Lessons From A College Sweater

I put my sweater on last night and realized I’m two years away from my 10 year college reunion. Time. It goes. I got my bachelors degree in Ethnic Studies and discovered critical race theory in a small classroom in Nicholas Hall at Sonoma State. It gave me the tools to understand how power is formed and maintained in America.

My spiritual path has led me out of my career in higher education but the first time I met God was when I learned that I could scrutinize any modus operandi that insinuated there are race and ethics groups that are socially, culturally and biologically inferior and therefore deserving of. subjugation.

Ironically, I found mental freedom in an institution…of higher learning. I learned a lot about myself and began to put the puzzle pieces together of my lived experience growing up a Black girl in San Diego. I found language for the things I could not name as a child and teenager. I graduated college informed yet optimistic into a post-recession job market where a $14 an hour full-time salary for a college graduate was the norm. For a poor working class girl who went to college to beat the system, I was enraged. Despite all the years, the courses and the leadership positions I’d taken on campus, I had somehow slipped through the cracks. I was still a poor Black woman but now with a degree and $50,000 in student loans. I didn’t realize until after the experience that college wasn’t going to save me.

And so I took what I learned and my anger to a protest and I met other queer people of color who felt like I did. Trans, non-binary and cis folks who did not tolerate the stifling white gaze. In our community, I was re-educated and I had a lot unlearn. I tried to keep my career identity and political identity separate but I learned there is no academic institution or non-profit where I am not threatening. And as I was being brutally rejected from my career, I met God again. And this time God said follow me. I did. Most of you only know me as a servant of spirit but I wasn’t always that girl and the life I’m living I never could’ve dreamed of. At some point in time between 2014 and 2018 my soul died and was reborn and baptized in the waters of the holy mother.

Now today, I can sit and laugh with God about all the choices that brought me to where I am right now. I am not who I was but I never lost what I gained. I don’t regret any of my years of schooling because I’ve always been a lover and seeker of knowledge. I appreciate all the educators I’ve had even the ones whose best of intentions could not prepare me for the realities of my life. I know now that my greatest education will come from my life commitment to enacting justice over my body, my family and my connection to all beings. Because I have not been given the illusion of safety in the ways others have, I will save myself. every time it’s required of me and birth out of this wickedness a thugs mansion for me and the homies. A world absent of whiteness and full of every color in the spectrum of light.

Also, here are some of my running thoughts about the white gaze:

There are several types of ways that the white gaze operates, that is to consume and commodify, control and reprimand and reject and destroy. People of color may find that they are racialized into a socio-political experience that can be defined by which type white gaze they are subjected to. The white gaze is geo-political force as well and adapts itself to any city, state or region depending on the location, racial demographics, socioeconomic status and political power of different race groups.

Any person of color being supervised under the gaze of whiteness, may seek it’s acceptance, it’s safety, or it’s eradication. Interracial tensions may exist within communities and within individual families, as to the best defense against whiteness.