The Black Scholar Travelogue in Academia

It is an honor and with immense appreciation to be on this Land of the traditional shared territories of the Huron-Wendat, Petun First Nations, the Seneca, and most recently, the Mississauga of the Credit River of Turtle Island. I locate myself as an African Canadian scholar, affirming my cultural rootedness while acknowledging residence in Toronto. I live and work on this Land that has through the years continued to sustain countless souls, spirits, and bodies even through times of ingratitude. I situate myself as part of a decolonial storytelling, always mindful of the complexities, complicities, and responsibilities to think through, write about, and do the work required of anyone who claims to be “anti-colonial” and “anti-racist.” In this work, I reflect on the sacrifices and magnanimity of the Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island that made it possible for a great number of us to be on this Land. I reflect on the promises and the challenges of getting to the promised Land. I reflect on the ancestors who continue to guide me through these troubled and unsettling times. I reflect on the pain, and suffering from the colonial past and its continuing legacies. Underneath the smile, joy, possibilities, and desires, I also feel a spiritual yearning and regeneration. The colonial wound needs healing and restoration. The Land has allowed me to tell stories that both guide and guard knowledge for action. The Land has also been a place and space of sharing knowledge and dialogue for our collective Living Well through subjective politics. The Land as geo-political, social, spiritual, emotional, and cultural has ensured building relationships with living and non-living beings, learning from the wisdom of ancestors and Elders while appreciating organic Earthly teachings.

In paying homage to Turtle Island, I am anchored in other geographies in spiritual, political, and intellectual ways that allow me to reclaim my African Indigeneity. I belong to the traditional Asakyiri clan of Ghana. My African and Ghanaian Indigeneity is rooted in the family clan and lineage history that traces our descent way back to/from a putative female ancestress even prior to Euro-colonialism. The Asakyiri clan is one of the eleven major clans in the Asante Kingdom of Ghana and our totem is the vulture. The vulture is noted for seeping through leftovers to reclaim what is of value. But the proverbial saying is that the vulture never forgets family and the importance of keeping some things in storage for future needs. My African Indigeneity grounds me in the connection to Land, seas, water, and the sky. It gives me a sense of purpose in the sanctity of life, strengthening my pursuit of education and search for knowledge through academic research, teaching and scholarly writing. This is intellectual power that nobody can take away, not even the colonizer. I reiterate in strong terms that being Black and African impacts everything I do as a Canadian scholar, community worker, family member and citizen of the global nation.

I want readers to be moved by this book. My hope is to model different approaches to writing, offering readers a necessary break from traditional academic writing. I also take this space and time as an opportunity to consolidate some of my early ideas that dance with already existing scholarship. As an oppositional gaze to hegemonic Western knowledge, my objective is to centre my experiences as a Black scholar in the Western academy, schooling, and education, and what it means to seriously consider the requirements and benefits of knowledge as generated through the body, Land, spaces, and politics of Black, Indigenous, and racialized peoples.

I offer a counter-theorizing of ideas in relation to anti-colonial knowledge production. In addition, I contribute to reducing epistemic violence that Black, African, Indigenous, and racialized bodies encounter in academic spaces. Consequently, the book should be read like a conversation and lay of academic theorizing. An important thesis is that we need critical dialogues regarding counter-hegemonic thought in education and the possibilities for the future. Given the state of the world in relation to the continual murders of Black people, our academic engagements need to center race, anti-Black racism, and global Blackness. Hence, the significance of a critical conceptual orientation, one which brings to the fore the possibilities of Black and Indigenous social thought. I contend that Indigenous knowledges help us counter the dominance of Western science knowledge in academia, especially if we ensure that our discursive practices are informed by anti-colonial elaborations and intersectional identities such as race, gender, sexual orientation, dis/ability and class.

We live in a world of deep cynicism. We must continually resist the temptation of simply letting our work/scholarship be a “trend,” or simply adding currency. It is time to shine the light on us. For Black, Indigenous, and racialized scholars our truths are sometimes frivolously and needlessly questioned. The challenges that come and are encountered with doing anti-racist work is ever-present, for the Western academy prefers silence around race and racism. In trying to navigate these challenges, I ask myself; are we prepared to face the risks and consequences of doing anti-Black racism work? What are the risks of becoming a “distinct Black voice” in my academic community? Academic spaces are not innocent, and Black scholars’ complicities and responsibilities need to be examined, from the seduction of the political economy of academia to the ongoing studying of our communities from a distance, and Black denouncements. As a Black scholar, one must master the quotidian practice of Black refusal in academia (Moten & Harney, 2013; Butler & Athena, 2013), and continue to question those who deny it.

We should insist on asserting our truths and authentic knowledges grounded in our everyday lived experiences. Family, community, culture, and history have always been important to me. There are ideals and virtues that emerge from upholding family, community, culture, and history which have guided and continue to guide my sojourn in the Western academy. These ideals and virtues have made me understand what social responsibility truly means. In this project, I pay tribute to my birth parents who instilled ideals and virtues in me as a child, for it has been my family, community and culture that have helped me survive the treacherous life of academia.

Informed by a strong cultural upbringing I can only appreciate my Africanness, as I speak from the heart and a place of gratitude. Even as I have become increasingly critical of society in my work on racism and social justice, I have reflected upon my Black African subjectivity and agency, and what it truly means to be a Black scholar in the Western academy. One thing has been clear and did not take me long to realize, barriers do not exist for everyone, nor do they fall for everyone. You get knocked down, only to get up, dust off and continue the next challenge. As a Black scholar in the Western academy, I expect criticisms and the delegitimizing of my work. I also know I face questions over excellence. I am often viewed as always whining and stand accused of being anti-intellectual when speaking about race and anti-racism in the academy. Everything about being a Black academic in the Western academy is politics. And yes, it must rightly be so. It is for us to understand what politics means and what politics we choose to play, how, why, when and with whom. We also learn that one must be angry if we want to get things done. Nothing is ever handed down to us gleefully. This is the essence of Black rage and anger. We cannot solve a problem we deny. Denials are not simply being complicit, but they serve to sustain the problem we face. We need a public acknowledgement of the disparities, and such acknowledgement to be unapologetic.

Moving through different cultural, national, geographical, and/or onto-epistemological borders in my life, my engagements with and understandings of the concepts of race, justice, equity, diversity, and difference, necessitated a recommitment to anti-colonial politics. I have witnessed the commitment to diversity and postcolonial education in Africa, the Canadian state’s lip service to multiculturalism, the domestication and the resiliency of anti-racism and pointed notion of difference, the power of anti-colonial difference, and the implications of identity for knowledge production. I have also become familiar with the rhetoric of national images and imaginaries of inclusion, belonging and citizenship and institutional avoidance. To speak about race, racism, and anti-Blackness, like all other oppressions, is about becoming a true patriot who, notwithstanding their critique, loves their community and nation and wants them to be better than they currently are. Why is this so difficult to understand? As an African Canadian who has witnessed and experienced anti-Black racism and anti-Blackness, I feel the love for community and nation. But sometimes one can be left wondering whether our nation loves us. I see this particularly in the United States where African Americans are deeply patriotic about their country, but as American professional basketball coach and former player Doc Rivers recently said, “…we keep loving this country and this country does not love us back” (2020).

Rhetorically, we would say we want justice for all. But there is no one model of social justice; and the idea of treating everyone the same, only an aspiration. “Treating everyone the same” is something to hope for, but we are not there yet. To get there we must acknowledge history, the severity of issues for certain bodies and groups, and the necessity to target our responses to the most disenfranchised, disadvantaged segments of our communities.

On educational change, how do we go about disrupting the perception of education today as a core avenue for “global redistributive justice,” (Mundy, 2008), particularly the ways conventional discourses of “democracy,” “good governance,” and “human rights,” are linked with education, specifically, in the Global South and mired in the primacy of globalized markets and capitalism (global capital). There is the Western preoccupation with democracy, good governance, and education with the underlying liberal notions of freedoms and rights. But how much have we learned of Indigenous leadership to help our understanding of governance and democracy, rights, and responsibility?