This post is inspired by a Chronicle Vitae piece on advice on mentoring minority students. While I’m not at all close to an “advisor” role yet, I do have some experience helping students more junior to me. This post records some reflections on the difficulties associated with it.
One thing that caught my attention and led to this post is the author’s (Prof. Shampa Biswas of Whitman College) description of minority experience:
They feel seen and unseen. Students of color can find themselves at opposite poles on the visibility spectrum:
- On the one hand, they feel “invisible” — and inaudible. In certain settings and forums they are trying to be seen and heard but are constantly overlooked …
- On the other hand is the problem of being “hypervisible.” Either they are viewed as representatives of “their cultures” …, or they are seen as the source of some infraction …
This is all too familiar because I have experienced both. I still routinely get blocked by groups of tall guys chatting at the APA registration table. I walk into a room filled with white guys and can’t help but feel self-conscious. My voice was almost never heard throughout my 5 undergraduate years as a philosopher major. Two philosophy profs knew who I was. One of them was an adjunct of colour who left after my second year; the other is a woman whom I took a grad/undergrad class (so, class size < 10) with.
Nevertheless, I decided to go to philosophy graduate school. There wasn’t anything special that happened that made me decide “I could do this”. I just tried and it worked out. It helps that 1) I have had a wonderful time as a master’s student and 2) I am fairly oblivious most of the time.
The problem is that there isn’t much of anything that I did that “worked” or “solved the problem” or “made me more resilient” which I can pass on to others. What did I do when I was talked over in a discussion? I walked away to do something more interesting and had the satisfaction of many of my friends leaving too because they’d rather spend time with me. What did I do when a male grad student from another department introduced himself and shook the hands of all of my male colleagues but not mine? I was deeply amused by the situation and exchanged glances with a friend who clearly noticed both how awkward it was and how amused I was. Are any of these valid pieces of advice to give to others? Of course not. But this is how I got to where I am now.
Most of the things that have happened to me as WoC academic have not been “solved”. They have unfolded in one way or another and then time passed. As a WoC who has had a reasonably good time in academia, I am sometimes asked by WoC undergrads or junior grad students in a “what’s your secret” kind of way. The idea is something like this: “I am very stressed all of the time and have extremely low self-esteem; you don’t appear as stressed. What did you do that I can do in the future to make myself less stressed?” I always feel flattered when I receive this kind of questions, but I also feel that I can’t answer then right. The honest answer that I sometimes give but hate giving is something like this: “the fact that I am financially secure and have a stable relationship helps a lot. It’s also possible that you experience more shit that I have either because you’re more sensitive or I was lucky.” This isn’t advice at all, let alone “good advice”.
Perhaps giving advice from one’s own experience is just a bad idea overall. This is something I’m starting to appreciate more and more: my experience really only generalize to a small group of people. (I wouldn’t go as far as saying that experience never generalizes in a way that, e.g., Tara Brabazon does. It is therapeutic for many people to think that someone else has experienced the exact same situation as themselves and has made it through.) When I do not advice through experience, though, “mentorship” feels more like work. I have to spend time and effort to collate resources/information and walk students through the procedure. I’m not trained at all in this, and I constantly worry about giving the wrong information or that students will be more discouraged if they have a bad experience with a service I recommended because they saw my recommendation as authoritative (because I’m WoC).
In your advising it’s important to be attentive to the specificity of a student’s experiences. The kind of pervasive racism that leaves African-American or Hispanic students feeling devalued may be quite different from the stereotypes that attach to students from third-world countries. Likewise, the needs of immigrant students might well be quite distinct from first-generation American college students who cannot afford to participate in important aspects of campus life.
It might just be that I have the wrong approach to mentoring. I do have a “solve everything or I’m not doing it right” mentality most of the time. When someone comes to me with a problem and because they see me as an ally, I feel like I’m letting them down if I don’t have all the answers. I worry if the answers I do have lead them astray. None of these is really rational but, like what prof. Biswas points out, we are not trained in it.
Doing something from a place of power
I have recently joined twitter. I saw a tweet the other day about how it’s terrible that women/poc faculty members take on more diversity-related service so that institutions and the white men in them can congratulate themselves for being diverse. Someone (a white man) responded to this tweet saying “um, because they can’t do it themselves?” (“it” being diversity service.) First, what a dumbass. Second, it’s also kinda true that people (minorities as well as white men) are not trained in it.
So, I’d like to end this post with a good story, something I have experienced that made academia a better place for me. I will not anonymize people since the story is very positive.
I went to a conference at the Rotman Institute of Philosophy at the University of Western Ontario on the replication crisis last year. I presented a poster, but really I just wanted to go to the conference.
All conference speakers and poster presenters are invited to the conference dinner. I was staying at an Airbnb and so was on my own in terms of finding my way to the restaurant. The restaurant was small and family style, with a few smaller tables rather than a big long one. When I arrived, 2 out of the 5~6 tables were occupied: one fully occupied with graduate students and some of the younger speakers, the other with 4 out of 6 seats occupied by very established-looking older people: Ayelet Shavit (Tel-Hai college), Miriam Solomon (Temple), Allan Franklin (Colorado, physics), Richard Shiffrin (Indiana, psychology).
I was stuck at the door. I stood there for something like 2-3 minutes, deciding whether sitting at an empty table was too extreme and whether someone would notice if I turned around and left quietly. If you don’t understand why I have this kind of reaction, then you have a completely different personality than I do.
I stood there, frozen. Then Allan Franklin said to me, “why don’t you join us?” So I sat down, frozen. I thought to myself: it’s going to be one of those nights. As a junior WoC, I have spent many dinners stuck with established scholars as they relate tales of their youth to each other for hours on end. Spending 3 hours without speaking a word, listening to stories about people I don’t know, is not my sense of an enjoyable dinner, but I could handle it.
Then we decided to do a round of introduction. I wasn’t very keen, since I fully expected that they’d forget I was there within minutes. But they didn’t. They started talking to each other — talking to me — like normal people do. This might sound strange, but I’ve rarely had a conference dinner with mixed established/early career scholars where people have normal conversations. Some stories were told, but they were personal stories that were funny or theme-appropriate, not ones where the whole point was to show that the teller was in the same room as this other big-shot or stories that signify group membership. I told some stories of mine, too, and they listened. At some point, Stuart Firestein (Columbia, biology) joined us, sitting across from me. I had assumed that he joined because he wanted to talk to the others, but he talked to me. At times where the 6-people conversation became a little chaotic, he made small talks about food with me.
At some point, we started talking about women in academia. Richard Shiffrin wanted to know, in a social psychologist’s fashion, quite concretely why academia is so bad for women. Miriam Solomon then started to list a number of quite concrete things, many of which were a surprise to me, too. (She told us that the APA used to hold interviews in hotel rooms!) Everyone listened as she talked. Ayelet Shavit and I then shared our experience being from different cultures and the misunderstandings that sometimes arose as a result of it. Again, people listened. Then we talked about something else and told more stories. It didn’t become a “we need to talk diversity because WoC is at the table”. Diversity was just one of the things we talked about.
The entire experience so “normal” that it was surreal. For once, I did not feel singled out. I was not singled out as the “grad student who needs random advice”, or the “WoC who needs to talk about WoC things”. I was not forgotten, either. I was simply just another person in the conversation. I was able to relax in a way that I rarely did even with other grad students. Academia just became that much more welcoming to me.
So, there you go. That’s something you can do.
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