This PhD Will Not Save You
From pressed loose leaf, the back of postcards, crumpled napkins, and post it notes, to blank computer paper and sketchpads, writing feels like paradise. In that space, it is just me and my voice. In college libraries, I would run my fingers across the worn spines of Toni Morrison, Anna Julia Cooper, and Jhumpa Lahiri texts; I imagined what The Fire Next Time could look like and day dreamed about The Temple of My Familiar. I found comfort in chronicling the threads of my thoughts and learned to stretch across those dog-eared copies of feminist literature to look within, and toy with the idea of perhaps, one day, being free. In these moments, Black and Brown women were deified beings – their labor the metaphorical bridge towards my personal liberation. When the revolution comes, prolific Feminist Freedom Warriors felt like the only people capable of leading real change. I was not ready yet. I needed more time. More instructions. More education; in fact, I needed a Ph.D. before I could partake in the type of change I so desired. With these tools, I would be able to bridge my feminist imagination and my geopolitical realities. Then, I would be ready.
In this first year of this doctoral journey, I fervently turned towards academia and began the search for answers for the world's ills and my own questions of survival. Entrenched in theory, conceptual frameworks, ontological questions and epistemological challenges, my frustrations intensified. Intellectually, I could make sense, Audre Lorde told me that my silence will not protect me. Words of Fire enveloped my breath and I knew that the possessive investment in misogynoir inveigled itself in the spines of communities of color. Decolonization can take place when collective agency is prioritized over the comfort of the oppressor. I wrote about Jamaica Kincaid’s denigration of “human rubbish” and smirked when critiquing the colonial nostalgia evident in these assigned readings.
For months, I delved into my imagined paradise, nestled firmly in the academy's ivory tower. I wrote, I edited, I underlined Gloria Anzaldúa’s words on the Left-handed world and willed the right answers to flow from my pen and onto the page. The space between my feminist imagination and reality felt strained and stagnant.
A return to literature afforded an array of resources that emanated a sense of knowing. I was sure, that these Black and Brown women had the answers. They did the work and would, through their prose, tell me exactly what to do. I thumbed across pages of Feminism Without Borders and tried to understand the complex glides and fricatives of Scattered Hegemonies. I nursed cups of coffee in office hours with my favorite professor and wondered, alongside Gayatri Spivak, if the subaltern could speak. I impatiently read, reread, and listened hoping I'd find the tools to feel ready, to grasp the solutions I knew lay in these courses. I sat in classrooms and echoed the words of the activists I loved and traded my ideas on the struggle for illustrative stanzas that inspired me to hope for a better tomorrow. For months I looked outward on the landscape of a romanticized academy, certain this PhD would make me feel ready.
But what piece of paper can prepare you for the revolution? No accumulation of assigned readings, grade point averages, and classroom discussions can prepare you for navigating this world when you are a nobody in the eyes of the State. My perfect articulation of neoliberal multiculturalism means nothing when waiters seat White customers ahead of me, pretending not to see me in restaurant entryways. I can't recite Lucille Clifton when cisgender men interrupt and talk over me in class, or brandish my 4.0 when I'm handcuffed in the Albany airport for forgetting the cat shaped brass knuckles I carry when walking alone in dim parking lots at the bottom of my gym bag.
This PhD will not protect me. More formal education will not prepare me for the risk and uncertainty of advocating for myself. My framed diplomas mean nothing when your feet can't find balance between being invisible and a token in a classroom It will not allow me to link arms with my privileged counterparts and relish the harmony of respect and affirmation the diploma seems to promise. Holding on to this degree does not make me feel less alone.
In these last months, I am trying to reclaim the space between pen and paper. To flatten the here/there and the past/present/future so that I may weaponize the alternative knowledges that threaten the academy. In bridging my feminist imagination and reality, I return to the Black and Brown scholars, poets, activists and friends to inspire my actualization of what I know and what I am willing to unlearn. I now know this accumulation of knowledge cannot compare to the ideas, skills, and intellectual weapons I cultivated outside of the academy.
As I look inward inward, what were the tools and strategies I deemed nonacademic - the pieces of myself I pushed away, hidden in my own feminist imagination? What have I forgotten because I did not learn it in a classroom? Why do I no longer resist if I won't receive a grade at the end? What am I losing in pursuit of this degree? Who am I without these credentials?
These questions inform my reflections on what one year as a doctoral student means to me. Years ago, I daydreamed about donning those (expensive) doctoral robes and finally feeling prepared, but this year was a conscious choice to unlearn. Unlearn my trust in the academy's promise of safety and accepting that a degree merely entails trading one vehicle of oppression for another. What the academy does is asks us to choose how it will kill us - which courses will replace what I already know? which grade letters will teach me to be ashamed of where I am from? how to swallow my tongue and become a caricature of the diversity statistic they'll celebrate on the official website. The academy will make me complicit in my own erasure.
As I bridge my imagined paradise with this tangible reality, writing brings me back to myself - it is just me and my voice. Defending this dissertation will mean defending my position in the shadow of the academy's ivory tower. But that does not mean that is where I belong.
