Today I have reached a double-my-age milestone. Today I am officially double the age I was the third Friday in November 1996, when my dissertation advisor Joe William Trotter, Jr. approved my PhD thesis. I was 26 years, 10 months, and three weeks old then, and it’s been 26 years, 10 months, and three weeks since. I am as far away from that day today as I was from that last Saturday in the 1960s in 1996, the day my mom birthed me. And on this day, I pour a libation to the burned-out fool I once was, the naive man-child who still thought my abilities and achievements would overcome all. May he and the ancestors educate the fool that remains still.
One story that encapsulates so many of the themes of my professional life since November 22, 1996 comes from my time at American University (AU). For much of my time there since 2018, those in charge of me have sent mixed signals. On the one hand, I was merely an adjunct, relegated to teaching no more than four classes in any Fall/Spring/Summer Session year. Department chairs in history and in critical race, gender, and culture studies often excluded me from teaching courses beyond those required for graduation. (The university also expected us to pay nearly $1,000 for a gym membership out-of-pocket while deducting a lower overall amount from full-time faculty via their paychecks, in their cases, spread out over the calendar year. I found this insulting, too.)
Yet AU was also one of only a couple of stops where I had the opportunity to create my own new courses. Some of them I drafted years ago, back when I taught graduate courses on the history of US education reform in the school of education at George Washington University (GW). In my first five semesters and one summer teaching at AU, I developed four new courses: History of US Social Justice Movements, History of American -isms (and -phobias), American Migration in Song (a one-credit course), and Critical Perspectives on Race and Education. All four courses were a hit with students, and combined with my required classes, every class I taught at AU filled up. Every class!
Not only did most of my students like me. They invited me to sit on panels about campus life and the lack of diversity efforts at AU. Those who wanted to become journalists interviewed me. I became enmeshed in campus life at AU in ways I hadn’t been at my previous stops since GW. Only with GW, the job was truly part-time. My full-time job as a nonprofit administrator, helping to run the Ford Foundation-funded New Voices National Fellowship Program at the Academy for Educational Development (now FHI 360), ate up any time I would’ve had to make a case for staying at GW full-time.
I also was (and still am) publishing articles on the American id and a collective US narcissism and how it has always reinforced systemic racism in the US. I upped my game a notch once the pandemic took hold in the US, writing also about Blackness and Black identity, social justice movements, Afropessimism, and the potential for civil war in the US. Between Al Jazeera — the third largest news organization in the world — NBC News THINK, Salon, The Washington Post, and other outlets, I thought I was building a case for staying at AU when the opportunity finally came for me to go for a term faculty position.
In June 2021, my shop at AU put out an Interfolio job ad for a term faculty position in African American and African diaspora studies. One of my department chairs sent me an email to encourage me to apply. Another wrote a letter of recommendation that was mostly positive, even though his observation that I “sometimes can be tough on [my] students” seemed odd, given the number of A’s and A-’s I had assigned my AU students over the previous three years. If this is me “sometimes can be tough on students,” I think we need to redefine what the word tough actually means.
Between the encouragement to apply, my mostly positive time at AU, and the need for more secure and better paying work, I applied for the term faculty teaching position. Seven weeks later, I received an email from the chair of the search committee, stating that I would not be interviewed for the job. “We have valued your years of service and teaching in the American University community,” without any explanation.
I was pissed and bewildered in a way I hadn’t been about a job rejection in years. Angry because I trusted the people in my corner to not put me in a position to make a fool of myself, confused because I in fact felt like a fool for applying. As an applicant for more than 3,600 jobs since I finished my doctorate at the end of 1996, rejection emails and constant ghosting from potential employers have always been the norm (actually, not potential employers at all, given their lack of decency). This was different. Some of the people on this committee were undoubtedly my “colleagues” — whether tenured, tenure-track, or term faculty — refusing to interview me. And not just for any job, but for a job that I had already been doing as an adjunct for more than three years.
What were they really trying to say? That I didn’t work hard enough? That I was too old, my whole bean, Kenyan-coffee-Blackness too Black and male, too male and not queer enough, or too Black and not well connected enough? Was it all of the above? Or, was it simply that they didn’t trust what I did outside the orthodoxy of humanities and social sciences academia, the constant publishing and public speaking to broad audiences about topics never meant to see the light of day without their stamp of approval? These are the kinds of questions that, if left unchecked in the mind and spirit, can easily land someone my age in a psychiatric ward, an ICU, or even as bone ash in an urn.
The truth was, I worked hard enough and more, as I did with any job and with any attempt to better myself in employment and in income. The truth was, I did near excellently with my students, many of whom have remained in contact with me even after graduating AU. The truth was, my publishing and public speaking in the broader public brought residuals to AU, and not just to me. The truth, sadly, came down to my status as an adjunct, a contingent faculty member whose accomplishments were likely never perused, whose potential for enhancing the departments for which I could’ve worked was never considered. Because in the minds of most of my colleagues, once an adjunct, always an adjunct, the academic equivalent of a lint ball or a used up can of evaporated milk, never to be thought about until a class needs an instructor, any instructor. What made it worse was knowing they never hired anyone for the position as advertised in 2021-22.
Do not think I accepted this as academia’s final pronouncement about me, my life, and my work. I threw myself into finding a less temporary position, which ended being my current job as a term teaching faculty member at Loyola University Maryland. I continue to write, as I am also a columnist for Al Jazeera English, and not just freelancing all the time.
The AU term faculty debacle was so typical of my thirty-something years working to build some sort of career or legacy. My initial plans fall through far more often than they work out without any hitches. I turn to Plan B, Plan C, and even Plan H and Plan S. The last two are hustlin’ and scrambling to make whatever I need to happen happen. When I go to that level, I am on the edge, somewhere between insanity and sanity, balancing my dream-walking with the hard-nosed reality of digging deep into the dirt to turn earth into gold. That has always required me to be resilient, to wallow in nonconformity, because in this white-racist-capitalist world, I am a loser in a binary Matrix of winners and losers. They will always try to force conformity on us all, to scare us into accepting whatever crumbs and shit sandwiches they begrudgingly give out with their depraved smiles of contempt.
As for me, I will continue to strive for more, because I deserve more, because my spouse and my son have always deserved more. Certainly more than places in academia, in the nonprofit world, and in other industries, have taken from me over the decades.