Dr. Omi Osun Joni L. Jones is an artist scholar and professor emeritus in the African and African diaspora studies department at the University of Texas at Austin. Her scholarship focuses on performance ethnography, theatrical jazz, Yoruba based aesthetics, black feminisms and activist theater. As the founder of the Austin Project, a collective of women of color artists, scholars, activists, and allies who use art for re-imagining society and the creator Sista Docta, a critique of the Academy and just being an overall generous spirit Omi is what happens when Britt and Mya make a wish upon a star for the perfect guest.
POD #2: Dr. Omi Osun Joni L. Jones
[00:00:00]
Britt: Hello, and welcome to Off-Track, On-Purpose, the podcast, where we come together to re-imagine academic and faculty life. I'm your co-host Britt [00:00:15] Yamamoto and along with Mya Fisher, I want to thank you for joining us. We're here to have heart-centered conversations with people who have experienced and successfully endured advanced academic training and gone on to have a meaningful social impact through their creative pursuits and [00:00:30] practical actions.
Today's guest embodies all of these things.
Dr. Omi Osun Joni L. Jones is an artist scholar and professor emeritus in the African and African diaspora studies department at the University of Texas at Austin. Her [00:00:45] scholarship focuses on performance ethnography, theatrical jazz, Yoruba based aesthetics, black feminisms and activist theater.
As the founder of the Austin Project, a collective of women of color artists, scholars, activists, and allies who use art [00:01:00] for re-imagining society and the creator Sista Docta, a critique of the Academy and just being an overall generous spirit Omi is what happens when Britt and Mya make a wish upon a star for the perfect guest.
Please enjoy our conversation. [00:01:15]
Pre-flections (Curiosities) [00:01:15]
Mya: So we like to kick off each of our podcasts with a section we call curiosities. And this is where we just talk about the questions that we're excited to explore with our guests and things that from their background that we know of are just inspiring us [00:01:30] to ask the questions. Britt what are your curiosities for today?
Britt: There's a few things that are really coming to mind. The first one for me is related to identity and how she's been able to infuse, what I feel is her exploration of her [00:01:45] own identity with creativity and teaching and expression and performance. And for myself, those are things that I've been very curious about in recent work and creative acts.
Mya: I liked that idea about identity.
[00:02:00] And what interests me is with all of the background and training that we have from the Academy, what does that mean? How does she identify herself? Does she think of herself as a practicing academic or as something [00:02:15] else?
Britt: I'm also really interested in her story and what brought her to create a life, which seems to be led by creativity, in an academic space. Very inspiring to see the reach of the work all around the world.
And [00:02:30] also what I sense is very much a focus on solidarity building across culture. So I'm very interested to explore that.
Mya: Yeah. The international and global scale of her work is really interesting. A lot of people, I think who were trained in [00:02:45] the US don't really do a lot of global work.
So it's always interesting to me how people, particularly in creative fields can leverage their expertise in a global way. And I'm interested in some of the projects that she's working on around [00:03:00] equity and how that shapes the work that she presents and shares with different communities.
Britt: I'm just so interested to hear what her vision is of the possibility for the Academy and how it might look a [00:03:15] generation from now. And particularly with the new generation of scholars who perhaps don't shy away from being public intellectuals, and being creative and how she sees herself in the arc of that transformation, but [00:03:30] also how she sees that transformation evolving.
Mya: Lots of good questions and curiosities. I am really excited to just get the interview started.
Interview with Dr. Omi Osun Joni L. Jones [00:03:39]
Britt: I just want to thank you Omi for taking some time out to spend with Mya and I, and to have this conversation. [00:03:45]
Omi: Oh, I'm really thrilled. Thanks for inviting me.
Academic Origin Story [00:03:48]
Britt: We just wanted to start with what we call your academic origin story and what brought you to graduate studies or to eventually go on to be a faculty and invest so much of your time and [00:04:00] energy in that space?
Omi: Wow. It's so interesting to think about an origin story with my academic life my academic work because origin story has to start in elementary school. I loved school. I [00:04:15] just, love to go. I was not the kid who was thrilled that there was a snow day. I was the one who wanted to be in school. I loved reading in particular and stories and all of [00:04:30] that.
And I must say I also loved the attention that I often got from teachers and so on. And I was a good student, all of that. So I was rewarded for certain kinds of behaviors and I love those [00:04:45] rewards. I moved through later parts of my academic life without the same degree of loving. I went to a small undergraduate institution in central Illinois and that [00:05:00] love of learning continued there very much. So something about the intimacy at a small school, teachers who really went out of their way to make you feel at home, many things make that a [00:05:15] really wonderful environment.
Graduate school on the other hand was a very different experience. It didn't seem to be any more about loving learning. There was a deep competitiveness in the [00:05:30] classrooms amongst the students.
There was a fear amongst the students and not knowing how to relate to the professors. And so there was a lot going on in graduate school that did not reinforce my excitement [00:05:45] about reading literature, learning new ideas and all of that. So it's even a little curious that I ended up as a professor, I didn't really have a clue about what that really meant.
Of course, I had gone to graduate school when I started [00:06:00] as a professor, I had my masters, but I did not have my PhD. And so of course I had some idea of what it meant to be a professor, but not as a career, not as a professor with [00:06:15] expectations and judgments and all kinds of things that began to get clear right away.
And I started to feel less at home. World of study that had been so exciting for me for so [00:06:30] long, suddenly became a cramped kind of place. And that certainly continued in my master's. And then through my PhD. And then I carried some of that into my subsequent [00:06:45] teaching positions.
What Led you to keep on? Relating to and Supporting Students [00:06:46]
Britt: Thank you. For me, what comes up is as you experienced that restriction or cramping what led you to keep going on?
Omi: I asked myself that many times. Why am I still doing this? And I [00:07:00] think there are a lot of big reasons.
There's a kind of legacy and, legacy I think in a healthy kind of way. I felt like I was part of a lineage. I knew that I had ancestors who couldn't [00:07:15] go to college, let alone become a professor.
So I felt like it was a real honor and an extension of who they were [00:07:30] and what they dreamt up for me. In my spiritual cosmology, my understanding is that we, all human beings, are our ancestors best wish. We dream. So thinking of myself [00:07:45] that way I felt I had a, I'll use the word responsibility, to do my very best, even in a very difficult situation.
Also, I love the students. I love the students. I love them. Those people [00:08:00] sitting there. Wanting to be good, wanting to be their best. Many of them not knowing what world they've just landed in. I want it to help them know they could have a home space in that world [00:08:15] as hard as it might be. And even as I say that, I'm very aware that as a black woman, there are these ideas about me as a nurturer that some people hold and there are a lot of black women professors [00:08:30] who want to make it clear to their students that they are not their mother, that they are their professor and all of the respect that goes with that title should be given to them. I'm really aware of that. And I've had to balance that knowledge that some of [00:08:45] my students may be seeing me inappropriately as a mother figure.
I had to balance that with, I really wanted them to love themselves. So it was a tussle at times internally not to reinforce certain [00:09:00] stereotypes or inappropriate expectations while at the same time doing what I think I'm here to do, and that is help people know that they are worthy.
Mya: It's so interesting that you say that because I sometimes feel [00:09:15] that tension as well. When I'm teaching, I want the students to explore themselves, grow and learn to articulate their thoughts and ideas around these concepts. And the way that I do it is trying to create a space where they can work through that. [00:09:30] It is somewhat nurturing, but it's also just somebody who gives them space that I've seen that a lot of my undergraduates didn't have. They were so used to being given things or told things that they [00:09:45] didn't learn to develop these things themselves. Office hours students came to me and unloaded all sorts of information on me, but it's because they felt that safety, they felt that nurturing was something that supported and encouraged them as human [00:10:00] beings that they didn't feel like they always got somewhere else.
Omi: That was my experience very much. And you said it right using the word tension because yes, I wanted them to come to office hours and share if there's a way [00:10:15] in which that sharing helps them, I'm hoping, to also be critical of the very institution that they were a part of.Why do I feel so uncomfortable here? Why am I only sharing or sharing with this faculty person and that, but not with others? So maybe that [00:10:30] gave them some way to analyze that experience. And there were times when I felt like it was in a couple of different ways.
One, I wasn't sure. I was always equipped to handle all that they were bringing to me. I didn't necessarily [00:10:45] have the training to handle some of these larger more, psychologically complex issues that they brought. Sometimes it was too much because it meant, inevitably, if I'm taking time with that, I'm not doing something else. And as [00:11:00] much as I wanted to take time with that meant I wasn't doing what the Academy told me I should be doing, writing the article, going to the conference, doing those kinds of career requirements. So yeah, tension is a great word to [00:11:15] identify what that felt like.
Ancestral Roots, Spirituality and Faculty Support [00:11:16]
Britt: You spoke to the power of connecting to your ancestral roots. When you were in graduate school, did you have much, if any of that actual contextual support of either faculty or the grad students? [00:11:30] Where did you derive your strength from, with those around you?
Omi: I taught at Howard and it was at Howard that I began my dissertation. So when I was at Howard, I was not on a tenure track position or any of that. It was really important to be in [00:11:45] Washington DC and to be at Howard in these predominantly black spaces, because my dissertation was looking at Yoruba cosmology and Yoruba aesthetics to [00:12:00] see how African American theater artists might draw from that as a series of grounded strategies for creating our work, African American work.
I don't know that I would have [00:12:15] had the clarity, the. And clarity is even too sharp, a word, but I was in a world where black simply was. So it felt in some ways, almost inevitable or obvious that I would pursue a [00:12:30] dissertation that took me deep into an idea or several ideas of blackness. I don't know that I would have gone in that direction, if I were somewhere else, if I had been, if I had stayed at the University of Maryland, for [00:12:45] example, I'm not sure that I would've done that work.
There's something really powerful about a thing being an IS rather than something that has to be defended. I didn't have to defend anything in the [00:13:00] environment of Howard.
Now I did my PhD at New York University and I didn't have any black professors while I was there. My professors encouraged me were very supportive, and didn't [00:13:15] always have the, whew, I'll say the spiritual tools for lack of a better term, to fuel, what was undergirding, all of that interest of mine.
They were excellent in [00:13:30] helping me to think of , a handful of other scholars I might look at, some other approaches, even though the approaches that they were offering were pretty what I'm going to call "standard approaches" rather than the really spiritual ones I was [00:13:45] hoping to get at in that dissertation.
So they did a great jobpreparing me for the career, I would eventually have, even though there was no direct support around the sort of juice, of the dissertation. [00:14:00] And I did all that dancing. I'm not really sure if I answered the question, but it was a dance!
Mya: So can I reflect back and see if I heard...
Omi: Please you'll do it better than I did!!
Mya: How I'm understanding it is that, as [00:14:15] faculty advisors or supporters, they supported in the technicality of the scholar part. But the spirituality, is a humaness of you as a person searching for meaning or [00:14:30] understanding, and, what drives us is this human quest for understanding and connection and things that I don't think the Academy is [00:14:45] appropriately resourced to support. A key it's the human, the humanness, or the human bound, passion things that drive people.
And for scholars of color, [00:15:00] who the push and the drive for legacy or family or the understanding that others don't have, the opportunities that you are in a position to do things that others can't. That is something that I don't think most of [00:15:15] our advisors can really relate to. And so they don't really know what to do with, so they focus on the technical and the other sort of human piece that doesn't get nurtured or it doesn't get directed.
Omi: Absolutely. Let me add to that because you helped me to [00:15:30] clarify one other thing. You're absolutely right, my faculty were great at what you're calling the technical part of moving through the dissertation and maybe they thought that by offering that up in a very precise and [00:15:45] rigorous way, that they were really serving me well, and they were, but in other words, maybe what they saw of me spiritually, so to speak was: a black woman, who would be the first person in her family line to get a PhD. [00:16:00] So let's give her every tool possible for being successful with that PhD, every tool that they knew, and they did.
You know what I mean?So I think there may be some ways in which they were fulfilling a kind of spiritual agenda too, that they [00:16:15] might not articulate in that way at all. But as you noticed, and I didn't even know I was seeking it at the time of doing the dissertation, but I turned to the Yoruba because I knew that there were ways of making art and [00:16:30] life that were not supported in Western theater. The Western theater that I knew. And not supported by the life options that were generally handed to me. So I don't know that I knew that! So [00:16:45] let alone my faculty knowing it. And I'm excited that in the latter part of my academic career, and I say that as if my academic career is over-- it is formally, I'm retired now, [00:17:00] it is in a different moment.
It's exciting to see graduate students who really are embracing in a much more direct way than I was, their dissertations, their scholarship as self investigation and not [00:17:15] in a self-absorbed way, but to say, I'm here on the planet I am here. So what does my presence mean in the larger fabric of things? And I'm so excited to see graduate students who [00:17:30] are going in, in that way, how to make sense of my own reality through this research.
Britt: I see it through my experience of this practical versus the transformational. And I think my faculty [00:17:45] were very similar to yours and that they understood the tactics, how to get a tenure track position, how to succeed in this academic world, all of which were important, strategic tools to know. But listening to you, it made me realize [00:18:00] that actually what drew me to graduate education after being away from the Academy for a few years, Was actually this quest for what you called meaning and understanding, the transformation. I was drawn to the things I was learning that were helping me to transform as a [00:18:15] human and understanding my own place in this experience of life. And that wasn't what my faculty wanted to talk about.
Now. I should say that as a master's student, I did have some faculty that were supportive of that. And I think for me, it's I learned [00:18:30] some of the frameworks, even just something about like critical ethnography or being able to understand positionality or some of these frames that, that come beautifully out of post-structural, feminist, [00:18:45] postmodernist thinking, that have helped us to understand how meaning is constructed our place in it. And so on that I experienced as being fundamentally like emotional, spiritual, transformational learning, not intellectual deconstructive, being able to [00:19:00] position that within a theoretical framework. And I get that, I could totally get that.
You can make a career out of it and everything, but that, wasn't where I lived. But hearing you describe it, I think it helps [00:19:15] to bring some definition that some of that tension that I. My experience through my own graduate journey.
Omi: No I so appreciate being able to articulate some of this because, part of why [00:19:30] I think I became an academic, which is related to one of the things you asked me, I thought it really would be much more a life of the mind than it is. It is much more a life of [00:19:45] career than it is life of the mind. I thought I'd be exchanging ideas with people who were interested, not in winning arguments, not proving their intelligence, but who really [00:20:00] wanted to explore that idea who were really trying to see, can we indeed, as I believe hold multiple truths at the same time? Can we do that? How do we explore that? That was what I thought I was going to [00:20:15] get, as I continued my academic life.
So I thought it was going to get more of that kind of feeling from a reading and so on that I had in elementary school and Some of the conversations, even that [00:20:30] I would have in high school with people about a story that we read, graduate school was not that. And then trying to figure out what kind of academic I wanted to be after that training. It was much later in [00:20:45] my teaching that I came to create environments that began to reflect those kinds of things that I wanted to have that I want to have as a grad student even as a [00:21:00] faculty member, so yes. Another way to say thank you for this conversation.
Britt: Think we've already established our mutual admiration society.
Omi: That's right, we did that part.
Competitiveness and Creating Community [00:21:12]
Mya: interesting that you're talking about [00:21:15] creating these environments, because one of the things that struck me in your earlier comment about the environment of graduate school, you talk about competitiveness and fear, amongst the peers and the [00:21:30] relationship with faculty as well.
That resonates with the experience that I have of highly competitive program. And most of the fears that we experienced was there aren't enough jobs to go around how are people going to land jobs when you get there? And that kind of [00:21:45] environment does not really facilitate or foster community.
One of my questions is how did you create community that either [00:22:00] encouraged or supported you or that protected you, perhaps in some way of the emotional strain of that kind of environment?
Omi: As a faculty member, I created community mostly outside of the Academy. [00:22:15] I wasn't active theater practitioner for much of my academic career and continue to perform some but much less now. So there was a theater community, a theater world that I was very much a part of. I did a lot [00:22:30] of work with the local theaters in Austin. Texas. And then when I was in DC teaching at Howard and then close enough to DC at the university of Maryland, I did a lot of professional theater work, so that was my community.
We worked on things [00:22:45] together. It was that simple. In some ways it's really that simple. We collaborated and academic life. It has nothing to do with collaboration. You are rewarded for the solo authored books, a solo author essay, [00:23:00] a grad seminar, people don't even work together .
We're at a moment in time when, if we don't figure out how to collaborate, its over! The planet's gonna figure out what to do. Human beings? We will be the dinosaurs unless we figure this out, [00:23:15] but we don't provide any training. At the highest level of education we provide virtually no training in how to work with people. If people are in a very particular program that is community centered , there's probably [00:23:30] training about community activism and that kind of thing, which is really important. But man, it should just be a general, how you work together?
Britt: Thank you for that, because I think it speaks to some of the inherent flaws, maybe too nice of a word, but of the Academy [00:23:45] where there's, this is very antiquated structure that is, as you said, not incentivized to promote collaboration. It is built on a culture of scarcity where there are only so many jobs to have. [00:24:00] So therefore, if you are successful and achieve the outcome, which is a tenure track job or whatever, you become then positioned in that role to then perpetuate culture. It's just so self-fulfilling in so many ways.
And [00:24:15] I think part of the impetus to have these kinds of conversations, was that so much of the vision, the energy, the curiosity, it's within these conversations, people like us, who've gone through the conventional experience and see the potential . You [00:24:30] have people coming together with very strong intent to learn and do things differently and passion for all these ideas and all these things. And yet, The system is intended to crush that, I like to say that, these things are called disciplines for a reason, [00:24:45] because you learn the way and those who learn the way, advance. And so it's a bit of a Gordian knot, right? Where there's so much potential. And yet there's such deeply entrenched [00:25:00] attachment to the way of doing things.
Black Feminism and Theatre [00:25:02]
Omi: When you say that it prompts me to include in this whole thing about collaborating and working together, part of what I was drawn to during my early [00:25:15] career, as a professor was theater and black feminism came later as an understanding it's always been present, but as a something to articulate as a practice came later and collaboration is very important to black [00:25:30] feminist theory.
So theater, a place where you actually make things, you got to figure something out with somebody and black feminism and the black feminist spaces that I connected to around collaboration really [00:25:45] come out of the Combahee River Collective statement andhow those women, ooh through a lot of conflict, forged powerful work.
So those ideas are important. And I wanted to mention both of those [00:26:00] because each of them, black feminist theory and praxis and theater, particularly the kind of theater that I am most drawn to theatrical jazz, challenges and not even always consciously, it's not like setting out to resist, [00:26:15] but because it's what comes up is something other than what already exists.
So these collaboration's were generating new possibilities and I was really excited by that. Working with Laurie [00:26:30] Carlos and Robbie McAuley, Daniel Alexander Jones, Sharon Bridgeforth these people were doing things in theater. I was like what you can do that or not even, or, and it was, Oh, if they can do that and they're a human [00:26:45] being and I'm a human being might be able to do this too. So I wanted to make sure I put in the mix of this conversation. The ways, the black feminist theory, the ways that theatrical jazz gave me the [00:27:00] assurance, even if it was tiny and tiny for a long time, but the assurance that there's some other ways to do something, I didn't get that in academic life.
I got that there's a way to do things, not multiple possibilities.
Creating New Communities [00:27:13]
Mya: So if I could [00:27:15] follow that up with a question, how did you make that transition or begin creating those communities or those connections outside of academia that allowed you to do these other types of projects or other types of things that fed you [00:27:30] differently?
Omi: It is hard, as you said to figure out the point, cause it was more and more of a evolution kind of slide, as opposed to a point. There were a couple of things that I think were useful in encouraging me to [00:27:45] trust that there are other ways of doing things. And I must say this too, this conversation is helping to articulate a lot of this.
If you don't say some things out loud or write them down or dance them or blow them into a saxophone, you don't [00:28:00] know. This conversation is helping me to even get sharper on some of the things that I live my life and I was like, Oh yeah, that's a choice.
I came to the university of Texas in 1990, my first tenure track position. And I felt like a real [00:28:15] fish out of water. Some years later, a friend of mine, Edmund T Gordon, who's still at UT, he and I became the director. He was the director and I was the associate director of something called the Warfield Center for African and African-American studies. And [00:28:30] we turned it out. We said, okay, we gonna go for broke. Every vision we got, this is our shot.
And we did many things and it was enormous fun and it was incredibly difficult and there were nights of crying. I was so tired just drained from the [00:28:45] effort and it was amazing. That was important.
First of all, you could be real subversive in institutions and one of the things that universities have trained many of us to do is to follow the path. There's a whole lot of these [00:29:00] kinds of swervy places. As a center I'd always argued we had a whole lot more flexibility than the department. Departments had to have majors and departments had curriculum and all these things the state legislature oversaw and all that stuff.
So we did all [00:29:15] kinds of things. We started an art gallery. We had a performing blackness series. We had a lecture series. We went for broke. So that experience helped me to know, Oh, a whole lot is doable. [00:29:30] If you dream and are willing to put in the work with the understanding that exhaustion is never a strategy exhaustion should never be the way. But that was important.
I think that kind of gets at your question, [00:29:45] Mya.
Note too, it was working with somebody and lots of other people. It was not just me and Ted. It was a lot of other people who were in there and it meant doing all kinds of things. When you go into meetings and those paneled, walled offices and so on, [00:30:00] working out between us, who's going to make which argument and all this, there was a lot of collaboration a lot of people conspiring together to make something different to do something new. That was exciting.
Clearly you see my energy level just went up
Mya: For listeners [00:30:15] who can't see us, the level of enthusiasm and all of the additional parts of your body that were involved in the telling of that, clearly it's something that is joyful for you.
The memories bring you joy [00:30:30] and excitement and they're good memories. And we can't always say that about things affiliated with our educations as graduate students.
Omi: And it is, it's energizing. I also don't want to mislead myself or others. It was hard. [00:30:45] And we tussled as faculty. We tussled with each other. Sometimes and not very generous and kind ways. So I don't want to paint a picture that it was only the joy, but there was a lot of joy, a lot of joy.
[00:31:00]
Britt: I think that's a great story for this podcast because it happened within an academic structure. You were able to marshal the support and the connection underneath and find your niche in the Overarching [00:31:15] academic framework. I think there's so many of those, especially with the large state institutions, our R one institutions that have all these places to just find opportunity. But that requires an entrepreneurial spirit that requires some [00:31:30] creativity that requires the will to do it. And, finding others who can help to guide you and say, Hey actually there are all kinds of ways to find opportunity to advance your ideas in the Academy that don't involve a tenure [00:31:45] track position.
Omi: I think many people, so-called junior faculty, when they enter a tenure track position, don't even realize what they could do, even as junior junior faculty, what they could really do differently, that might be [00:32:00] more in alignment with their spirits, their hearts, how they envision the world.
Turning Point to Take Action [00:32:06]
Britt: Was there a turning point where fully occupied that tension between the fear and the confidence to take action? You remember a [00:32:15] particular event or some something you worked through or?
Omi: There are a couple of incidents that keep coming back to me, I'm not sure that this is exactly what your question is headed toward, but I'm going to mention [00:32:30] two of them because again, they just keep rising up over time. So I know that they are relevant in some kind of way.
One incident when I was the associate director of the center... young black undergraduate, who had [00:32:45] spent a fair amount of time in and out of the center, undergrads would come and flop on the couch and study in different places and so on. And it was very nice having that energy. So he hung around and I knew him. Not well, but he'd never been a student of mine, but I knew him from [00:33:00] being in the center.
I was at my desk and he came in and clearly something was wrong. His body was stiff and he was talking the way I am right now. It was. And I said, come in. And [00:33:15] then he just started crying. For a black man for any man black man at a PWI to cry...
This was summer school, he was in some class. I don't even remember what department it was. But the class [00:33:30] got into a discussion. I think about enslavement in the US and the students were arguing back and forth. And my memory on these details is fuzzy. I believe they were talking about the pros and cons of [00:33:45] enslavement.
And this young black man, done up, the button-down shirt and the crisply press pants and the whole thing sitting in his classroom and the teacher didn't do anything to [00:34:00] advance a series of well-known truths.
So I held this young man and he cried and that body stiff that stayed with me. I think that one is important because. I thought, a [00:34:15] couple of things we academics and I will say black academics in particular, we can offer spaces where students can validate the rage of such a [00:34:30] moment.
And think of that as a moment that can lead us to building and celebrating. So I think there's something in what we do as academics that should make [00:34:45] space for some of that. Not that we are counselors, not that we are psychiatrists, but this is what students are encountering in classrooms where they should be free in quotation marks.
All [00:35:00] right. And then the other incident.
Young black woman was working on a project with some of her classmates. She was the only black one in her group. They were sitting in a hallway working on this project because I guess they had spread out [00:35:15] across the building to work on the project and non-black professor came out of his classroom and basically called her a B, and told her to shut up, she was making too much noise.
Long story short, I worked [00:35:30] with her to prepare her grievance and the upshot of all of that was that the university acknowledged that the professor had done something wrong, but that it wasn't racist. Her friends wrote affidavits to say he singled her out. He [00:35:45] talked to her, he didn't address the group that, all of that, but that it wasn't racist, on a technicality, I'll say this this way, there is such an investment in whiteness and in institutions [00:36:00] that people will invest in those things on a technicality.
So if I had said sexist, if I had argued that what he did was a sexist thing, maybe then, because it was the B word. Had he used the N word, maybe then there was some... [00:36:15] you see what I'm saying? And those two things, and you can, I'm animated now in a different way, they broke my heart. Those two things broke my heart and I recognize that part of the heartbreak was that I couldn't protect either of those people.
[00:36:30] Here. I was a professor. Hey, got my degree. Making my salary. I get my summers off and my retirement planning and none of that protected either from what was clearly an assault on who they were. [00:36:45] And the institution didn't stand up for them. So I think those things, it was like, Oh, this is, and I knew it, sometimes you got to get hit over the head.
Like my ancestors, they know I'm hard headed. So I said, okay, [00:37:00] Omi, you didn't get it, let me give it to you again. So those two things broke my heart. And as with so many things, I think it will be black folk going to have to figure out how to take care of black folks. If we want to be in these institutions and have less damage [00:37:15] done to our spirits, I invite us to think of some other things.
And all of that I just said could be said about every single person up in the Academy. If we want people to be healthy in the Academy, we should think of other [00:37:30] ways to allow those institutions to function. So those are the two things I hope that they are instructive to other folk.
Institutions and Representation [00:37:41]
Mya: It's interesting that , at the particular moment we find ourselves in [00:37:45] and diversity, representation, and why it's important and appointing black CEOs and people on the boards and college presidents, et cetera, which is all well and good. But as your [00:38:00] story illustrates, simply having people in institutions is not enough because it's the practices of the institutions. It's the non people of color that creates situations or [00:38:15] speak in particular ways or act, or don't act in ways, as you said, that advance certain ideas in a more coherent or logical manner. And that perfectly illustrates why tokenistic representation is not [00:38:30] helpful.
Institutions as a whole need to think about their processes and their procedures and how they possibly themselves in order to create environments where people's selves are not assaulted as [00:38:45] human beings.
Omi: What's joyous for me about this conversation is that the two of you often take something that I've said and find a nuance in it. That wasn't my intention, but makes perfect sense. And Mya, this is an example because I think what you just [00:39:00] did. Yes yes. To everything you just said. And what I was thinking of when I was trying to work that analogy between what I'm calling the technicality with the young woman and what's going on in the United States, us government people [00:39:15] know what happened on January 6th. People know what happened. I have listened to enough of the commentaries now to know that many of those persons are not going to be charged at the highest level in part, because somebody [00:39:30] found something in the constitution to protect white people is what that means.
That's what that means. And we all know if those persons had looked different, nobody would have hunted the constitution to figure out, Oh, [00:39:45] because this is domestic terrorism. We don't really have laws in the books that nobody would have cared. It's like this man, somebody provost found this way to get out of the maximum penalty for that professor, just as whatever [00:40:00] happens to all of those insurrectionists and only probably an eighth of them. If that many we'll get any kind of anything, they are still not going to get what would have been the maximum penalty if they had looked any different. I'm like, wow, this is [00:40:15] when you get your bags packed for Ghana.
Global Lens and Perspective [00:40:17]
Mya: It's interesting because the way in which America operates is driven so much by our history and the way it was shaped and all of these other things. And one of the things that interested me about your story [00:40:30] too, is this global lens.
You had talked about, these other communities of women who used performance in a different way, or these other communities that try to illustrate or message [00:40:45] or express themselves in different ways then traditional American theater. And the fact that they are from the African continent and or diaspora is also interesting because mainstream academia, mainstream America don't really think of [00:41:00] those places as having anything to benefit to broad cultural depth or progress or advancement. And so it was really interesting when we were reading your bio, when we first talked to find somebody else who had a [00:41:15] global lens to the ways in which they work, that also was able to see different models and mechanisms for doing things that were worth sharing. And that, I don't think is something that I would say [00:41:30] in my field for sociology, like global or international, it's not really a thing. Because the American version is the one that is upheld. And to find somebody who is doing work in a global sense to, or using [00:41:45] comparative or global mechanisms or models to be able to contribute in advance scholarship and work here is really fascinating. So that was something that also I was curious about.
Omi: Wow. Wow. Wow, I love the way You frame that [00:42:00] because I am only beginning to look at my work as more global. It's really interesting. When you are a quote unquote researcher, there is a way that we are sometimes encouraged, not with critical ethnography, but other approaches [00:42:15] where we're encouraged to stand at a distance from the research.
And it's fairly recently, like the last 10, 15 years that I've done to really understand how my ideas about performance, my ideas about life have been shaped by [00:42:30] extended periods in Nigeria, evolving relationships in Ghana, evolving relationships in Brazil, that all of those things have come to bear.
When Trump was elected president I was thinking, Oh, I need to talk to my friends who've been working with [00:42:45] dictators for a long time. They know some things, how are they navigating? How are they thriving with dictators in place? So I'm trying to embrace more of my relationships throughout the diaspora so that I can learn more [00:43:00] and understand, I'm working to release myself from US arrogance.Everybody's supposed to have a house and everybody's supposed to have a car and everybody's supposed to get a college degree. Trying to release myself from unconscious [00:43:15] expectations and my relationships outside of the us help to do that. They're vital for me.
Britt: I was trained as a geographer and one of the things I enjoyed the most about my training was that geographers, relatively early on to other [00:43:30] disciplines, had to confront Colonialism and had to work through that because the discipline itself was hand in glove with conquest and imperialism and colonization. So as a result you find a longer tail of critical analysis [00:43:45] of what harm geographers are wrought on the world as being enablers of the Imperial project.
For me, the global piece has been so important in even just situating the sort of the recent moment in American context of [00:44:00] supremacy and very outward forms of oppression and how those are experienced and then seeing how they're similar and different in other people.
Wow. I wanna come back to those two stories that you shared, because even though you qualified it as being, maybe not [00:44:15] clear, I think there's something in that telling and in that sharing that I can connect to what you've said and what you've shared as something similar to either something that I've experienced or others around me have.
That like you said , you've got to get the word out, you've got to lay [00:44:30] that tune and hear how it sounds , but also how it lands on others as a result of that begin to create something together.
Omi: Yeah. This podcast is part of that, right? Trying to figure out how to create new possibilities doing it together. The fact that the two of you are doing this [00:44:45] together. It's not a solo venture, that's really important. So yeah, you are modeling it. And indeed, I think that was one of thinking spiritually that the universe set it up, my ancestors set it up, I was supposed to be there for those folks, [00:45:00] help them move through a difficult time.
How would you describe your relationship to the Academy? [00:45:02]
Britt: How do you think you might describe your relationship to the Academy?
Omi: Wow. Tell you what's hard. I'm still trying to figure it out. For a while I'd gotten comfortable, even with retirement of saying I am an [00:45:15] academic, which was a way to acknowledge that I have certain sensibilities, this certain ways of doing that I think of as academic, that feel like mine. I have more recently thought, [00:45:30] Oh, to name myself, that way, it's too much of a box and so I've been toying with other kinds of namings. I've I redid my CV, because now it's okay, how do I present myself to the [00:45:45] world? Do you put your academic training first and then all your publications? Or how do you order all of that? I'm having a hard time because I don't know.
There's a way that I love school. Let me say that. I love it. I love it. I love learning and excitement and light [00:46:00] bulbs going off and it's part of being human is how we grow, it's how we connect with others.
Now. What do I do with that when I line it up against it's really hard and damaging practices in academic institutions. [00:46:15] So I don't know. I'm excited that I know there are people who are now creating their own sort of academic institutions. There is something called the black feminist film school that Julia R. Wallace, who started through Mobile homecoming. And [00:46:30] I know that there are lots of others of such examples. Those things are very exciting to me.
I don't know if the Academy, as an institution is going to be a place where black freedom can happen. I don't know. I don't know, as long as [00:46:45] there are black faculty and there are black students who are enrolling in institutions, I want to do what I can to encourage them, encourage myself to whoo, stretch those [00:47:00] institutions. Be subversive within those institutions to create healthier places for everybody. I don't know how I would describe that in terms of a relationship. Every relationship is complicated. That's right. It's very complicated. Cause like [00:47:15] I haven't been able to completely walk away. A friend invited me to team teach a grad seminar at Northwestern this spring quarter. And I was thrilled. I was like yes. I'd love to do that. And the title is black art [00:47:30] in anti-black world. I was like, Oh yeah, come on. Let's do this. So I don't know how to easily name my relationship. I haven't closed the door on it. I haven't given up on it so to speak.
Britt: It sounds like you still believe that they can change. You still believe in their core.
[00:47:45]
Omi: I guess, you know what I got to check myself on, is it that? Or is it what I hope it's not some notion that I've got this solo power to do this thing. You know what? Maybe rather than I think it can change. I just still get juice from ideas. Do you know what I mean? [00:48:00] I'm excited to see what's going to come in this grad seminar that they're going to have to make work around various themes. I'm excited to see where their imaginations take them that still is thrilling.
Britt: The way I experienced what you've just shared is that you're still quite [00:48:15] clear what it is that you love and that is the learning.
Omi: That's true. That's true .
Mya: What also resonated with me is that you are not allowing the institutions to limit what you believe can [00:48:30] be transformative education or learning for students, whether it's the grad seminar that you teach or how you've conducted the courses that you've taught.
Because it often looks to me as though, [00:48:45] institutions through the structures and processes within departments determine what is important to teach. Whether it's an intro level that can reach 400 students or a seminar where you only want to focus on 25 students and deep dives, [00:49:00] within those topics, faculty have some wiggle room in how they can make that learning. Perhaps the change is not exclusively in what is being taught, but how we teach and make that relevant to [00:49:15] students. As you said, in a way that is positive for everybody, and also informative and transformative and connecting with people, maybe that's the opportunity and the place for change or just push back [00:49:30] against the traditional academic thing.
Omi: I think there's a lot of space in classrooms to do a whole bunch of stuff. As much as there may be state mandates about what the curriculum is supposed to be, what you actually do in your [00:49:45] classroom. Nobody knows what you're doing in there! Nobody knows. Yeah, I think bell hooks in Teaching to Transgress said that the classroom is the greatest site for social resistance, social activism. But it was a way to [00:50:00] acknowledge that as a place where a lot can happen. Yeah. Yeah. I agree.
Engaging Black Academics [00:50:04]
Britt: Omi, I want to make sure that we make space to explore your project with engaging black academics and if you'd like to say [00:50:15] what that is and how it's progressing and what your vision is for it.
Omi: Sure. It is called at this moment, Our Next Now I co-created this with my partner, my wife, Sharon Bridgeforth and it is what I'm calling a rumination. [00:50:30] And there are, I believe five sections to this rumination.
Sharon is somebody who writes for performance and has developed a series of Oracle cards, ancestral, oceanic, Oracle cards [00:50:45] that have a relationship to Yoruba cosmology. She did a reading of that deck, which meant she pulled five cards from that deck in a particular sequence. That sequencing informed what I [00:51:00] then had to offer about the Academy as Our Next Now.
I mentioned some of the sections the five sections begin and we've got to start, we all people, and in this instance, in particular black people, to feel into what needs to [00:51:15] be done, we have to get present. We have to be still long enough, so we got to start somewhere.
The second section of the rumination of the Oracle reading is healing. I think black academics have so much [00:51:30] healing to do without that healing. I fear we allow our pain to spill out. Sometimes in explosive ways with our colleagues, with our grad students in particular, a lot that has not been addressed, that is painful. [00:51:45] That should be grieved and then healing. So those two go hand in hand.
I then offer as a third, following the sequencing of Sharon's reading: building, making community, collaborating. I think that this is very [00:52:00] important part of healing actually is doing with others, working with others and black academics, perhaps of necessity we spend a lot of time in our classrooms, rehearsing black pain. As somebody who taught performance, to [00:52:15] talk about black performance in a, if I want to do the history of that United States, there's gotta be some conversation on resistance. It's gotta be some discussion of productions that never got mounted because the artists said that they weren't going to be in segregated locations, so there's some reference [00:52:30] to black pain that gets rehearsed over and over again, I think in our classrooms and that can leave faculty and students full of the pain, those stories, the stories I told earlier, they are in our muscles.
So [00:52:45] celebration gives us new muscle memories. Literally dancing, singing, writing, parades, costuming, all those things floral design, making a garden. All those things are physical activities [00:53:00] that give us new muscle memories about being human in general and being black, particularly. So that's the thing.
And I say something, I referenced the one story about the young woman being called out of her name. I need to include the story about a young man. [00:53:15] Again, if it keeps rising up, it's like I'm supposed to do something with it. And that's what I'll do.
My hope with all of this is that people will feel inspired to do some really creative, perhaps outlandish things in those classrooms, close that [00:53:30] door and create the world that makes you excited.
And what would that be? And I feel sure students, they will be beating the door down to get into those classes. Students are hungry for something that says I'm an [00:53:45] individual. Yes. I want to be in collective, but I'm an individual that my story matters. My me-ness matters. That's what I'm working on!
Britt: A small little side project!
Omi: I thought, I didn't know, but it's much bigger than I realized. I think it is a [00:54:00] book. I think what I want to do, I think I need something bigger and book is, I wish I had another word, but it's a, it's something else than something that will appear in a academic publication It's something else.
Britt: That might be a lovely high note to [00:54:15] dismount on. Especially with the inspirational visioning and particularly the need for that type of a praxis within so many communities whether they be academic or otherwise.
Closing [00:54:26]
Britt: I want to thank you Omi. Oh, [00:54:30] it's just been, it's been one of those elevating conversations that I think will be with me for a long time as things continue to sprout. There were several moments , where I felt like I needed a moment or two, [00:54:45] the absorption rate, wasn't keeping up with the pace of the conversation. I really appreciate it.
Mya: I echo Britt's sentiments. I haven't been writing in my notebook for a while, but I was taking copious notes. There were [00:55:00] just a lot of things that resonated for me personally, but also things that outside of the Academy, I was able to connect with in terms of skillsets and ideas and motivations as well. And [00:55:15] I don't think I'm alone in that, so I'm excited for others to be able to hear and make those connections as well. And so I thank you for your openness and the energy has really also been great.
Omi: It is such a precious opportunity [00:55:30] to articulate. Do you know? So for many of those things, I've never said out loud before it, those things that I said some of them I've said before, but in different kinds of ways. So it was such a growth process for me, to stand inside of those [00:55:45] ideas in this way.I just want to thank you again for the work you're doing individually, like out in the world, but then also for this, because it's affirming that some of the things that I feel I should pursue and you gave me the space to articulate some things [00:56:00] more clearly.
Thank you both so much. What a great thing you're doing. This is such a great thing. This is really important. I'm excited to see how it evolves. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe I'll come back.Maybe there's a part two in the future a year [00:56:15] or so what will have transpired in the world?
I would be remiss if I didn't say thank you to Jennifer Lentfer, she put us together. Thank you. Thank you.
Reflections [00:56:25]
Mya: One of the key words that came out for me was collaboration. And the idea that the Academy doesn't train us or prepare us or value collaboration. [00:56:45] And it was interesting because in my multi-disciplinary master's program for international education, there was a lot of collaboration, but in a more traditional PhD, a social science background [00:57:00] program for sociology there wasn't.
But outside of the Academy in the work that I've done with Japan or China or other programs, it's always been about collaboration. And so to hear it come up in this conversation in [00:57:15] that way, with respect to the Academy really made me think about where did I learn those skills? Where did I get that training? And I'm not really sure I have an answer for that but it raised that question for me, that I thought was fascinating
Britt: Yeah. [00:57:30] I think there's so many things or maybe more emotions that are present for me. And I don't quite have the language to describe them. I was just so moved by her generosity of spirit and her enthusiasm for [00:57:45] learning. That latter point on learning because it reminded me of what I was like as a young person, but also what led me to want to continue on with school and how I coupled school with learning because of course, why wouldn't you as a young person? because it's what you know. [00:58:00] But then you realize, Oh, learning doesn't really happen here. Or maybe it's we realize learning can happen another ways and you can get fueled by that.
And her enthusiasm for that commitment or that understanding of herself was very defining [00:58:15] for me. And her mentioning the wisdom of her elders and her ancestors and that being a really important driving factor.
Mya: Yeah. That was going to be my emotional point. There was a deep sense of caring and [00:58:30] humanity for people in the way that she talked about her students and wanting to provide spaces for them,talking about protecting or safety and it's often hard for me to believe that there [00:58:45] are more people out there who care about people, because that's not really what we talk about that's not really what we hear. And so to be reminded that there are people out there who are passionate and care about people makes me hopeful and [00:59:00] validates the fact that I'm not alone or we are not alone and that heart-centeredness work or careers that are driven by that are successful and are impactful and are meaningful in the world is also validating [00:59:15] and very hopeful.
Britt: The first story she told about the young black man who came into her office and broke down. Of course it was very moving and the image that came to mind was that representing larger place [00:59:30] in the world of her and that grounded inspiration of being able to create a space to hold the trauma of others and then to help facilitating some healing. And she went on later to describe the parts of her rumination [00:59:45] on the Next Now, but connected to that, the aspect of building community celebration, isn't just acknowledged, but actually it's to transform. And it's the step into that, next now. And so it's elevated the [01:00:00] discourse or potential for the conversations that we're convening here, beyond just the tactical, "how do I make it through the Academy?" I just so deeply appreciate her and how she showed up, there was no performance to it and just how she is [01:00:15] helping to clarify what this could be and then what it could contribute.
Mya: And the conversation that she had about the advisors and the technical and the feeding, the soul or the spirit pieces is reflective [01:00:30] of what we had thought about and envisioned for the podcast, right? Like it's not about navigating specifically, grad school, but what are the emotional and personal and human aspects of the experience, that have stories to share [01:00:45] or lessons to learn or just information. That can be valuable to somebody else or to get somebody else to think about their own experience in graduate school and navigating that. And I really resonated with [01:01:00] her idea of sharpening and the idea that conversations help you to sharpen and articulate your thoughts and ideas, and are places and spaces to say out loud things that you haven't ever said to somebody before. And so [01:01:15] the conversation is that space, it's that environment where people can feel safe to, to speak, to share, to open up. And that is something that's needed everywhere and anywhere, not just in [01:01:30] the Academy, but in other places. And so if the podcast can be that for people, that's wonderful thing. And that's our contribution to the cacophony of podcasts.
Britt: I just appreciate how, from a purely self-interested [01:01:45] standpoint there's an unexpected lightness of being that I had not even anticipated nor expected would be a part of this, like cracking open of my experience in and around the Academy.
And even [01:02:00] retroactively being able to say I wasn't alone, or I'm not alone now. As I carry with me, whatever memories of that experience. Just a real gift and real.
Mya: I think the other emotional piece is there was something very spiritual about the [01:02:15] conversation and just in between the three of us and, I feel like there was a piece of me where the spirituality that she was talking about and she led with at times spoke to my own sort of faith and belief [01:02:30] and ideas about legacy and Whether it's ancestors, whether it's God, things that helped give me direction or purpose or, move me forward.
That was a real connection point for me that I don't think I [01:02:45] expected. I really was excited to experience. Does that make sense?
Britt: Yeah, absolutely. That totally makes sense. To that point on ancestry and lineage, I had forgotten probably my greatest regret after I confirmed my PhD was that [01:03:00] my grandparents were no longer living and for my paternal grandfather who came as an immigrant ISSEI and finished at the second grade basically, and spoke very little English and so on and was in of course incarcerated and everything else. And [01:03:15] education was something that he believed in so deeply and he was also a farmer. And so we had these other connections through our backgrounds, but that he wasn't alive to experience that. And there were a number of times, where I would summon that, and my wife always knows [01:03:30] how to poke me to make me particularly, emotional like, Oh, your grandfather would probably be so moved by what you're doing... Okay, that's not fair. But just remembering that, and then just the connection and the lineage and all that goes into it.
Okay. Wow. I think [01:03:45] we've set a pretty high bar for ourselves.