This story is mostly true. Except for the part where I am brave and resilient all of the time. or The One About Naima and Jimmy

Dear Readers,

This story was originally written for and shared with my students in an African-American art and literature class on November 9, 2016 - The day after Donal Trump was elected President of the United States. Some of the names and dates are muddled from memory, but the story is mostly true. Except for the part where I am brave and resilient all of the time. 

I was born in a college town in Connecticut in 1979. My father was a music professor and my mother did taxes for non-profits and helped run the town’s WIC program. We were pretty good at pretending to be middle class, but it wasn’t always easy to do.

For one thing, the public school that I attended decided that despite my off the charts test scores and capacity to read at a 5th grade level at the age of 7, I should be placed in the “slow” class. My parents showed the principal what a couple of uppity Mississippi and South Trenton niggas could do when their baby got messed with, and I got moved to a different class. The teachers showed us what they could do to the child of said uppity niggas, and proceeded to make my life miserable for the majority of my 1st grade year. My parents pulled me out of that school a few weeks into the 2nd grade, and sent me to a private one on the other side of town, paid for with credit union loans and secretly scrambling each month to keep the household afloat. 

When I began my tenure at The Independent Day School I was the lone black child in my class of thirteen students. Christy and Melissa were the only other girls in the class and they rarely spoke to me other than to express their distaste about my hair and clothes. The boys were practicing daily domination; constantly disappearing to the bathroom to compare the size and shape of their genitals and punching Christy and Melissa in the arms on the lunch line. I was grateful to be invisible to them (for the time being) and I got very good at spending time alone with books. In truth, this had been my favorite pass-time since the moment I’d learned to read at age 4. Being in school taught me that if I was going to learn anything useful, I would need to get very good at reading anything and everything that I could get my hands on because few of the white women in charge of my education had much to offer me. 

There were some genuinely wonderful things about the Independent Day School. The school was situated on several acres of forest and wetlands that we were encouraged to explore. Our teachers regularly took us on walks to the frog pond or to pet the sheep at the neighboring farm, and I was allowed to disappear onto the hill behind the soccer field with whatever book I was absorbed in during recess. During the winter months, when ice and snow covered the entire bucolic New England landscape, the recess hour was lengthened to 90 minutes and we brought sleds and cafeteria trays out to the hill behind the gym so that we could slide screaming and giggling down the hill, and then haul ourselves back up the hill, and back down again, and back up again, and back down again, over and over until we were filthy, soaked and exhausted. 

By the 3rd grade I made a few friends. Danielle was a hyperactive black girl two years my senior whose mother, Krishna, worked with my father at the college. Krishna was white and had no idea what to do with her daughter’s hair, so Danielle came to our house so my mother or older sister could put her hair in neat box braids and oil her scalp. Danielle and I joined the Girl Scouts together, and we made up a Witchcraft Badge based on the books on the subject that we’d begun reading on the bus that carried us from school to the troop leader’s house. Once, while we were engulfed in our reading and scheming, two boys tried to set Danielle’s hair on fire, which she put a stop to by screaming at the top of her lungs while I punched one of the boys in the jaw. He responded by telling us niggers to go back to Africa. In shock and holding back tears, I gave him a brief and disorganized lecture on the trans atlantic slave trade. I got sent to the vice principal’s office for fighting, and Danielle and I began furiously researching spells to cause permanent diarrhea. 

The third grade was also the year that our class was tasked with doing a presentation before the entire school on an important figure from Connecticut History. Our assignment was to choose someone we found interesting, do research on their life, dress up in their likeness and speak in their voices in front of the 100 or so other children and teachers in the school. I was distraught by this task, finding it difficult to connect with any of the people we’d learned about. Should I research John Davenport, Puritan minister and founder of the Connecticut Colony? Or perhaps  Eli Whitney, inventor of the Cotton Gin? Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, had high marks in the mind of my teacher who really wanted to encourage my interest in African-American culture and history. Fortunately for me, I had the help of my parents who, in their infinite wisdom, gifted me a book by James Baldwin earlier that year. It was called “Little Man, Little Man: A Story of Childhood.”

This book tells the story of TJ. The opening line is “Music all up and down this street, TJ runs it every day.” TJ spends time with his friends and neighbors; Ms. Honey, Mr. Man, Blinky, and WT. The story meanders through his daily experiences of life as a young black man growing up in Harlem. The kinetically expressive watercolor illustrations in the book mesmerized me as much as the story, and Little Man, Little Man became a permanent fixture in my bookbag for several months. This young man’s life was very different from mine, but he was also so familiar to me. TJ could have been my father or one of cousins, or even my older sister before my parents moved on up out of Atlantic Avenue, in Brooklyn, NY to Hunting Hill Avenue in Middletown, Connecticut. In one passage, TJ witnessed his friend WT beating his older brother in a rage and TJ notices that “his brother just make sounds and spit coming out his mouth and running down his chin and his eyes roll up and he move just like them plants TJ saw under the water, just back and forth and back and forth like that, just like them plants TJ saw way at the bottom of the water that time when they went to Jones Beach and his Daddy carried TJ out in the water on his back.” 

In his fear and sadness, TJ transported himself to another time and place, and shaped what he saw into something manageable and beautiful. He made sense of the violence around him through his imagination; through his capacity to allow his mind to rescue him from a present that was too much for a child to bear. As an adult I’ve learned very useful clinical concepts like “dissociation” and “complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder,” but as a child, James Baldwin and TJ helped me feel less alone.

I was eight years old, and in the third grade at the Independent Day School in 1987, the year that James Baldwin died, in late November. On December 20, 1987 William Styron wrote an essay honoring Baldwin for the New York Times. In this piece he discussed the importance of Baldwin’s legacy, and he credits Baldwin with teaching him difficult truths about the ongoing impact of slavery and racism in America. He also noted that he had the pleasure of spending a summer with Baldwin in Connecticut in 1960, when Styron offered his fellow author the cabin behind his home for an extended writing retreat while he worked on his novel “Another Country” and on notes for the essay that would become “The Fire Next Time.” 1987 was also the year that the first panel of the AIDS quilt came to the campus of the college where my father worked. I remember seeing it displayed in the library, and I remember thinking that the stickers around town with the pink triangles on them said “Science=Death” (which made sense to me, since I hated my science teacher) but having my sister explain that it actually said “Silence=Death.” I remember late night conversations about our local chapter of Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition, and I remember my mother arguing with our neighbors who thought that having a soup kitchen downtown would attract “a bad element.” I remember that my white friends at school were terrified of New York, but I was mad at my parents for not raising me there because when we visited I got to spend time with all of their interesting artist and writer and musician friends. I recently asked one of those friends, a black gay man in his 50s who still lives in New York, what he remembers about that time and he said “we were always going to marches and funerals and marches and funerals.” Marches and funerals and fighting and mourning and fucking up and starting over and trying again and also celebrating and dancing and dreaming and of course loving and loving and loving.

In the weeks leading up to my Connecticut History Presentation, I had been pestering my teacher about my dissatisfaction with my options for the project. I somehow got it into my head (probably with the help of my parents) to ask Mrs. Cavanaugh exactly how long someone had to live in Connecticut in order to be considered a “significant figure of Connecticut history.” You see, I’d gotten my hands on that William Styron obituary, and an idea was forming in my mind. In what was, I’m sure, a combination of exasperation and desperation on her part, Mrs. Cavanaugh agreed that 3 months was an acceptable amount of time to live in and have an impact on the history of the 3rd smallest state in the union. 

My research into Baldwin was sloppy at best. I was only 8 years old, after all. For one thing, I did not know that he was queer. I mean, I knew that he was queer in the same way that I knew that I was queer. Which is to say, I didn’t yet have words to describe the person that I was becoming, but I knew that I wasn’t built for the tiny boxes that the world was trying to put me into, and I knew that my blackness was as important as my girl-ness, but also I knew that I wasn’t like the other girls, and I knew that I cried a lot for no apparent reason, and I knew that I would need to keep some people at a distance to be safe, and I knew that I would have to fight to survive and that my brain was going to be my weapon, and I knew that my parents loved me but didn’t totally understand me, and I knew that art would save me. And I knew that I loved Jimmy and that he loved me even though we would never have the opportunity to meet. 

I focused considerable attention on Baldwin’s time in France. He had moved there in the late 1940s and become part of radical left politics. I learned that he resisted all wars, and wrote many books and essays and plays about racial and sexual politics, religion and American culture. I learned that he had been a preacher’s son, and that even as he fled the church, his spiritual core remained a critical part of his life. I learned that he never married or had children, but that he had important relationships with his nieces and nephews as they grew up. For my presentation at the Independent Day School, in the late winter/early Spring of 1988, just a few months after Baldwin’s Death, and just after my 9th birthday, I dressed up in combat boots, green khakis, a black beret, a thin white scarf tied at my neck, and dark sunglasses. I made a long thin cigarette out of construction paper and masking tape. I remember my mother pinning the beret to my short afro with bobby pins, and my sister loaning me a too large denim jacket with tough looking patches on it to sling over my shoulder as I walked on stage in the line up with all of the other children. The other girls wore long skirts to match the Victorian or Puritan dress of their chosen figures, and the boys looked nervous when I crowded to their end of the line-up. I dragged on the cigarette suggestively as I waited my turn on stage to deliver my prepared speech.

I wish my mother had kept a copy of what I wrote in her “Naima” file next to my diplomas and story contest entries and baby pictures. I don’t remember the words as well as I remember the costume and what it felt like to stand nervously in front of my entire school with that construction paper cigarette dangling between my fingers. Here is what I imagine a 9 year old version of me would have said: 

“James Baldwin was BLACK and he cared about BLACK people and children and about doing what was right. He was born in 1924 and died last year. He lived in France because that was where he felt that he could be a free man, and that’s important. He lived in Connecticut for a little while where he wrote some VERY IMPORTANT BOOKS that I hope to read when I am older. I did read one of his books, called Little Man, Little Man. It is about black children and their lives, and I wish we could read things like this in school, but Mrs. Cavanaugh says that it had too much violence so instead we read a book about a rabbit, which was dumb and boring, but I still got an A on my report because I’m going to Yale or Howard when I grow up so I can also learn to write important books.” 
I do remember that at the end of my speech, I thrust my fist into the air exclaiming “Vive La Resistance!” and stomped off the stage triumphantly. 

Twenty-nine years later, in 2016, I am 37 years old and still deeply in love with James Baldwin. I have found his work again and again (or perhaps it has found me) at times when I have needed it. In eighth grade it was Giovanni’s Room. In 11th it was Amen Corner. In my twenties I finally made my way to The Fire Next Time, and I learned that Baldwin’s gift to the world was his unflinching willingness to tell the truth with all of the tools available to him. Two years ago when my mother began excavating “The Naima File” that had outgrown her basement, she found my copy of Little Man, Little Man and mailed it to me for my birthday. I’m reading it now, again and again and again. I’m saved again and again and again, by a mind and heart that is determined to imagine beyond what I’m told is possible. I’m Jimmy and I’m his beloved nephew. I’m a preacher’s son and a musician’s daughter and the great-great-great grandchild of slaves and I’m seaweed under the waves at Jones Beach and I’m a little boy who walks down the street filled with music and I’m a wet eyed mouthy defiant little thing with a mean left hook and the deepest love and loyalty to her friends and I’m a person who keeps mourning and fighting and daydreaming and truth-telling and…

Yours Truly,
Naima

Old Blog, New Year (And A Last Minute Event)

Dear 456 Followers,
Like many of you, I’m in a period of deep reflection and (irrational? improbable?) optimism as we move into 2021. It has been a doozy, to say the least. Racial capitalism is really doing a number on us all.

I’m working on series of different projects about creativity, commodities, and how artists are used and abused within various economies. Within these projects, I find myself constantly coming back around to questions of accountability and the potential for transformative change in my life and communities. What does it mean for me, as an artist living through late (hopefully) capitalism, to be accountable to movements and people that I care deeply about? What does it mean for me to be accountable to my own self as a living, breathing, human person with material needs? How do those questions impact how I engage with cultural institutions, consumer driven economies, and the fact that my landlady does not accept robust Marxist analysis as payment for my rent?

I’ll share news and updates on these projects via email, as well as my newly reconstituted blog, Yours Truly, Naima.

Tonight I’ll be part of live stream hosted by OK#1 I’m going to be discussing the (lack of) accountability by the Tulsa Artist Fellowship, the program that I opted to leave several months before the end of my contract due to ongoing abuses by the program’s Executive Director. This decision to leave came with considerable financial strain, but it also opened me to the idea that I could be more accountable to myself by refusing to accept poor treatment in exchange for a paycheck. More and more artists are speaking out about predatory and unaccountable art institutions that rely on artists remaining precarious and dependent. I’m hoping that this talk can build on those conversations while offering some insight the specific concerns raised at Tulsa Artist Fellowship.

Thanks for reading and for your ongoing interest in my work.

Yours Truly,
Naima

Info on the Talk:
The Trouble That’s Brewing At The Tulsa Artist Fellowship

Join us Thursday, January 7th at 7pm CST for a conversation with Heyd Fontenot, Naima Lowe, and Lucas Wrench (OK #1's proprietor), discussing our experiences in the Tulsa Artist Fellowship that led us to speak on the record for Catherine Wagley's recent article "Trouble is Brewing at the Tulsa Artist Fellowship." We'll discuss past efforts to push for change and accountability within the fellowship, our motivations for speaking out publicly, and what we hope will happen as a result.

Streaming at okno.one and

twitch.tv/okno1stream.

I fought academia’s cult of civility, and all i got was this lousy ptsd diagnosis

Dear Reader,
This piece was originally posted on my now defunct Medium blog on October 18, 2018. I originally prefaced it by letting you, the reader, know that I was finally ready to talk about this shitty ass experience after over a year of relative silence. I say relative because, of course, I was talked about this plenty to my therapist, my friends and family, my partner at the time, my lawyer, etc.

I commonly refer to this time period as “2018, the year I laid down.” It was the year after my academic career came to a screeching halt, and I needed to rest. I read a lot of books, took a solo trip to Haiti, Jamaica and Turks and Caicos, saw Janelle Monae twice, spent a lot of time in trauma therapy and doing meds adjustments with my psychiatrist, taught myself to paint, had a few major medical procedures, broke up with my partner of 5 years and made plans to move away from the town I’d called home for almost a decade. But mostly I laid down: in my bed, on the couch, in the backyard, at the beach - I even got into the habit of taking breaks at the side of the road with my seat pushed back and my chihuahua, Jake, curled onto my chest while I counted backwards from one hundred and remembered to breathe. I was very very tired.

Yours Truly,
Naima

I speak out of direct and particular anger at an academic conference, and a white woman says, “Tell me how you feel but don’t say it too harshly or I cannot hear you.” But is it my manner that keeps her from hearing, or the threat of a message that her life may change? — Audre Lorde, “The Uses of Anger: Women Respond to Racism”

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excerpt of a message that I received at my work email address and subsequently forwarded to Evergreen administration

Between late May and early June 2017, I received hundreds of email messages, phone calls and letters that called me nigger, bitch, and monster. Some included images of black bodies being mutilated and lynched. If you do a Google search of my name you’ll find Reddit posts and YouTube videos featuring images and video taken from my own artwork and social media presence that call me ugly, stupid and terrorist. And of course there were the letters calling for my firing, phone messages screaming that I ought to kill myself, and of course “I hope you get lynched you fat piece of nigger shit.” These messages were sent to me on campus while working at the Evergreen State College, where I was a tenured professor, in the aftermath of student protests about campus racism, during which I was a vocal supporter of the students’ agenda and right to protest.

Soon after this hate fueled campaign started, I discovered that a selectively-edited video of me angrily confronting some of my colleagues was circulating online, along with my name, campus address, social media and contact information; a malicious release of personal information known as doxxing. Other staff, faculty and students, particularly black women, femmes and non-binary folks, were also receiving threats and getting doxxed, and it was escalating as the days went on. I shared the threatening messages with anyone at Evergreen I could think of, including members of the administration, faculty leadership, the college president and the Board of Trustees. It took a full week of me sharing these messages on a daily basis before I received any sort of response. When I was contacted, it was from colleagues expressing their concern about my well being, though members of the faculty leadership also made sure to let me know that they disapproved of the uncivil behavior that I’d demonstrated during the student protests.

This is the story about campus free speech that keeps getting obscured. Black, queer and trans student protestors with legitimate grievances get reduced to caricatures of Social Justice Warriors while they, and those who support them, get threatened and belittled. Flagrantly racist trolls sling epithets online, respectable liberals wring their hands at the lack of civility, authorities dismiss the danger of the threats, and the school does nothing until it isn’t just black people being threatened. This experience had a chilling and silencing effect on many of Evergreen’s student protestors, but where is the concern about students’ right to speech being suppressed? Why don’t we hear the stories of people of color, and women, and trans people on campuses losing their platform and right to speak? I’ve spent over a year recovering from the trauma of becoming a lightning-rod for alt-right hatred and then being thrown under the bus by white liberal complacency. I was dismissed, disbelieved, and ultimately treated as though my anger in responding to racism was on par with the racism itself that I was trying to address. The backlash and condemnations that I received achieved their intended goal. I was largely silent about my experience for over a year, for fear of further recrimination. I’m now done being afraid of my anger.

excerpt of a message that I received at my work email address and subsequently forwarded to Evergreen administration

When I called the police to report the threats on my life, I was told that I was likely just dealing with “kids pulling pranks.” A week after the doxxing and threats began, I met with the President and the Provost to tell them that I was afraid for my life, that I was afraid for students’ lives, and that I was concerned that there wasn’t enough being done to protect the safety of the people of color who were being targeted. My pleas for support were met with genuine personal concern, but little in the way of action to ensure the safety of those of who were being targeted. I asked why there were no investigations or sanctions against the people internal to the college who were recklessly spreading the names and faces of faculty, staff and students to notoriously far-right news outlets. I asked why the school couldn’t release statements supporting the students right to protest and free assembly. I asked why the school wasn’t publicly acknowledging or directly addressing the fact that black faculty, staff and students, and those who expressed views in support of campus equity measures, were being disproportionately impacted by doxxing and threats. I was dismayed but not surprised by the lack of proactive response. This is what happens when black women speak up about being harmed within white dominated liberal spaces. People may express empathy, but few in positions of power have any willingness or capacity to act.

I was told that the administration had to “remain neutral” in the situation because the institution was facing an “existential crisis,” hearing rumblings about threats to defund. When the Provost told me that “the school could be shut down, and that is the worst thing that could happen,” I responded that someone on campus getting killed by a white nationalist would be much worse. The next day, on June 2, the first of two threats of racially motivated mass violence to the campus was called in.

I never returned to Evergreen as a faculty member after that day. I held the remainder of my classes off campus, and watched in horror when campus officials sanctioned a “Free Speech Rally,” organized by ultra-right wing activist Joey Gibson, on campus the day before Evergreen’s graduation. This rally was attended by a coalition of alt-right, libertarian and self avowed Neo-Nazis from all over the Pacific Northwest and beyond. Counter-protestors from Evergreen and the greater Olympia, WA community were also there in force, sending a strong message of love, resistance and support to the community. However, graduation had to be relocated due to safety concerns.

I left town for most of the summer, and laid low hoping that the harassment would die down. In July I attended an artists’ residency in rural Vermont, focusing on self care and creativity. This moment of tranquility was interrupted when Milo Yiannopoulos, a right-wing provocateur, got hold of the Evergreen story and shared a video to his followers that included screenshots of my name, face, campus address, email and phone number. Despite the administration assuring me that directory information was being protected from those outside of the campus community, this led me to wonder whether someone internal to Evergreen had shared my information.

When Milo’s followers got hold of me, on around July 24, I received upwards of 75 messages within a 24 hour period, all of them more vile and demeaning than the last. Die you fat cunt bitch. If you hate America so much, why don’t you take your monkey ass back to Africa? How did anyone let a dumb nigger like you teach at a college? I spent that afternoon organizing and forwarding the emails to the school, composing the calmest message I could muster to let people know that I was under attack again. I thought that if I could find a way to temper my fear and anger, someone might take me seriously enough to respond to the threats to my life. By the time I finished I’d broken out into hives and spent the night vomiting and sobbing. Almost two months after threats and harassment began, someone at Evergreen finally helped me change my email address and scrubbed my information from the faculty directory. A dean offered to check the area around my office, and I eventually convinced the communications team to remove the photos of my (Happy! Black! Female!) face from its featured location on the campus website. At no point did anyone offer me on-campus safety escorts, and if the threats to my life were investigated by the campus or county police, I never heard a word about it. I had no reason to trust that the campus would be a safe environment for me. I took a personal leave for the Fall 2017 quarter in order to give myself more time to recover and figure out my next steps.

The events and context of the protests were grossly distorted by the mainstream media, and became fodder for shady alt-right media sources. Faculty, staff and students who took part in the protests and/or campus sanctioned equity initiatives were doxxed and threatened. Students’ protest tactics were broadly characterized as violent, while many of us who were on campus during the events witnessed actions that were provocative and bold, but never included threats of physical harm. I witnessed students speaking stridently, loudly, and firmly about their grievances, and yes some were yelling and swearing. There were also students working to craft the demands with the administration and student newspaper; students offering water, snacks and access to first aid supplies in case of emergency; students gathering important stakeholders into the President’s’ office to discuss solutions to their grievances. Many faculty and staff took the students’ protests seriously for what they were: A demonstration highlighting our collective need to do better on behalf of marginalized students on our campus. Others were angry and dismayed that students would rise up in the ways that they did, and I recall discussions with some colleagues who complained that the students were too harsh, too loud, and too brazen in their approach. I found myself frequently thinking “I understand that this is stressful, but they are our students. We are the adults and people with authority in this situation, and they are our students.”

I wish that I could say that I was surprised that so many well educated and well informed people forgot that protests are not meant to create comfort and ease for those in cultural and political power. A tiny, but incredibly loud, minority could not muster enough critical thought about the situation to recognize the validity of the students’ concerns, and instead helped to broadcast false claims that students were rioting, kicking white people off campus, and that they deserved censure and ridicule rather than compassion and guidance.

While several students, colleagues and reporters have attempted to offer alternative perspectives on the events, a master narrative that paints students as single-minded “snowflakes” unwilling to hear alternative viewpoints caught hold in mainstream media. The roots of the students’ complaints have been continually buried under a simplistic conversation about “campus free speech,” as well as a false claims that white community members were forced off campus during an equity event. These misrepresentations made it difficult for others to tell their side of the story without appearing to oppose free expression and the exchange of dissenting ideas. The dominant discussion about campus speech vilifies and punishes black people for speaking stridently about our experiences of racism and then hides this disdain for our right to free speech and assembly beneath the guise of civility.

The widely-circulated video of me, shot on the second day of student protests, became a primary source of “evidence” that I was an anti-white provocateur bent on demeaning my white colleagues and radicalizing students. I’m accused of threatening and intimidating the group of white faculty members standing across from me, and yet I’m unclear what I did that indicated the potential for violence other than being a loud black woman with unapologetic opinions. When I look at that video I see myself standing before a group of mostly white people, keeping a careful distance from everyone as I’m speaking. I remember feeling exhausted and frightened for the students; I had no idea whether the police would be called, or how their protests were being portrayed in the media. I had walked up to the group alone, wearing gym clothes, holding my 8 lb. service dog, being black and pissed off.

screen shot taken of a post made to “The Ralph Report”

The video leaves out critical context: Just 20 minutes earlier, students had disrupted a faculty meeting as part of their protests, where they expressed heartfelt and respectful pleas to their teachers to support them in their occupation of the administrative offices. Many faculty immediately joined the students in solidarity, some left campus, while others remained behind to discuss what they’d seen. When I challenged one faculty member on why she’d apparently dismissed the students’ request for support, she complained that she was witnessing “leftist McCarthyists” on a “witch-hunt.” It is ahistorical, myopic and intellectually lazy to compare a single student’s protest against racism to the hundreds of people accused of disloyalty and treason by the US government. I was appalled to hear such false equivalences coming from a tenured faculty member with a PhD in history, and I said as much. This is the same faculty member that I confronted in the circulated video and I’m not ashamed to say that I told her, and those with her, that her racism was showing and that she was being motherfucking ridiculous. But more importantly, my frustrated yells were not directed at the single actions of a single faculty member, but at the collective inaction of a majority white faculty body. I was angry, exhausted, and frustrated that students of color who had been asking nicely for change for years were being treated as though their demands were unreasonable.

The students weren’t asking for the moon. They were asking for mandatory staff and faculty training on equity issues, for student input into the campus conduct code, for increased funding for culturally responsive student services, for accountability and punitive measures taken against faculty and staff who had repeatedly exhibited discriminatory behaviors and, most importantly, they demanded that their concerns be addressed quickly and deliberately. Several protest leaders had taken part in less confrontational approaches to change by joining various committees, speaking to administrators, and filing complaints. Others had participated in a year’s worth of smaller actions directed at the schools’ record on addressing equity issues. They were demanding that the faculty and administrators of Evergreen take responsibility for the challenges faced by historically underserved student populations. The protests didn’t come from nowhere; they were an articulation of dissent from a group of students who believed that Evergreen could be better. Many students come to Evergreen because they want to be encouraged to think critically about social inequality, so it should not be surprising that some would challenge injustices that occur within the institution itself. Where some saw a mob of reckless and unreasonable thugs, I saw a group of young people with enough faith in their school to ask that it make changes for the better.

In my 7 years at Evergreen, I was on multiple equity focused task forces and event planning committees, I discussed my concerns for students of color and my own experiences of racism in my annual evaluations and participated in countless formal and informal discussions with faculty and administrators on the subject. I spoke out about being tokenized as a black woman, about nepotistic faculty hiring practices that favored the (mostly white) spouses and friends of the (mostly white) current faculty, about overwhelmingly Eurocentric curriculum, about a lack of racial and gender diversity within the administration and faculty leadership, about programs designed to support students of color being persistently under-funded, about being repeatedly bullied and targeted on an all-campus email list for speaking out about racism, about being pressured by administrators to accept under-qualified white male students into competitive upper division classes that I was teaching, about students of color and trans students frequently confiding in me about their negative experiences in classes, and about having my tenure case unfairly challenged despite years of glowing reviews by peers, students, and administrators.

In the year leading up to the student protests, I was part of a team of 30+ faculty, staff, administrators and students who were tasked with creating a strategic equity plan for the campus. While we addressed a variety of issues over the many months that the group was convened, it became clear (at least to me) that one of the schools’ biggest obstacles to lasting change on behalf of students of color came from within the faculty. Evergreen is known for giving its faculty unprecedented freedom to choose what and how to teach. Many are drawn to the school by their desire to be creative and innovative in their teaching, and the school’s unconventional structure allows for many exciting opportunities for students. However, for some faculty this can mean a lack of accountability towards developing cultural competency or utilizing evidence based pedagogical best practices for supporting disabled students, first generation college students, or students of color. (There are many examples of this, and not enough room in one article to discuss in depth. See Tia McNair’s “Becoming A Student Ready College” for an in depth analysis.)

Some faculty, thankfully not the majority, are irrevocably tied to the idea that they should be allowed to ignore those best practices because they may inhibit their sense of academic freedom. The assumption that faculty always know what’s best for students is based in academic elitism, entitlement, and an unconscious bias among Evergreen’s (mostly white) faculty. I spent a significant amount of time making this argument in meetings with my colleagues. After years of being disappointed by a lack of collective action or bold leadership on this issue, I had grown tired of offering up explanations on this issue that focused on placating the feelings and anxieties of my peers. Instead, I took a cue from my students and made my concerns plain. On more than one occasion I bluntly told faculty colleagues that their unwillingness to shift their attitudes and behaviors towards students was, in fact, racist.

I fought these battles because I believe in Evergreen’s capacity to deliver on its promise of a truly progressive, innovative, student centered, justice oriented education. I worked with many colleagues over the years who shared that commitment, and who offered exceptional educational experiences to students. However, when faced with the crisis of confronting racism head on, the white liberal tendency to dismiss patterns of structural inequality in favor of avoiding conflict and hard feelings, undermined the school’s ability to take a strong stance in favor of justice. Various (mostly white) faculty colleagues and members of the administration approached me over my last year at Evergreen to let me know that they were concerned about whether I was being constructive enough in my approach to addressing these issues. They told me that I was alienating people, that I was doing a disservice to my own cause, and that I was making people feel uncomfortable and unwelcome in discussions. They told me to temper my anger so that they could hear what I had to say.

Just a few months before the student protests I reported seeing a man wearing white supremacist symbols on his clothing going through the garbage outside of my office, and did not receive any sort of response from the campus police or administration until weeks later; after I’d put pressure a dean to do so. I managed to hold back on the panic attack that I would have later that evening while I reported this incident to the Provost an hour after it occured. He brushed it off saying “that’s weird,” and proceeded to use that moment as an opportunity to critique my tone and level of constructiveness, seemingly more concerned that I had concretely named the behaviors and actions of a colleague as racist, then with the fact that I was experiencing and being impacted by racism.

email sent to my work email, subsequently forwarded to Evergreen admin.

This is a familiar pattern at Evergreen and elsewhere within white liberal circles: A person of color reports racism and they are either dismissed or chastised for their tone, hostility, or attitude issues. Naming racism, especially with any hint of anger in your voice, is treated as an attack or threat to the good name of an innocent, well meaning white person. This form of gaslighting and avoidance is not unique, but my experience at Evergreen has taught me that while many white liberal academics may possess the language to talk about racism as an idea, few seem able to address or transform their own racist behaviors. I constantly heard my colleagues use their academic training to speak articulately about systems and structures that uphold racism, but would stop short at recognizing that those systems aren’t just theoretical constructs. They are created and maintained by the choices that everyday people make to preserve their own comfort, ease and status.

excerpt of a message that I received at my work email address and subsequently forwarded to Evergreen administration

As far as I can tell, my major sin, the one that made me a target, and the one that made me unworthy of protection by the administration, is that I stood in solidarity with students. I decided that their right to be heard was more important than my colleagues’ right to feel comfortable. I told my colleagues, many of whom had watched me spend years attempting to advocate through “proper channels,” to get their collective heads out of their asses. It is hard to make well meaning white people understand the impact of their obsession with civility. When people are more upset about the way that black people demand justice than they are about the absence of justice in the first place, they are upholding a racist value system. It is easy to buy into the narrative that the disruptive anger of protests against racism invite or enable racism. People of color aren’t free of this; plenty of us have internalized the idea that we’ll be more accepted if we’re easier to digest. For the past year, I’ve remained quiet about my experience for fear of further backlash, but also for fear of being characterized as the stereotypical “Angry Black Woman.” However, I’ve recently decided to let go of that fear because I am angry. In fact, I am furious.

I am furious that students standing against racism were characterized as thugs. I am furious that so many of my colleagues working towards equity on campus were targeted, and that several have left the school. I am furious that there are staff of color on campus still experiencing fallout from this disaster. I am furious that misinformation has damaged the morale of those at Evergreen who are working to support students of color. I am furious that I had to leave my job and practically remain in hiding for the past year in order to regain a sense of safety. I am furious that this pattern of valuing civility over dissent and comfort over justice is repeated so frequently and in so many parts of American culture.

During my fall 2017 leave, I submitted a severance request, asking that I be able to complete Winter and Spring quarters, and finish my time at Evergreen at the end of Spring 2018. Despite my extreme anxiety and concerns about my safety, I felt an obligation to the students who had signed up for the course I was offering that year, and a desire to finish my time at Evergreen on a positive note. My request was honored after protracted and confusing communications with the college’s lawyers, though I was not given the option to return to work. It seemed as though the school was ready to see me gone as soon as possible, and at first this added insult to injury. I ended up relieved not to have to return, and grateful to be done with the whole ordeal. I received a $240,000 settlement for my trouble, the majority of which I used to pay off the student loans I’d acquired getting the advanced degrees required to be an academic. I resigned December 6 2017, cleaned out my office on December 13, and I haven’t been to campus since.

I believe that anger is useful and productive, and I’m no longer afraid to express mine with all its potency. Students and young people are often at the forefront of our movements and if we’re smart enough to pay attention, they can teach us important lessons about resisting the systems that demand our complacency and compliance. Civility hasn’t stopped the oncoming train of far right white nationalism in this country, and it doesn’t solve racism on college campuses. The concept is totally subjective, based on the values of those in power, and is consistently weaponized against women, people of color, young people, queers and others marginalized within public discourse. I lost my willingness to adhere to this arbitrary standard of behavior with people who should know better.

I’m grateful for the opportunity to learn with and from Evergreen’s student protestors, and for the opportunity to let go of my lifelong dream of being a professor. For years I thought that academia’s illusion of comfort was worth swallowing my anger and compromising my integrity. I’m grateful to have gotten free of that lie before it rotted me from the inside out.

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I cried a lot through this process, trying to understand where I’d gone wrong, and how I’d ended up so alienated from an institution that I’d committed myself to for almost a decade. Once, while crying, I told my mother that I felt stupid for not knowing better than to fight like this. She told me “Naima, it is not stupid to care. You’re not capable of seeing something that’s wrong and not caring. I love you for that, but you’ve got to care about yourself too, so get out of there before that place kills you.”

Another time, while crying, I told my father that it was hard not to see all of the harassment I was receiving as my own fault. He told me “Naima, of course this is your fault, because you had the audacity to spend the last thirty-eight years of your life growing into yourself. You live in a world that could barely handle you when you were three feet tall, and there you go being ten feet tall and still not done growing.”

Fuck your civility.

My momma and daddy love me.

Correction: I originally stated that black women were disproportionately targeted by the backlash. This is incomplete, as it was black women, black femmes and black non-binary folks who were targeted most heavily. Black (cis and trans) women, femmes and non-binary folks were at the forefront of these protests, as they are so many movements to support black freedom, and they/we get punished for it.

Photo taken by a friend on campus the day after the election of Donald Trump