Doing the Work, part four: a trauma-informed politics for academia

I am no longer on twitter a lot, but sometimes things I want to say emerge as though I am. Here’s something that began as a tweet-essay and bears its hallmarks. Pretend this is on twitter, if you like.

I find this essay by @OlufemiOTaiwo really interesting and important (h/t @dynamicecology).

I’ve only recently begun understanding standpoints in relation to myself and my work. The key thing to hold, I gather, is that standpoints derive not from oppression itself but from the political resistance to oppression. Táíwò’s essay discusses how this difference has been elided in practice, and how this elision is damaging.

Especially in light of trauma, the damage caused by conflating oppression and resistance to it rings very true to me. In traumatic conditions, we do what we need to do in order to stay safe. Of course this will often imply aligning with hegemonies. The power I have accrued has come from aligning with hegemonies—of caste, class, the ivory tower. It was the security that came from accruing this power that eventually positioned me to heal from the trauma of my childhood in a verbally abusive and emotionally neglectful home. When I consider why my parents were the way they were, and their parents before them, it is deeply entangled with alliance to hegemonies within systems of oppression.

Experiencing trauma was not inherently freeing for me–it was the opposite. For me, freedom has lain in my healing from trauma and in the resistance to hegemonies that derive from and perpetuate conditions of trauma.

The truly transformative standpoints I have access to now have come from healing from my trauma and starting to resist the specifc hegemonic alliances in which I sought shelter from trauma—through feminist thought and action, community building, organizing and collective action, spirituality, and the work of healing.

Yet, I’m in the position of deriving continued power from my hegemonic alliances, and I don’t actually think it should be this way. The question then is, what do I (we) do about this? Anything I (we) do needs to involve giving up power. How, and how best, do I (we) build?

What Táíwò’s essay gets at, accurately I believe, is that in places of power such as academia now, we want people who symbolize to us a history of oppression and trauma (which may or may not align with actual experience), and maybe we even want even academic work emerging from standpoints that resist that oppression. But do we want actual change in the conditions that bring about trauma and oppression, given that such change will mean giving up power?

I don’t really know if we do. I’m not the arbiter of that. What I do know is that during one of my job interviews for a position ostensibly focused on diversity, equity, and inclusion, I was told quite explicitly that what mattered to them was not different thought or different work, but a name with differently arranged syllables and, just maybe, a face of a different color. It is not hard for me to guess that I was interviewed for this position because of my alliances with hegemonies combined with the veneer of my name, gender, and skin color, and not the work of change that I have done and am learning to do, not the work that derives from my standpoints resisting the very hegemonic alliances that make me palatable.

But if we recognize that the work ahead of us is dismantling the very systems that bring some of us power and yet keep all of us trapped in trauma, if we recognize that collective liberation lies in the redistribution of power, if we decide that we want to work to build an academia that is accountable in some true way, the question then becomes—individually, for each of us, and collectively—what are the right loci of action? That’s something I’m wrestling with these days, and I don’t yet know my answer.

What I do know is this. I’m here, my path here was both straightforward and complicated depending on the lens you look through, and my goal now is human liberation.

(This is part four of a series on what it means to do the work of culture change. Here are parts one, two, and three).