“Keep your head down” is a phrase others have offered me as sage advice for nearly as long as I’ve been in the workforce. At every stage of my career, folks have hoisted this phrase into my ear canals as if they were paying it forward, as if Yoda had passed the words to them himself. “Mind your business,” “Watch what you say,” and “Learn to pick [or choose] your battles” are also on this Family Feud list of the top phrases co-workers say to the newbie or new-ish hire as a form of protection from the toxicity of any workplace. Whether I was an 18-year-old computer lab nerdy desk jockey, a research intern with Westchester County Department of Community Mental Health or at Western Psychiatric Institute & Clinic, a history PhD student at Carnegie Mellon, a senior program officer at Academy for Educational Development (now FHI 360), or a professor at Loyola University Maryland, the song has been the same.
The truth is, keeping my head down has never worked or worked out for me. Sometimes it was because of the educated fool in me. Most of the time, though, despite my best efforts, I couldn’t hide who I was and what I have been capable of precisely because of who I am. It was difficult to render myself invisible as a Black person working in predominantly white spaces with ever-increasing educational credentials and a third-stage growth spurt that took me from six foot and 1.5 inches to six-three by the time I was 22. It’s even more difficult if you do work that gets you noticed, if you make a point of doing the best work you can because this is how you do your own work outside the job. Keeping your head down in an education environment is near impossible, especially if you are working in the classroom, especially if you teach on US and African American history, especially in predominantly white and incredibly caustic spaces. The era of anti-Blackness and anti-anti-racism is so pervasive that “keep your head down” sounds more and more like I should avoid the giant hailstorm that is teaching altogether.
I recently contacted a few junior Black faculty members who described themselves as “critical race theorists” regarding their education and sociology research. I was looking to quote younger folks for an Al Jazeera English article I published in January on critical race theory as really established fact, and not mere theory at all. Two immediately declined, with one of them writing back, “I need to keep my head down.” I told them both that I understood, and wrote my piece without their quotes.
But while I do understand the temptation to think that you can “keep your head down,” you really can’t. Even if your end goal is for a department or a school or a program full of mostly white and mostly male colleagues to grant you tenure, “keeping your head down” does not guarantee that giant prize after five or six years in the tenure stream. And for those few handfuls of folk who do succeed at this toxic game, what is the cost? Do your white colleagues want to get to know the real you? Does your research promote activism of some sort that ultimately helps your students and junior faculty navigate institutional racism, misogyny, elitism, and the job market? Do you “lift as you climb” in your relationships with Black and Brown students and faculty members? Or do you continue to “keep your head down,” because it is easier, it is conflict-free, even as you suffer in silence and in relative isolation, even as you occasionally feel imposter syndrome? My experience as a contingent faculty member and as a nonprofit administrator over the past quarter-century says it’s all of the above.
Joe Trotter, my dissertation advisor at Carnegie Mellon, often said to “keep my head down,” and often did the same himself. It got him tenure and his colleagues saw him as a “very private and polite man.” But it made him a lousy advisor beyond writing my dissertation, because he was so paranoid about the potential backlash I might receive from “the people around [the history department].” Only, the real backlash I confronted was from Trotter as HNIC himself.
I even had colleagues tell me to keep my best ideas for articles and books and research projects to myself, for fear others would steal them or quash my efforts. Several of my grad school folk told me to write a good dissertation on multiculturalism and African American activism, but make sure it’s “not too interesting. You don’t want” too much attention, for fear professors “will derail you” from getting the coveted PhD. I listened and attempted to thread the needle between the truly esoteric and boring and the provocative and groundbreaking. It didn’t work. My dissertation was still too “presentist” and “interdisciplinary,” my finishing my history doctorate in four years got me noticed (in good, bad, and awful ways), and a professor who now teaches at University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education did steal from my work.
My abusive idiot ex-stepfather was truly one of the worst human beings I have ever known. But he gave me two good pieces of advice during the 12 years I had to endure him. One was to not move out on my mother when I was 14. The second and more relevant advice was, “Donald, always keep your head up!” I was in month 18 of a 20-month-growth spurt that would take me from five-two to six-feet-even. With kids joking, “How’s the air up there?” it seemed every time I came home at the beginning of high school, I hung my head down. My then stepfather saw that one day as he stood on the steps of our apartment building one day and immediately said what he said, adding “You’re tall anyway. Be proud of your height.” The dumbass is right!, I thought, and to this day, I hold my head up, knowing there’s really no place to hide who I am and what I am about.
Yet I have attempted to go along to get along, because “keeping my head up” physically and metaphorically also comes with a cost. It means constant battles to do meaningful work, potential conflicts with jealous-hearted, micromanaging supervisors, and bearing the searing eyeballs of the racist, sexist, ageist, and elitist white gaze. It has meant sometimes not getting a well-deserved promotion, blowing the whistle on ethical and legal issues on the job, and not quite having a crew of people in places high enough to help me in my various careers with better paying work and publishing opportunities.
Tupac’s “Keep Ya Head Up” (1993) seems relevant here. The rap anthem to Black feminism and against patriarchy-fueled rape and abuse culture is also an anthem to being your full self in an incredibly racist and classist world. When Tupac spits, “I'm tryin' to make a dollar out of fifteen cents/It's hard to be legit and still pay your rent…I try to find my friends, but they're blowin' in the wind,” I get it. I really do. To quote the blues and jazz legend Bessie Smith, “no one wants you when you’re down and out” anyway, and “keeping my head down” had brought short-term gains and stability when I was in my 30s, but little meaning to my life. I’ve almost always found it better to go for what I want, and in doing so, even though “[I’m] fed up, huh, [I] got to keep [my] head up.”