I’m not entirely sure if this is department specific, but it appears as though folks in my department assume that their students will learn job application processes, CV writing, and the development of other associated documents for employment, both within academic and beyond it, through osmosis. That is, I have had to struggle my ass through preparing these documents because the workshop that was supposed to help me with this was held in the fall and generally not aimed at folks who are... well... not straight white cis-dudes and dudettes doing straight white cis-dude and dudette philosophy.
I’m thankful that we managed to snag one faculty member of color who is not doing straight white philosophy. Some of the best advice I’ve gotten thus far in the anxiety ridden hell of CV development and document generation has been from him, which is unsurprising, but I wish more members of my department were like “hey, maybe we should fucking prepare our students to go out on the market,” rather than assuming that we’ve somehow acquired the skills to survive the increasingly dystopian academic hellscape.
This experience of being two weeks away from my defense and drowning in the job application process reinforces my perception that the only way Black scholars survive is through support structures made by other black scholars. Unfortunately, I’m kind of out on the bleeding edge of what other Black scholars are doing, which presents another kind of problem: the support structures that Black scholars have built in our field are designed for particular kinds of scholarship, particular kinds of scholars, and are really reluctant to change.
I remember driving an invited speaker to a symposium I put together, a Black woman, and talking about the field and the community we built in it. One of the things she made clear is that the field, support structures and all, serves to reproduce a kind of Black identity politics, a policing of the “legitimate” scholarly activities of Black scholars. She also made clear that I, like her, would have to do it alone because of the nature of my work, and the challenge that some of it would present to the established scholars in the field. This is the kind of thing that I’m running into when reaching out to the “traditional networks.”
The structures, and the folks who maintain them, place a kind of demand on specific kinds of work, thereby allowing access to the support of scholars in the field doing that work. Moreover, these structures are confined to providing support for the maintenance of the traditions valued in the field, as opposed to expanding the work we do. My work is as far from “traditional” as possible, specifically when viewed from the lens of the Black scholars in the field, and therefore, they find it “difficult” to provide advice or direction. Read in the language of my field, “difficult” is a value judgment indicating an unwillingness to engage with the work to provide advice.
Here, I need to be clear: I do not expect that they understand my work completely. I do expect them to use the support structures that maintain the presence of Black scholars in the field to actually help junior scholars regardless of their research interests, because there are just too damn few of us in this academic hellscape to be elitist. That is, support could be anything from “here’s how you market yourself as a Black man in a predominately white field,” to “here’s some folks that I know who can help you out with this.” In fact, the folks who’ve been most helpful with the job search are white women because they’re overrepresented in some of the areas I’m working in, but that’s another problem.
Anyway, I needed to vent about this because senior Black scholars will talk to the end of the day about supporting junior scholars just entering the field; however, when it comes to put boot to ass, they’re not about that life if your scholarship doesn’t align with that they “think” is good work, or a valued contribution to the little slice of the field they’ve carved out as their own.
