
Who Is Zooming Who? Rituals of Shame in the White Academic Institution
Who Is Zooming Who? Rituals of Shame in the White Academic Institution
An elite white academic institution in California has convened a virtual workshop on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) for a cohort of humanities faculty. The DEI workshop is facilitated by a consulting firm. Colleagues CS and Etambuyu are faculty and long-time collaborators. They are co-editing a book anthology on shaming rituals for Black women academics. They are finalizing the book proposal through Direct Messaging during the DEI workshop and, at the same time, participating in the DEI workshop.
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9:05:42
From DEI-PC-002 to Everyone:
For those who came in late, please click on the link. It’s in the email I sent last night. We are reading the poem “Please, Don’t Touch my Hair Again.” Read it in silence. Respond to the questions at the end of the poem. Post your responses on the Jamboard, use the pink Post-its. I’ll give you fifteen minutes for that, then we can move onto the everyday microaggressions survey — the survey takes about ten minutes.
9:05:44
From CS Mibenge to Everyone:
Can we use the yellow Post-its?
9:05:59
From DEI-PC-002 to Everyone:
Of course! Use any color you like.
We are reading the poem 'Please, Don’t Touch my Hair Again.' Read it in silence.
9:06:01
From Etambuyu to CS Mibenge (Direct Message):
You are so childish.
9:07:31
From CS Mibenge to Etambuyu (Direct Message):
Thank you. Yeah. So, I’m on page 6. Part one introduces the idea of shame as cracking the whip on a girl’s back. We have the vignette: a mother discovers condoms in her daughter’s backpack and assumes correctly that her daughter is in a sexual relationship with her boyfriend. That evening after class, the daughter, a college senior, calls her mother to let her know that she will be home late because she needs to stay behind for a tutorial with her professor. Her mother responds, you can sleep in a ditch for all we care, you are already ruined.
9:08:35
From Etambuyu to CS Mibenge (Direct Message):
That’s a heartbreaker. OK, shaming within the community affirms a girl’s suspicions that she is impure and contaminating.
9:09:03
From CS Mibenge to Etambuyu (Direct Message):
Ana and Akosua’s chapter one captures slut-shaming, fat-shaming, body-shaming, and period-shaming as some of the most effective ways to thrash a girl. We sniff our underarms, our extensions, our underwear. We are alarmed by musk, discharge, clots, yeast, mucus, all evidence of our filth; and the battle with shame is lost.
9:11:00
From Etambuyu to CS Mibenge (Direct Message):
That is a killer first sentence. But let’s keep this internalization of shame section short. Everyone knows this stuff. Press your thighs and ankles together. Stop talking. Don’t give Akosua more than the introduction and chapter one. OK?
Can we leave out sexual harassment altogether?
9:12:15
From CS Mibenge to Etambuyu (Direct Message):
In chapter one, they also draw attention to the moment girls adopt and fine-tune the language of shame to accuse ourselves and other girls of unworthiness. What we learned about ourselves when we started to take down other girls. There’s some power and agency in there too. That’s the bridge to the Black woman professor stuff.
9:13:55
From CS Mibenge to Etambuyu (Direct Message):
Part two moves us out of the house and into public life, the world of work, the academy. Can we leave out sexual harassment altogether?
9:15:02
From Etambuyu to CS Mibenge (Direct Message):
No. We need to acknowledge the ILO Convention on sexual harassment — it’s fresh, promising. I was looking forward to developing that chapter. I’m interviewing a classmate, she was expelled for exchanging sex for grades with a Tort prof at the University of Zambia. Her parents sued the school. That was twenty years ago. She’s a law professor in Florida now.
9:17:19
From CS Mibenge to Etambuyu (Direct Message):
Yeah. It’s been done to death and not very well. ME TOO ME TOO. Keep it. Good for her. I’m thinking about a chapter on all the LinkedIn alerts people keep sending me for VP Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion jobs.
9:18:08
Etambuyu to CS Mibenge (Direct Message):
It’s good money. You could go corporate. You’d actually be good at it. As good as our Sister Poet here, anyway.
To teach white people how to gaslight us? Yeah. I would be good at it.
9:18:11
From DEI-PC-002 to Everyone:
A reminder, the survey is completely anonymous and can’t be traced back to you. I just emailed you all the link to the survey.
9:20:42
From CS Mibenge to Etambuyu (Direct Message):
Oh please. I lived in student housing until I was 35 years old, for what? To teach white people how to gaslight us? Yeah. I would be good at it. But I’ve been subjected to too many diversity training programs mandated by a white supremacist cisgender male Dean, Provost, Chair. Don’t blame our Sister. She’s smart enough, three or four advanced degrees, but keeps getting shoved off the tenure track. Maybe I should interview her. Have you noticed, the D-I-E trainers are always Black?
9:21:40
From CS Mibenge to Etambuyu (Direct Message):
It’s almost like being a dominatrix. They all use this weird caressing tone of voice when they say white supremacy, white genocide, white fragility, white tears, imposter syndrome, and George Floyd.
9:22:02
From Etambuyu to CS Mibenge (Direct Message):
OK. D-I-E trainers are giving our white colleagues a hard on. Diversity training as a metaphor for #wm4bw S&M. Wow. That’s your chapter?
9:23:12
From CS Mibenge to Etambuyu (Direct Message):
Yeah. White people look like they’ve been sitting in a sweat lodge — they are aglow when they come out of training. Intersectionality this, intersectionality that, #Kimberlégurrl. Watching the trainer crack that whip, I leave the room feeling so ashamed and used.
Who taught us those jokes? We couldn’t make them up. The same grown-ups — Apartheid survivors — that renamed David Livingstone Avenue to Independence Avenue.
9:24:04
From Etambuyu to CSM Mibenge (Direct Message):
Like the sticky handkerchief.
9:24:50
From CS Mibenge to Etambuyu (Direct Message):
More like I was forced to spy on a golden retriever fucking a Jack Russell.
9:25:17
From Etambuyu to CS Mibenge (Direct Message):
Dog porn action. Is the Jack Russell white or Black? Two dogs fucking. OK, why am I laughing?
9:25:56
From CS Mibenge to Etambuyu (Direct Message):
Remember, that was the punchline to a joke about indigenous names we told each other in middle school. We were the natives. All of the jokes were racist or misogynistic. There were Maasai, Bemba, Kikuyu, Bangra jokes.
9:26:11
From Etambuyu to CS Mibenge (Direct Message):
And Irish — the British made them Black too. Irish jokes actually made me racist against Irish. I never met one until the children’s rights conference in Galway. And they hate Brits even more than we do. Amazing. Very good hosts. Who taught us those jokes? We couldn’t make them up. The same grown-ups — Apartheid survivors — that renamed David Livingstone Avenue to Independence Avenue.
And the white girls, the Kenya Cowgirls at boarding school, their parents taught them and then they taught us.
9:27:10
From CS Mibenge to Etambuyu (Direct Message):
No. It wasn’t my parents. It was my teachers — they were all white until I went to Uni. And the white girls, the Kenya Cowgirls at boarding school, their parents taught them and then they taught us.
9:28:59
From Etambuyu to CS Mibenge (Direct Message):
Wow.
9:29:27
From CS Mibenge to Etambuyu (Direct Message):
Yeah. So, that’s my first chapter, the contemporary institutionalized rituals through which the layers of shame are really dumped on Black woman scholars’ bodies. My second contribution will trash the Executive Leadership programs for Black women on the NBA syllabus
9:29:45
From CS Mibenge to Etambuyu (Direct Message):
*MBA
9:30:10
From Etambuyu to CS Mibenge (Direct Message):
Ha ha! Sounds like we are in business.
9:30:11
From CS Mibenge to Etambuyu (Direct Message):
I emailed us the shared doc — we each have editor status, they have the introduction and chapter one. We have our final writing meet-up on Friday night.
9:34:01
From DEI-PC-002 to Everyone:
Use the raised hand emoji when you finish the survey. We’ll start with the poem once all your hands are up. Another minute or two.
9:34:11
From CS Mibenge to Etambuyu:
I am done.
9:34:11
From CS Mibenge to Everyone:
Friends, my connection is bad today. If I cut off suddenly …
9:48:52
From Etambuyu to CS Mibenge (Direct Message):
Smooth smooth criminal
9:51:59
From Etambuyu to Everyone:
CS seems to have dropped off the call — it is raining heavily in Boston. Connectivity problems. Are we recording this?
CHISECHE SALOME MIBENGE
Chiseche Salome Mibenge is the author of Sex and International Tribunals: The Erasure of Gender from the War Narrative (Penn Press) and a co-editor of the book series Human Rights Interventions (Palgrave MacMillan). She is part of the editorial board for the Netherlands Quarterly of Human Rights and the Journal of Human Trafficking, Enslavement and Conflict-Related Sexual Violence. Her short story “The Protected Party” was the winner of the Columbia Journal’s 2016 Winter Contest for creative nonfiction (judged by Eula Biss), and her story “Mortal Combat” was recently published in the maiden issue of Jeffery Renard Allen’s literary magazine Taint Taint Taint. She is a human rights educator and has taught at Stanford University and the City University of New York. Chiseche is working remotely, alternating between her two hometowns, the Bronx and Lusaka.
nanya jhingran
nanya jhingran (she/they) is a poet, scholar, and teacher from Lucknow, India, currently living by the coastal margin of the Salish Sea, on the unceded lands of the Coast Salish People (upon which the city of Seattle was built). She is a PhD candidate in Literature and Culture, an MFA candidate in poetry, and a Teaching Assistant in American Ethnic Studies at the University of Washington, Seattle.
Artist Statement:
My art is driven by a commitment to how places make people and more specifically, how the city is always making who lives in it — even when the skyline is littered with cranes that seem to disassemble and reassemble both place and sky. Using language and image as my medium, I hope to restore that livingness of place and material which insistently shapes our experience of the present, which flows in excess of and disorganizes settler, capitalist-colonialist projects of making space as fungible resource.