in T’s struggle with me over Black masculinity, my im/migrant blackness undermined my (US) Black masculinity—and perhaps contributed to T’s doubt about my use of “nigga.” The word’s enculturation and commodification in hip-hop and rap discourses and those discourses’ operation as “an authentic African American cultural form against its appropriation as transnational popular culture” (Judy 1994, 229) contribute to tension that leads to fracture—where the deep ecology of the white classroom cultures us on different planes in relation to racialized hegemony. Caribbean Blackness thus reads illegible when gradated by US Blackness via a low-key nationalization of the ecologically white space. The junctions of Blackness, in particular temporalities/spatialities in both Young’s and my analyses, illustrate the dynamic capabilities of autoethnography within the griot-as-scholar lineage.

Methodologically, Young (2007) locates his text with Voices, explaining it as a predecessor, though he attempts to merge seamlessly autobiography and criticism, as opposed to Gilyard’s chapter separations (1991, 11). Young (2007) also explicitly draws from W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk, calling it a model for blending genres. Notably, Du Bois recalls first coming to the question prompting his formative theory of double-consciousness, which haunts this very project—“How does it feel to be a problem?”—in a “wooden schoolhouse” (1903, 1–2). Du Bois’s socialization within an educational institution teaches him, through reflective/reflexive interrogation, how to embody, affectively and materially, his Blackness.18 Although Young (2007) frames Your Average Nigga as autocritography,19 it might usefully also be considered Black autoethnography, working from that latter form through self-aware attunement to subjectivity, identity formation, and genre manipulation. This chapter explicitly builds on Young’s performativity, reflexivity/reflectivity, attentiveness to space, and use of poetry,20 revealing a conscious propulsion of autoethnography and how it could be fruitfully employed in studying diasporic Black identity.

Following on Young’s conspicuous and metalevel use of storytelling as a means to analysis, Carmen Kynard’s (2013, 2015) scholarship exhibits Black autoethnographic methodologies in its prioritization of personal narrative in reflexive relation to academic conversation. It embodies critical self-awareness of her positionality as a Black feminist race-radical griot-as-scholar and how that awareness shapes and furthers research. Kynard’s Vernacular Insurrections intertwines several vignettes with revisionist histories of writing studies in relation to the Black Freedom movement. Calling her work “Intellectual Autobiography” (2013, 1), Kynard also foregrounds her language usage (like Young), claiming a “cross amalgamation of many styles and registers” from “high academese” to “high urbanese” (13). My above story in two vignettes and the critical reflections in proceeding sections similarly slip in/out of academic, colloquial Black US, and Trini dialect. Kynard explains the self-involvement required in Black autoethnography when she pronounces, “You are always right there in the mix, no matter how much you have been written out, spanning much wider than the token representation you have been allowed” (12), harkening back to Royster, and pushing outward from the commodification of Blackness in white spaces.

While Vernacular Insurrections’ organization reminds us of Gilyard’s (1991) Voices in separating chapters featuring personal accounts from explicitly critical conversations, Kynard’s (2013) shifting deployment of language to story her work operationalizes and forwards the all-encompassing autoethnographic analytic offered in Young’s scholarship. In her article “Teaching While Black,” Kynard remains “conscious” in using “stories to understand and present the lives and literacies of students of color where [her] own cultural role as a black female storyteller enacts its own critical inquiry” (2015, 4; emphasis mine). Kynard’s scholarship not only overtly brings the Black feminist griot-as-scholar role to conversation, but also emphasizes positionality, reflexively marshalling the inherent political Black agency and traditions from which it comes as a mechanism for scholarly analysis.

Employing that mechanism, I re/mix autoethnographic frameworks from an amalgam of predecessors, pushing onward, while doubling back, from V. Young (2004, 2007), Kynard (2013, 2015), and others in the heritage. My stories thus stand on their own as criticism and entertain academic conversation, fluidly navigating dialects, and eventually leave only the creative (yet analytical) text. In further mulling why my “standing in front of a classroom” at MwSU caused intraracial tension, I offer more stories to uncover and ecologize how my Blackness functions, or fails to do so, on US college campuses. These stories, like “If This Was Plantation Days,” ask: How might my histories, identities, and experiences cut across spaces/temporalities to fracture notions of Blackness in antiBlack environments? How does engaging moments of racial stress evoke para/ontological rhetorical possibilities where objectified Blackness might emerge/sojourn? How does autoethnography merge style and content to suggest a means for antiracism? My analysis’s Black feminist lens follows purposefully on Royster’s claim that individual stories placed against each other construct credible evidence, a basis from which “transformation in theory and practice might rightfully begin” (1996, 30). Building from the outlined griot-as-scholar tradition, I present them to critique the institutionalization of Blackness and de/constructions of my precarious identities, continuing to also pose Du Bois’s question: “How does it feel to be a problem?” (1903) while navigating agency through that push.

Visualized Difference: On Becoming Token

On the glossy cover of the summer 2009 issue of Liberal Arts College’s (2009) Liberal Arts College Magazine,21 a publication by its Division of Institutional Advancement (emphasis mine), my image stands out like a Black thumb. Of the six individuals pictured in graduation regalia, I am the only one not a white woman. But it’s also my hair: while my scraggly beard signals gendered difference from the rest of the group, my dreadlocks—that ironically cannot fit under the graduation cap—place an inordinate amount of visual attention on my role in the photograph. The caked black tentacles that defined my identity back then overshadow the decorative ropes and medals that signify institutional achievement. Embracing the two of the five white women I know personally, I smile with the group, proudly above the first of two text boxes that reads: “Cover Story: Tomorrow’s Stellar Alumni: Stories From This Year’s Honors Convocation Celebration.” We stand under the maroon arch, an icon for the university on official documents, with the title of the magazine, named after the university, flanked atop the page. Liberal Arts College lifts its name from a nearby range in the Appalachian Mountains that runs through the Northeast. The mountain range’s name has some relation to an indigenous tribe of about 5,000 persons, who, according to the New York Times, “are economically strapped and very rural, which sets them apart from most of the residents of [their] wealthy [county]” (Kelley 2006). Here: in one of the wealthiest counties in the United States, in one of its wealthiest states in terms of median income, the name of an indigenous tribe signifies not its cultural underpinnings, not the histories of the genocide, poverty, or socioeconomic degradation inflicted upon its bearers by white settlers, but the public liberal arts college located within it. Its Magazine sets my Black im/migrant male face in service of that unjust history.

This section recalls the use of my image by this historically white institution I attended prior to MwSU to orient the autoethnographic reading of my position as a Black graduate student/instructor. It tells the story of a pair of photographs used by my undergraduate alma mater, analyzing how my identity as a Black male im/migrant does diversity work for the institution. I deploy literary and Black studies scholar Houston A. Baker’s idea of “critical memory” (1995): a “continuous arrival at turning points,” that evaluates the Black “past that it never denies as well passed.” We might well understand Baker’s concept as a technology of Sharpe’s (2016) “wake work” in its “cumulative, collective maintenance of a record that draws into relationship significant instants of time past and the always uprooted homelessness of now” (Baker 1995, 3). These photographs recall fractures made present when my Black imaged self was/is/will be used by white institutions that conjure conforming Black stereotypes.

I am commodified as palatable Blackness. Among a group of white women in the cover image, I smile, the happy slave: my affect signaling that I do not represent a threat to white male hierarchies. As Frantz Fanon explains on relations between Black men and white women, “the Negro is a savage, whereas the student is civilized” ([1952] 2008, 50). In a country where media often casts and recasts Black men as dangerous threats in specific relation to white women (and their sexualities), justifying notions of white supremacy though such essentialization (James 1996, 28; Kozol 1995, 658), the photographer and/or the magazine and/or the institution seem to communicate that I am just “one of the gang”—nah, not the Black kind. Note that the photograph chosen for the cover does not center or bookend my presence (as the one male and tallest body in the image) but attempts to create an M shape, fitting neatly within the arch and metaphorically within the college community. The picture positions my body as integrated within the shape of daily life here.

The Magazine’s second use of my image, situated (before all of the other notable alumni) along with the introduction to the cover story article “Tomorrow’s Stellar Alumni,” displays my body seated with both hands in clear view—again nonthreatening. My oversized shirt and tie are thrift store purchases.22 While smiling, as requested, my left hand clutches my knee, indicating my discomfort with being put on display—a quiet act of Black refusal (Campt 2017). The caption for the photograph reads “Louis Maraj / Poetry.” Yet, the college does not offer “Poetry” as a primary course of study. It erases the three majors I completed. Effectively, whether because of space constraints or otherwise—not because of ignorance—the caption essentializes my work as “Poetry.” I am both the exceptional Negro and the stereotypical poet/entertainer, an ontological all or nothing. Through the racialized minimization of my work, it becomes “the random droppings of birds” (Lorde 1990, xi), where the white academy diminishes Black scholarship, discounting it as “simply stories” (Royster 1996, 35). And while the article’s prose alongside does mark my credited majors, among other accomplishments, it describes these achievements with “his academic load would not tolerate delay” ([Staff] 2009, 8); the load itself becomes subject, the actor. The deep ecological fracture (in the wake) means—in relation to slaveness, to the concept “work for life”—“the body, as such, is not endowed with intrinsic meaning” (Mbembe 2017, 143): “his” carries only the possessive description of the load. The pristine greenery of the college campus together with the mirrored building in the background belie the complex realities of what engenders my Black im/migrant survival.

The accompanying article, however, with its chance to alleviate these omissions, does little to make up for them. I remember the journalist excited when their initial questions led them to learn details of my health problems while attending Liberal Arts. The success/progress narrative they craft from the interview characterizes the institution as the white savior that steps in to rescue, to give meaning, to the model minority. It begins by casting me as a fish outta water: “Louis Maraj had never stepped foot outside Trinidad and Tobago before venturing to the United States in 2005” ([Staff] 2009, 8). The article discusses the particulars of my health condition, giving intimate details of the help offered by a professor who assisted with the process that led to the removal of a life-threatening brain tumor. The account ends with a quote from me about the impact of a white male professor on my poetry writing, noting that with his “encouragement” I plan to attend graduate school (8). With a group of six interviewees, only one of whom identified as male, it is telling that the magazine chooses to present my image and narrative first. That choice, along with my tokenization as exceptional and exotic, and positioning with/in the histories of the institution’s name, demonstrates the deep ecological rhetorics of white capitalist heteropatriarchal educational institutions.

What’s more, the next narrative features the only other international student, beginning with a similar first line: She had “no cell phone, and no computer” ([Staff] 2009, 9). The exclusion of racial and gender dynamics—explicitly not pointed to in relation to the playing up of our pathetic nowhereness (“he doesn’t know where he is”; “she doesn’t have technology”)—contributes to a depiction of diversity and difference as “universal”; “each cultural group [here represented by individuated images and accounts] is deemed to be the same and equal precisely because they are all equally different” (Halualani 2011, 248; emphasis in original). The institution plays its “diversity cards” before all others, illustrating how “women (and people of color) need not expose their autobiography; the institution already projects its autobiographical scripts onto their visual selves” (Hesford 1999, 105). In such scripts, my image delivers to alumni, parents, and fellow students a notion of inclusivity via race and citizenship status; the attached caption provides a notion of the “unlearned” engaging in a “creative” racialized simplicity; and the account of my “success” pats the white institution, its appendages, and contributors on the back. The institution, indeed, advances.

Such re/presentation solidifies the idea that institutional diversity now “overwhelmingly [means] the inclusion of people who ‘look different’” (Puwar 2004, 1), demonstrating “how it can keep whiteness in place” (Ahmed 2012, 33). Further, the narrative in the article—“a form of affective conversion,” to use Ahmed’s term—and apposite photos attempt to discipline bad feelings and the unhappy objects associated with them into good feelings and happy objects (Ahmed 2010, 45) in the affective economy of the white institution. I remember another fracturing moment under the white gaze: being first confronted with a copy of the magazine by the mother of a white friend at a summer graduation party as she gushed, “look it’s you on the cover.” Her white daughter adds, “with your dreads and all.”

(Em)bodying Difference

I think about Trayvon Martin a lot—maybe too much. I think about what he means to whom and why. Perhaps it is because a child, because of his clothes, his skin color, and environment, because of his racializing assemblage, represented to a man some deviant problem. Weheliye contends that “the idea of racializing assemblages construes race not as a biological or cultural classification but as a set of sociopolitical processes that discipline humanity into full humans, not-quite-humans, and nonhumans” (2014, 4). I have sought, through poetry mostly, to consider, repeatedly, Du Bois’s thesis question “How does it feel to be a problem?” (1903) in relation to Martin. In Weheliye’s conception, this means “How does it feel to be not-quite-human or nonhuman?” (2014). Delving into that feeling, that fracture, “is to live in the no’s, to live in the no-space that the law is not bound to respect, to live in no citizenship” (Sharpe 2016, 16). In this section, I continue to probe those “no-spaces,” to ask these questions, that make racial difference within college campus environments. While reacting to the alleged “colorblindness” of US society during Obama’s presidency, the above poem arises from two particular incidents in 2015 and 2011. Both occurred in “off-campus” areas,23 in the Midwest and Texas, respectively, and demonstrate how I (em)body and affect certain notions of Blackness in particular environments.

The man to whom I dedicate this poem jumped me while walking home one night several summers ago. Through the poem, I follow Lorde’s call to “claim anger and to hear in anger a certain claim” (Ahmed 2012, 171). Like the Black feminist thinker, “my response to racism is anger. I have lived with that anger, ignoring it, feeding it, learning to use it” (Lorde 1984, 127). I return from a white male friend’s home after playing video games. As I continue up the street where I live, three Black youth run by me. They wear an assortment of shorts, T-shirts, and sneakers. In a college town, such scenes are commonplace late Saturday night, with bars buzzing, alcoholic energy quickly peaking. I distinctly know, from my own experiences, that responses “to Black males in common spaces, in public spaces, [send] powerful messages to [them] about how their presence is unwanted” (Brooms 2017, 100). I continue until I notice a white woman lying on the opposite curb, clutching her foot. I cross the street, wanting to be an ally, offering help. She groans. I prod, asking, “Are you okay?” I understand why a white woman, injured, lying on a curb at midnight, wants nothing to do with a strange Black man. Somewhat fortunately, another man—a white man—approaches and asks similar questions. I don’t possess language or reason without him. We begin to find out she twisted her ankle.

With my back to the street, I’m shoved forward. I spin to a bloodied, skinny, short white dude, who shouts, “Gimme my shit! You took my fucking shit!” I calmly explain that I don’t know what he’s talking about, but furiously he again pushes his stained hands, now, into my chest, still shouting about his “shit.” I am almost twice his size (not a big man, not a fighter, I don’t want to hurl able-bodied anger against a vulnerable, injured person). As he continues to aggravate me, the white man who stopped to help explains to the aggressor that I’m not who he wants: “I think they went that way.” The vigilante stares at me blankly, recognizing in those few seconds that he profiled, picked a fight with, and assaulted me, before crossing the street, screaming into oncoming Saturday-nighters, “They took my shit!”—his “they” still categorically criminalizing the Black men he encounters that night. As author/editorial writer Brent Staples explains, there’s “no solace against the kind of alienation that comes from ever being the suspect, against being set apart” ([1986] 2001, 565). I walk a couple blocks home, remove my sneakers, shorts, and T-shirt, now bloody.

Within the campus environment, such vigilante action might be expected with the prevalence of the MwSU Public Safety Department’s alerts via text messages, emails, and its website. These racialized “safety notices” give vague descriptions of Black men suspected of violent crimes, contributing to a vigilante culture that perpetuates antiBlackness. The spoken word piece in this chapter’s final section contains excerpts from one such alert.24 These announcements represent mechanisms by which white institutions criminalize Blackness and particularly Black males, placing us “under increased surveillance and control by community policing tactics on and off campus,” rendering us “‘out of place’ . . . ‘fitting the description’ of illegitimate members of the campus community” (W. A. Smith, Allen, and Danley 2007, 562). In the temporal fracture in these deep ecologies, they conjure “the surveillance technology of the runaway slave advertisement,” which “through their detailing of physical descriptions,” “make the already hypervisible racial subject legible” as indeed “out of place” (S. Browne 2015, 54). The historically white institution’s policies, which reflect the systemically in-built ideologies of most all US institutions, prompt affective responses from both Black males (paranoia, alienation, anger) and other members of on-/off-campus college communities about them. As sociologist Derrick Brooms highlights, fear of Black males in college environments aligns with how they are historically scripted (2017, 100). This narrative illustrates how embodying Blackness with/in these deep ecologies means wrestling with temporal/spatial affects produced by oppressive institutional forces, as well as through gender performance.

The following night, another eye-opening, fracturing incident speaks directly to individual behaviors that oppressive institutional environments birth (and vice versa), which undoubtedly feed into personal prejudices, a “most insidious danger” (Brooms 2017, 100). I go to a bar with the same white colleague from the night before to recuperate from my previous experience. At 2 a.m., while he smokes and chats up a white woman, a bottle breaks amidst a small crowd across the street near another bar’s patio. I step away briefly to use the bathroom and return to him on the phone. “White, Black, or Hispanic?” the other end asks—I could hear. “Black,” he says. “Why would you call the cops? Why would you say they are Black?” He looks at me as most white folk do when confronted with ghosts of slavery and Jim Crow. Here lies a limit of Black-white “friendship,” “directly influenced by concerns about ethics and law” (Mbembe 2017, 74). Within sixty seconds, cops roll up. From the other side of the street, flanked by the man responsible for their presence, I see a white officer yell at, grab, and frisk a Black man walking by the nearby CVS. I see myself there, walking by that CVS as I hop off the bus daily. I recognize the disconnect that academia doesn’t want me to. These particular acts of seeing—in eye contact with this colleague, with the previous night’s vigilante, in living the distance between one side of the street and another—alert me to Du Bois’s (1903) “Veil” mentioned throughout Souls. These fractures make visible the color line that institutional white supremacy and colorblind policies and ideology invite us to ignore. They reveal the shaping of racialized, gendered, nationalized, dis/abled notions of material identities inherent in US institutions that play into the re/active (per)forming of these identities.

I specifically choose off-campus interactions that push institutionalization up against identity to foreground how the Black graduate scholar engages with kairotic spaces not seen in classrooms, conference presentations, or professionalization workshops. As sociologists indicate, Black male students in “campus-academic,” “campus-social,” and “campus-public” spaces routinely face microaggressions causing “racial battle fatigue (e.g., frustration, shock, anger, disappointment, resentment, anxiety, helplessness, hopelessness, and fear)” (W. A. Smith, Allen, and Danley. 2007, 551). But, as public health scholars David R. Williams, Harold W. Neighbors, and James S. Jackson illustrate, we also experience macrostressors or racial macroagressions (2008). These traumas elicit the above range of affective responses that pile together, fashioning Blackness with/in and out/side of being.

Imagine a physical classroom where, as a student, you never meet five of the six assessors of your writing. They will evaluate through an online mechanism to which you submit your work, only knowing you through electronic documents. They do not know your name, what you look or sound like, when they open submissions. Unlike a strictly online course, your material identities matter within the classroom space to your instructor but play little role in how meanings you produce might be “valued” (through grading) by the neoliberal university. While a graduate student/instructor in Texas, I teach for this program that removes student identifiers from submitted assignments. When not teaching a syllabus, texts, assignments, and rubrics standardized across all sections of this first-year writing course, I “document instruct”: I grade online from a pile of work, unmarked.26 Identical guidelines and material across all course sections ensure that my lived identities as an instructor, like my students’, matter minimally in assessing the information I deliver. In this colorblind institutional backdrop, I fall victim to racial profiling and police brutality, demonstrating how I am both “misrecognized as someone who committed a crime” while also “criminalized” through my Black im/migrant identities in being “prevented from being law-abiding” in social death (Cacho 2012, 4).

On the first day of Spring Break 2011, I return with two white coworkers from a music festival to my home at 9 p.m. I left the house at 2 p.m., with my roommate (a white woman from Dallas) away, so the porch lights remain off. I fumble my keys in the dark. I use my phone’s backlight to identify the right one and get inside. Sitting in the living room, loudly watching television, a bang interrupts casual conversation.

(Pause.)

Another bang. “Police!”

We exchange frantic glances.

Another bang. “Open this door!”

My colleague Ben shouts, “No!”

I’m taken aback, but Ben knows that they need a warrant for intrusion.

I don’t.

Another bang. “Open this fucking door right now!”

When Ben shouts, “No! What’s the problem?!,” the cop “explains,” “I will kick in this door if I have to!” Reece relents. He opens to a hand, shoved, that yanks him out beyond eye-shot. Ben, closest to the door, gets ripped out next. I walk to it, and, by the hand, am raffed,27 cuffed, face-slammed onto the concrete porch.

They check IDs. “I live here!” The white male cop takes my passport out my back pocket. I cut my dreads when I went for my new visa photo. My regrown dreads couch my face from the ground. The passport, I suppose, seems sketch. In the barrage of questions, Ben asks, “Why is there a dog here?” “To bite your ass!” the white woman cop snaps. Still cuffed, I am dragged by the white male officer through my living room. He asks about my roommate. Her framed pictures stare back at me, an indictment. This is a nice white lady’s home. The cop shoves me through each room, asks to see my mine, surveys my papers and poems: “You go by ‘Lou’?”

He takes me back to the porch, sets me back on my face and stomach.

They chat.

I panic.

I don’t understand what’s happening. I rock back and forth screaming, “Help!” “Please!” “Why?!” The cops panic.

Ben asks, “Can we tell him to shut the fuck up?”

“Yes.”

“Lou! Shut the fuck up!”

Eventually, they uncuff Reece. He again explains that all we did was go to a concert and come home. I live there. We ask for their names. They say only, “Next time, open the door when we fucking say to!” I eat my porch. I am humiliated. No record exists of the near-half-hour incident. All they offer at the station is a mostly blank sheet indicating a call was made: three men; one with a light, opening the door; my body, profiled, suspect. Blackness, im/migrantness, fracture/mean violently. It means no home nowhere, not even in a body. The rationale given by the cop I complain to later on the phone: I would want the law to treat an intruder the way I was treated. They need to be brutal because the situation demands it. I, myself, ask to be brutalized.

(Per)forming Difference

In “asking” to be brutalized, in ecologically materializing “suspect,” I succumb to what Ahmed calls “a life paradox: you have to become what you are judged as being” in representing difference (2012, 186). Like my clash with T over our material-discursive relationships with “nigga,” (em)bodying and (per)forming racially precarious rhetorics (above, through dreadlocks, my im/migrant identity, etc.) means being rendered non-law-abiding, an object. In this section, I continue exhibiting this bind of object-being, which does diversity work for educational institutions that sustains dominant whiteness (33)—labor built into US socioeconomic infrastructures for Blackness. I break completely from formal critical conversation, concluding only with a spoken word dedication to T.

Such a conclusion aims to facilitate (autoethnographic) scholarship in rhetoric/communication, writing, and literacy studies that encourages, as Lorde consistently does, knowledge-producers to take into account how “even the form our creativity takes” operates within oppressive matrixes. We must welcome work “which requires the least physical labor, the least material” (1984, 116). In continuing the griot-as-scholar methodology, this study opens up what counts as valid knowledge-creation, situated within the complex systematic positions that Black folk occupy. I call on autoethnographers and nonautoethnographers “to consider the accessibility of their texts . . . asking what value or benefit our work might have for our participants and readers, as well as ourselves” (Adams, Holman Jones, and Ellis 2015, 44).

This creatively critical inquiry into my Blackness as an able-bodied Black im/migrant male graduate student/instructor adds to Kynard’s demand via LaNita Jacobs-Huey (2002). I mobilize what the latter describes as “‘gazing and talking back’ in ways that explicitly interrogate the daily operation of white supremacy in our field and on our campuses rather than more performances of psychologically-internalized black pain for the white gaze” (Kynard 2015, 14; emphasis in original). It offers Black autoethnography as rhetorical means for potential antiracism. This chapter enacts that clap back in object-being, a fracture in multiple ecologies, building on a tradition of resistant storytelling struggling for potentials to liberate our work, language, and daily material realities.