Professor Grace Adeniyi Ogunyankin
I’ve come to realize that there are three pre-requisites for my mental well-being: anger, love and humour. Yet, these three things are more elusive than you would imagine. I’ve been told not to express my anger, “you don’t want to be that angry black woman”. It’s hard to love those you perceive to be your oppressor; especially when time and time again, you get hurt: When people throw stones at you, because you dare to assert your right to public space. When somebody looks down at you and spits on your face, it’s hard to wipe it off, and say, “it’s okay, I can still love you.” And most especially, it’s hard to still laugh, when your racial wounds and injuries have barely healed.
Just about a week before I began teaching at Carleton in Fall 2015, an “auntie” called me aside at a gathering and told me that she and her husband have been meaning to speak to me. They expressed their fears that I may get into trouble and not progress in my career, if I show my anger. I didn’t know whether to cry or to laugh. They were referring to the diatribes that would come from me when a black man is shot by the police, when a Sikh man (mistaken for a Muslim) is beaten up and told to go back home, when another Aboriginal woman goes missing and murdered, and when the likes of Rachel Dolezal are exposed. You get the point. But I was told, “You don’t want to isolate people… You don’t want them to only see your anger”.
I wanted to cry because I believed that they had failed to understand me. And I wanted to cry because they had internalized the dominant discourse which enabled them to truly believe that my anger was unjustified. And I wanted to cry because they thought that I would not know how to put my anger into productive use in the classroom. Yet, I wanted to laugh because, ironically, one of the reasons I wanted to be a professor was because I was angry. I was angry that people like me were marginalized in academia and I was angry about injustices in the world, and I wanted to help my students understand issues of injustice and participate actively in transforming the system through constructive engagement with oppressive systems and structures.
Prof. Grace Adeniyi Ogunyankin 5 months pregnant
Believe you me, there is nothing like righteous anger. It fuels me. Especially given how far I had come. I used to think all was hopeless, especially after you witness/experience one injustice after another. When I learned that it was okay to get angry – that being angry is only human, humanizes you and enables you to see the need for humanization – I embraced it, and came to see how it could be a useful pedagogy in the classroom. Not violent anger. No. But an anger that means you can’t be neutral in the face of injustice but makes you want to speak the truth, to testify, and to love.
Love. I recall things got a little emotional during the last day of my WGST 2800 course, Intersectional Identities, as I implored my students to stay human and to choose love. I quoted bell hooks, “A culture of domination is anti-love. It requires violence to sustain itself. To choose love is to go against the prevailing values of the culture. … The moment we choose to love we begin to move against domination, against oppression. The moment we choose to love we begin to move towards freedom, to act in ways that liberate ourselves and others. That action is the testimony of love as the practice of freedom.” It’s not easy, but I’m slowly starting to liberate myself.
This liberation that comes from choosing love, I believe is key to parenting my toddler especially given how much angst I have about his survival. Some think this angst is unfounded: “Canada is safe, there’s no racism here.” “We embrace diversity” (tell that to the Muslim women who got beaten up in Toronto after the Paris bombing). When you know the injuries of racism yourself it’s not far fetched to imagine how the stones that were hurled at you not too long ago, could easily be a gun that’s pointing at your beloved because of his “profile”. On those days that you are a time traveller, and find yourself in your worst nightmare, and travel back again to your present day, you can only try to plan. Map out his life. Then you realize that you’re not moving against domination. In your perplexity, you talk to your friends. You hear their stories about parenting while Black and the stereotypes they encounter from teachers in school that inexplicably links their parenting skills to criminalized black masculinity, you can only start to laugh after you’ve become angry. In that rage, you find humour, and it eventually leads you to choose love. Otherwise you could go mad. Seriously.
Prof. Grace Adeniyi Ogunyankin
So, this is what my talk, Hashtags Can’t Resuscitate: Reproductive Justice and Black Masculinity is partially about. It is inspired by a poem I wrote after I got tired of all the hashtags I was seeing on social media, in that moment of anger, I asked: what would it be like, if some of us began to practice love in a manner that would finally start to lead towards social transformations, rather than thinking that hashtags would suffice?
Prof. Grace Adeniyi Ogunyankin and her son Ayo
Another Damn Hashtag
Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night
#Hyperventilating
#Sweating
#Afraid
I dream that you are dead
#Gunshot
#Blood
#Tears
I scurry out of bed and run to your room
#Asleep
#Peaceful
#BeautifulAngel
Then I turn on the TV and the nightmare begins again
#Criminalized
#Blackness
#RightProfile
I shudder because I can’t imagine the pain
#Injustice
#Ignorance
#Racism
In my mind, I begin to map out my plan for your life
#PerfectDiction
#NoHoodie
#Policedbehaviour
But then I catch myself at the stupidity of it all
#Whiteprivilege
# “Racialuplift”
# Damnunfair
I know that it doesn’t matter what I do or you do
# Can’tescape
# prejudicerules
#hardknocklife
I can’t protect you and it hurts; society doesn’t care about you and it breaks my heart
#Disposablebodies
# Justanotherday
#Industrialprisoncomplex
And as much as I try, it’s hard to be optimistic
Even though I say a prayer
Reality stares me in the face
I see the flurry on social media
#indignation
#policebrutality
#what’snext?
I’m scared
And I’m so sick and tired
Because nobody’s life should have to be reduced to another damn hashtag
#Hashtags.
#can’t .
#resuscitate
Ayo, Prof. Grace Adeniyi Ogunyankin’s son, playing in the snow.
The post From Stones to Guns: On Embracing Anger, Love and Humour appeared first on Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences.