Race

I wrote the following notes in response to a few different resources I engaged with at the same time: Christina Sharpe’s book Ordinary Notes (2023); PGcert IP seminars and resources (particularly ‘Rentention and attainment in the disciplines: Art and Design’, by Finegan and Richards, on the attainment gap between black and white students; Josephine Kwhali’s critique of ‘unconscious bias’ for UCU; the ‘Key Data’ in Shades of Noir’s ‘Terms of Reference’ on Race; as well as my experience as a black lecturer and student. I re-worked this writing as a performative reading which I performed at a public launch Sharpe did for her book at CSM on Tuesday 6th June 2023.

In Note 195, Professor Sharpe talks about a gesture that she starts to make during her time in graduate school. She writes: ‘As I talked, my hands would move to my throat, my thumbs meeting at my larynx, my eight fingers touching behind my neck… I was strangling words before they even left my throat.’ She realises that she started to develop the gesture after a series of events as a student in which her tutors tried to make her feel like she didn’t belong. She writes that it took months of vigilance to undo the gesture completely.

Sharpe’s description causes me to attend to one of my own gestures. When I feel anxious – which first manifests for me as shortness of breath – I unconsciously put my hand to the left-side of my chest and hold it there. I first understood this as me fielding a blow to my chest from the outside, like I’m trying to stem an imaginary flow of blood. At some point I figured it must look to others like I’m making a pledge – hand on my heart. And in a way, I’m doing both things: as I become more wholly accepting of my self – I realise the gesture serves to connect me with the feeling of my heart pumping blood around my body – and also sets into motion a pledge I make to myself to remain present in the room – to breathe.

I’m most moved by the bit in Professor Sharpe’s book where she lists various definitions of ‘life’ – each written with blackness as its centre. It’s both a deeply personal question and one that Black people have struggled and experimented with throughout history. Sharpe reminds us of the question ‘Can I live?’ which Saidiya Hartman imagines being asked by those who first experimented with what it might mean to live as a free, black girl. This reminds me of Whitney Houston’s snap back: ‘Can I be me?’. It reminds me of a letter that, Jamaican broadcaster Una Marson, wrote to her former employer, the BBC, in the 1940s: ‘I hope you remember a girl by the name of Una Marson, She is still alive’. Sharpe notes other iterations of this question: “What the fuck. Can I live? Can I live? Can I fucking live?” and ‘How Can I Lose?’  and ‘Do you feel safe?’

I’m writing this imagining I’m reading it in the the university, specifically the one where I’m employed and which I rely on for my livelihood. I start to get anxious about really really considering a question so personal as ‘can I live?’, within a professional setting. My hand goes automatically to my heart. Why does it feel taboo to talk honestly about black life (and by extension death) in the university? For all the talk about ‘diversity’ and ‘decolonising the university’ and utterances of ‘Black Lives Matter’, it feels personally risky to really talk about life and death of the Black girl in uni.

This reminds me of the thing in Prof Sharpe’s work that first inspired me when I was doing my masters: she doesn’t hide how the personal comes into, no is the bedrock of Black studies as an ‘academic’ field. It cannot be abstracted.

For three years I have worked in the Performance department. In my practice, I think about the roles we perform. When I think about considering, really considering the question ‘Can I live?’ in the context of a university, I think of Black students I’ve encountered. In this elite university, as in many elite universities in the UK, these are the minority. Many struggle with getting their deeply felt ideas understood by their peers, are subject to overtly harsh critique, isolated from their peers and tutors, struggling to make friends, find collaborators. ‘Attendance’, in all its meanings, is difficult.

These experiences remind me of my own experience as an undergraduate elsewhere. Where I tried to make friends, to communicate my ideas, campaign, organise, but by my final year I was so stressed about my academic and social situation that the fear that people were looking at me confined me to my bedroom. This fear left me unable to physically submit my work. It would be white to say this was paranoia. But of course, people were looking at me, in the ways people often do, when there is only one black girl in a class of 30 or a college of 1500.

According to the university workers unions, in UK university sector there is a 19% pay gap between black and white employees. Black lecturers are often on insecure contracts. Most black people I regularly encounter in the university are cleaners or security on insecure contracts. Sometimes white students complain that they can’t relate to the content I teach.

I did get out of my undergrad room, with the help of a professor who offered to come and help me carry my portfolio. The thought of him turning up at my door embarrassed me so much that I quickly mobilised – it literally moved me. This was one small chapter of my ongoing experiment in living. And black students here do attend: work hard, make friends, submit portfolios, make art, articulate the most fantastic dissertations, continue their still radical experiment of being free and black in a UK university. I see you and in the words of Sharpe, I hold you in deep regard. 

I want to thank Christina for her work, particularly for the friends I’ve be able to make through an engagement with the hard or difficult discussions and dreams that your work holds space for.