It’s not you. I know you might think it is, but this journey is designed to make you feel the way you do these. It's crafted to undermine your sense of self, to be crazy-making. It's not accidental. Although there aren’t many of us, it doesn’t mean we don’t matter. I say these things not to solve a problem or to make sense of what is happening, because that is not possible. The system we enter is not broken; it works exactly as it's intended to. And we? We are fodder. I cannot help you not be fodder. Maybe someone else with more patience can take on that struggle. But I can show you that you are not being ground up and formed into a patty because of anything you’ve done. So, I say these things to myself, to my former self, relying on the curvature of time to convince her in the hope that it will change the me to come.
Graduate School will try to steal your voice
They can’t actually take it and it’s not cool to silence people these days. But there’s something in between. They change your voice, back you into corners that alter it so much that sometimes you won't recognize yourself speaking. I remember a spring evening in a seminar, coming into confrontation with a white American female student. The context is vague, but I believe I made an “I” statement that she disagreed with, likely in a class on visual rhetoric. Much of the content was fairly gruesome. Initially, I felt only the tickle of adrenaline that comes with speaking aloud in that setting. But as she began to speak, I felt the energy leave the room. A terrible stillness, a collective recognition that something was happening. I’d been disagreed with before, told I was wrong, used to critique. But this was different, so odd that I found myself questioning not whether she had misheard me but whether I had misspoken. Her response began with “not everyone,” as if I had suggested my view was common. In a single second, panic ensued.
In the stillness, her body trembled visibly, and we all felt it. I was being accused, misunderstood. In hindsight, I see now that the reaction was as much to the tone of my skin and my audacity to not allow it to determine when and how I spoke. But in the moment, I didn’t understand. The confusion of these moments is met with a variety of reactions. For me, it was a plummet into knee-jerk calculations. The fact of my not-whiteness rose like a breaching whale, breaking the stillness of my inner world, and I engaged the world within the context of its largeness. It was all-encompassing. I performed the calculus, eyes darting around the room as her voice grew louder and more shrill with each syllable. As a dark-skinned woman of almost 6 feet in height, I was conscious that I was always, already, the aggressor. A quick sweep of the room told me that no one was coming to my rescue because, even in my silence, she was the victim. The rules of civility that I could, by my very being, breach inadvertently. The consequences that would stain my reputation forever did not apply.
And then the duality, the nauseating vacillation between responses that occurs in mere seconds. My heart racing but conscious of how I appeared, barely holding myself together. Two worlds of knowledge chafing against each other. I knew that if I met her volume, it would not end well for me. I could see the dam of weaponized tears welling behind her rage. I knew how it would end. I also knew that humiliation and silencing, the putting in place, whether consciously or not, was the ultimate goal of the assault.
In those moments, the urge to fight, to right what is clearly wrong, and the desire for safety become locked together and fuse into an ugly, trembling heap of the pieces of yourself. These urges do not cancel each other out. Instead, because they are irreducible and inherently different, each is transformed and together they create a new thing, a new self. Do not hate it. Please do not hate it or blame yourself for not doing better, for not having a quicker response, for being hurt and confused, for wilting and hoping for the moment to pass. You did your best. While it doesn't look like transcendence, there is no precedent for better in the twisted space you occupy.
This is trauma
This is trauma for us. This is trauma. This is the kind of trauma for which people are ultimately medicated and counseled. This is the kind of trauma that counts as a disability on a job application. This trauma will emerge in a therapeutic setting, decontextualized and normalized, buried under your achievements. Then a kindly doctor will call it anxiety and give you drugs to help you cope, as if it's possible to cope with living in the upside down. It's the kind of trauma that, because it's repeated, transforms you into a wincing, hypervigilant creature. It's the trauma that feeds the anger by which you will inevitably be labeled. The inability of your department, your advisor, your colleagues to perceive it, to intervene, does not change what it is. You have actually been betrayed and your reactions are valid, even if no one wants to hear about them. The swelling dissonance between the diversity agenda that you are forced to be the face of and the very real interactions you must survive on a daily basis is a betrayal. It's not right, but it is normal, and this is your lot. It is happening.
They will use you to benchmark their progress. One of the tricks of the modern academy is that it's supposed to reflect the world. It's multicultural and intersectional, and that means, to be valid, it must be international. While this seems a perfectly fine idea from the outside, the reality is that the egalitarian fantasy white American students experience is not something you can share in, at least not wholly. In fact, their exposure to the world requires your existence, but the dominance of the white academic requires that you never truly succeed. The pathway to success is difficult for most graduate students, but the pathway for internationals is strewn with obstacles no one realizes are obstacles until it's far too late. Apart from pitying glances from the nice lady at the international students' office and the, sometimes genuine, sighs of commiseration from faculty, there will be no recognition that your path is significantly more difficult. I would go as far as to say it constitutes an entirely separate form of matriculation. It should count as an additional course.
When you leave your home country , things happen to your mind and body that, to my mind, count as significant. Your gut changes within weeks of getting off the plane. The same gut that is partly responsible for maintaining your mental well-being. For residents of the global south, the type and amount of vitamin D you can get from the sun is drastically reduced. This is especially true for students starting their programs in the fall semester. If people born and raised in temperate countries suffer from Seasonal Affective Disorder, what of those who only know wet and dry? And then there is the culture shock, which few institutions make any effort to mitigate. The list goes on, as does the coursework and the expectations, especially if you also happen to be a student of color who has received significant funds. Essentially, first-year international students are fighting for their lives, but it doesn’t count toward your GPA. And so, the school gets to claim that it's inclusive, and American students get to say that their programs were global. And we become the evidence for benchmarking because on paper, it appears as if Americans did as well as the rest of the world. Except, few people consider that international students are properly hobbled before that standard is set.
We are not the same
Your degree is not their degree. Oh, how I wish the certificate you receive at the end of this would say so. I wish they gave purple hearts to recognize your valor and ribbons to commend you for surviving. Your degree is not a man’s degree, it is not a white American woman’s degree, it is not a Black American’s degree, it is not a white international student’s degree. I wish your GPA were pro-rated to account for the conversion of your home currency to US dollars. What a difference it would make if the job market could see that you did it alone, without sleep so you could talk to your family, without a community to remind you of who you are. How much better are you than the others who were writing their way deeper into their culture, being comforted by their tradition, while with every moment you spent away from home it became more clear that you were never going back.
Either way, you’re here. It will be difficult for you, but it is also possible. Very often, I think that many of the scholars who have really changed the way I think about the world are those who were not in their home countries as they studied and wrote. Whether you understand it in the moment or not, you have been called from the ends of the earth to do something that few people on the planet are able to do. You are also likely to do it well. The only option that is not available to you is the one in which you turn tail and run. Maybe not today, because this might be a day on which things seem alright.
I can promise, though, that a day will come when the choice to leave everyone behind, if only for a while, will seem like an error. Save these words for that day.
Inevitably, someone somewhere will argue that all experiences are not the same and they are not. I care only for those who will be allowed to wallow in confusion. If these words help them get through, then I am satisfied. Also, there will always be good, kind people who are prepare to takes a student by the hand, comfort and help them. These people exist and I am grateful for them as well. Mostly, though good kind people tend not to notice when they way they see the world, they way they have always done things, makes them blind to the struggles of others and a menace to their success.