Happy Birthday to our wonderful co-host Alyssa! We’re back for our second episode of the semester to talk about hegemony, institutional power, and the academic hierarchies that fail to protect Black queer and trans women.
What’s the Word? Hegemony. We give a brief explanation of hegemony and how it comes into being.
What We’re Reading “Black Lesbians—Who Will Fight for Our Lives but Us?”: Navigating Power, Belonging, Labor, Resistance, and Graduate Student Survival in the Ivory Tower by S. Tay Glover. We discuss our experiences with pedagogies of accommodation (Chandra Mohanty) and being feminist killjoys and willful subjects (Sara Ahmed) in our department, being disposable randoms of the political economy of the academy, and resisting respectability politics and our impossibility through silence and self-love.
What in the World?! We discuss the controversy surrounding Harvard anthropology professor John Comaroff, the way universities are “protected enclosures of unchecked violence and abuse of power,” why anthropology is often at the center of academic controversies, and how Title IX regulations are designed to protect the university and break the will of victims and survivors.
Looking for Title IX information? Visit KnowYourIX.org
Zora’s Daughters Podcast: Episode 10
Co-Hosts: Brendane Tynes and Alyssa A.L. James
Title: Entitled IX
Total Length: 01:13:56
[00:00:00] Music Plays
[00:00:26] Music descends
[00:00:26] AJ: Hey everyone! Welcome back to Zora’s Daughters, the podcast where we share Black feminist perspectives and close read pop culture and other social topics that affect Black folx. I’m Alyssa and I use she/her/hers pronouns.
[00:00:39] BT: Hey y’all, I’m Brendane and my pronouns are also she/her/hers. Today we’ll be talking about hegemony, institutional power, and the academic hierarchies that fail to protect Black queer and trans women. But before we get into it, happy birthday, happy solar return, to the only—well lemme, okay, one of the only—Aquarians I can stand, my co-host [imitates trumpet sounds] Alyssa! If you’re listening on the day that this episode comes out, it’s Alyssa’s birthday, so DM us with your well wishes! Send her a few birthday dollars! What are you doing? What are your plans for your birthday?
[00:01:22] AJ: Thank you! Thank you for the well wishes. Any cash would be much appreciated [laughter] but not too much. I celebrated on the weekend with a private chef that came to our apartment and cooked for us. It was far too luxurious. I was like ‘I could get used to this!’
[00:01:42] BT: Oh, I love it. I love to see it. What!?
[00:01:44] AJ: I could get used to it, but my student budget says nah. Nah, negative, no [laughter]. But I have an in-home massage planned courtesy of my mom. Thank you, mom.
[00:01:57] BT: Thanks, mom!
[00:01:58] AJ: So, I’m just going to relax and take it easy. And I was actually thinking about how bae organized that dinner for me, and I showed up at the restaurant—this was years ago, two years ago—and I was just expecting it to be him and I, and you were there, and I was like, “What are you doing here?” [Laughter] I was like, “Oh, that’s so funny. It’s so funny she came to the same restaurant, I guess she’s on a date night!” But it was a surprise, he invited some of my friends and it was really nice. I smile every time I think about it [laughter]. And I just remember seeing you, I remember exactly how you were dressed and seeing you through the window, being like, “It’s so funny Brendane’s here, what a surprise.” [Laughter]
[00:02:39] BT: Like yo, why was she dressed like that on a date. Yeah, that was such a sweet night, honestly. It was fun to hang out with y’all and try the place—I don’t even remember the place we went to.
[00:02:50] AJ: It was Avant Garden. It was a vegan place, back in my vegan days.
[00:02:54] BT: Oh yes, I remember being like, “Oh wow, this is dinner number one but I’m here to celebrate, I love it.” So, that was like forever, forever, forever ago it feels like. Pandemic years have been creeping by. Before the podcast, before the world was opening and closing randomly [laughter]. But before we get too carried away in our reminiscing, we just want to thank all of you for supporting us. We would not and could not be doing this without y’all. Shout out to our new patrons [imitates gunshots], who have joined Zora’s Daughters Community. And we really are looking forward to building that space up for folks to chat, share ideas, get to know us a little but more. And if you wanna join, you can join at patreon.com/zorasdaughters. And if you join before midnight tonight, that’s February 16th, we will mail you a handwritten postcard from our respective cities! So, once again, that’s patreon.com/zorasdaughters.
[00:04:07] AJ: Yes. We also love non-monetary support, so please leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts and follow us at zorasdaughters on Instagram or zoras_daughters on Twitter. Also, we find that the way most people hear about us is through word of mouth, so please share our podcast with your friends, your family, or add it to those Black History Month listicles that y’all be sharing. Thank you. And as a final piece of news, I want to add that it is official, my postcard for our new patrons will be coming to some of y’all from Martinique! A bitch got her research visa, okay, ay, ay. The flight is booked, and I am getting ready to leave this cold city next weekend [laughter]!
[00:04:54] BT: Yo, first of all, yes, so excited for you to get a move on your fieldwork and to get away from winter because [sigh] we were not made to live in these temperatures. My body
[00:05:09] AJ: My skin, my hair. Declines.
[00:05:13] BT: My scalp [laughter]. But I just feel like they just need to turn the weather machine off already. I think it slipped up on Sunday, but you need to like, turn it back off, let it warm up a little bit [laughter]. Anyway, let’s get on with it, Alyssa, what’s the word for today?
[00:03:35] [Music Plays]
[00:05:38] AJ: Our word for today is hegemony. So, as usual, I busted out my trusty Oxford Dictionary of Sociology, which tells me that we have two theorists to thank for the development of this concept—and of course there are many other theorists who have contributed to the concept and its growth, but foundationally we talk about Karl Marx and Antonio Gramsci. In Marxist historical materialism, hegemony refers to the ideal representation of the interests of the ruling class as universal interests. Of course, that doesn’t mean our personal interests or hobbies like golfing or polo—I probably shouldn’t say our because those are not my personal interests but I’m talking about the ruling class—but rather a cause or issue that brings a benefit or advantage to that group. These class interests and ideals from the ruling class are inherently opposed to the class interests of the working class, but they come to be widely accepted as legitimate. But if these ideals are detrimental to the working class, how do they come to have legitimacy across all of us?
[00:06:46] BT: Well Marx says that society is made of two different parts. You have your base and then you have your superstructure. There is a lot more to this, and I am, by no means a Marx expert, honey. Capital volume one is still sitting in someone’s bookshelf but not mine. But the base is the part of society where our basic necessities are produced. These things are produced through labor, through labor relations, and property. The superstructure are our “higher-order” ideas and relationships that aren’t directly related to production such as culture, religion, ritual, media, and so on. And so, the base and the superstructure, they reinforce each other. Gramsci’s contribution was to divide the superstructure into civil society and political society, and he posited that hegemony is located in the non-state level of the superstructure. So, hegemony—and I keep wanting to say “hed-ge-mony,” cause that’s how I used to say it before I learned it [laughter]—is social and cultural. So, it is not just about using force to wield power, like you might in war or in other forms of conflict, but actually making superiority and hierarchy seem natural through discourse.
[00:08:10] AJ: Right, so what did that all mean? Hegemony involves manipulating the way we think and see things so that certain groups having power and other groups being oppressed is accepted as the natural order of things. It is a type of domination that operates through group consensus rather than the power over. So, it’s the things we take for granted and accept as being part of “just the way things are,” “that’s just how things are.” Any time someone says, “that’s just how we do things” or “that’s just how it is,” that’s hegemony in action. The things—or the ideologies and discourses—circulate through the media, through cultural productions, though folx’ beliefs, and other social institutions that allow those in power to influence our values, norms, ideas, expectations, worldview, and our behavior.
So, school is actually a really great example of where hegemony comes into being, because it’s a place where we learn “common sense,” right. For example, the ideology of the American dream. What does it do? It sells the belief that upward mobility is possible for everyone, no matter where they start from. It says that through hard work, through craft, you can have economic success. It also implies that the rich have earned their riches and the poor deserve their poverty. These beliefs validate our current economic system, which is capitalism—which is essentially like if you work hard enough you can find success. So, it makes sense that we have a system that rewards hard work. However, this hegemonic idea obscures the various inequalities that are built into capitalism, specifically that it expressly requires an underclass of people to function. So, as I’ve said, capitalism is a pyramid scheme [laughter].
[00:10:06] BT: Right, pyramid scheme and all that means is there are more people on the bottom, fewer people on the top, honey. And if you’re like, “Capitalism is a pyramid scheme, y’all should put that on a t-shirt!” Guess what? We already did, we’re way ahead of you, boo [laughter]. You can find that t-shirt on our website zorasdaughters.com. But to sum it up, hegemony is our agreement with values and beliefs that reflect and support those of the ruling class that are a result of our socialization and circulating cultural narratives.
[00:10:40] AJ: Exactly. So just remember hegemony is an influence-based system, so it’s not about power over, but rather our learned cultural tendencies. The foundation to hegemony is common sense acceptance of the way things are, so to start pulling back the curtain on it, you have to ask “Who does this process, institution, or ideology benefit? And who pays?”
[00:11:04] BT: Cause in capitalism, something always comes at a cost. So, I think that’s a great question and actually we’ll begin to answer that in our next segment, which is “What We’re Reading.”
[00:11:17] [Music Plays]
[00:11:19] AJ: What we’re reading today is “Black Lesbians—Who Will Fight for Our Lives but Us?”: Navigating Power, Belonging, Labor, Resistance, and Graduate Student Survival in the Ivory Tower by S. Tay Glover, published in 2017. As a caveat—you know we usually read the bio—this bio is the one that was published with the essay in 2017, and I’ve tried to add some details of what Glover is up to now. S. Tay Glover is an interdisciplinary Black lesbian feminist scholar-artist and healer pursuing her PhD degree at Northwestern University in the Department of African American Studies, from which she has a master’s degree. She received her bachelor’s degree in women’s studies and political science, and her master’s in women’s, gender, and sexuality studies from The Ohio State University.
Her research and art centers on occult studies, history, feminisms, Black Southern queer women’s experiences, erotic counterculture, and critical theory. She is founder of The Witch Goddess Wellness, a holistic spiritual lifestyle brand and media platform that houses her modern mystic creative content and consulting-healing services. Today at present she is a professional psychic medium, astrologist, and certified Shamanic Master Healer and Teacher who offers trauma-informed healing, healing justice modalities for women, LGBTQIA and gender expansive Black, Indigenous, and POC communities.
[00:12:56] BT: I just [unclear]. Yes. My kind of girl. And she’s from the South too. I just, the only thing that would make this more perfect is if she were a Gemini, but [laughter] that’s my bias coming out. Of course, we have to shout out our girl Chloe who was on our Afropessimism episode for putting us on to this essay a while ago. In an interview about the publication of this essay, Glover describes the article as a “mini autobiography and un-silencing regarding being a trauma-survivor in this life so far as a dark-skinned, Black lesbian femme-nist born and raised in the rural South of the US committed to truth-telling, Black lesbian feminist politics, activism, and justice.” And so, in my read of it, this essay very clearly lays out the stakes that Glover and other Black queer women have in saving themselves in the face of the violent academy. She begins by recognizing her specific vulnerability to violence as a Black lesbian graduate student.
Right out of the gate, she dispels the myth—that I believe is one of the myths that keep the academy going—that the academy is the place where liberation can happen, especially for Black queer and trans people. She says, “To interrupt epistemologies of ignorance, I engage Barbara Christian and Grace Hong’s critiques of universities and disciplines comply with the state’s historical containment, management, and extinguishment of Black women, Black feminisms, and Black queer feminists in particular, as well as literature exploring Black queer women’s specific graduate and postgraduate experiences in the academy.” So, drawing upon Black feminist, Third World feminist and queer critique, Glover seeks to “unveil the life-in-death consequences of neoliberal anti-Black, sexist, homophobic institutional spaces for Black lesbian/queer women in graduate school, and specifically within women’s studies and Black studies at predominately white institutions—spaces thought to be justice-centered, progressive homes for graduate students like me.” Which whew, just that in and of itself, end the article right there.
[00:15:17] AJ: I mean it’s such a huge contribution to Black lesbian feminist studies, to just what’s going on in the academy in general. People really do believe that the university is this amazingly progressive space. Everybody believes that they’re doing something that’s their calling, you know, that this is their vocation. But it’s like, at the end of the day this is just another workplace and I think the sooner you realize that, the less you’re going to feel disappointed by everything that happens in it.
[00:15:54] BT: Whew, chile.
[00:15:55] AJ: So, Glover draws on a number of scholars including Barbara Smith, Moya Bailey, Audre Lorde, Sara Ahmed, and Chandra Mohanty to examine her experience as a feminist killjoy and willful subject. I really want to talk about the introduction where she talks about the pedagogy of accommodation and how it maintains the “school to oppressor pipeline” for white people and those in power as much as it maintains the “school to prison/precarity pipeline” for marginalized students. Chandra Mohanty, she defines pedagogy of accommodation as distinct from pedagogy of dissent and transformation. So, it promotes a sort of multicultural civility and respectability rather than social justice. Its goal is management and quelling dissent rather than actually challenging and eliminating the causes and whew, have we seen that. We know a little something, something, about that [laughter].
[00:16:54] BT: A little something.
[00:16:56] AJ: You know what, I’m just gonna say it, I’mma tell. I’mma tell it. But okay. Glover writes “Pedagogy of accommodation appeases white normativity and white comfort in the curriculum and classroom environment, often to the detriment of students of color.” One of the examples she gives is about professors not challenging racist views in class because she “didn’t want to alienate students.” So that effectively places the comfort of white students over the interests of the students of color and social justice in general. That really reminded me of the experiences we had with some, a little, just a touch, a tad of race conflict in our department—if we wanna even call it that “race conflict”—and the immediate, the almost immediate calls for us to repair, right.
So, there was no acknowledgement of harm—which I would say is kinda a precondition to repair. Just the demand that we, the Black students calling out injustice, be “professional,” right. You know, or that calling out all of this basically anti-Blackness in the department and the university, in academia in general we were being unprofessional. We were the killjoys. We spoke out and we became the problem; that was kind of the quote from Sara Ahmed, you know, you speak out against the problem, and you become the problem. And so, following that we become responsible for a fractured department and for fixing it.
[00:18:37] BT: Which is very common, right. Not just the things that happen to Black students at elite universities. I would just ask the question: How many Black students in “liberal” or “progressive” departments found themselves penning letters or gracing town halls in 2020 with their presence only to be told that their demands were too much? Like yeah, you know, niggas out here dying in the street but at least you’re here “protected” within the walls of these ivory towers, right. What do you have to complain about? I remember distinctly—and Alyssa, I know you were also there—asking for certain things to meet my needs as a first-generation student, like some money for exam books and then being told to go to the library, like you know. Now one of the new initiatives in the depart is a small book fund for students where they can apply to receive money for books, but I was also directly told that I would not be able to benefit from that, so nice to know. Nice to know things change but are the same [laughter].
[00:19:46] AJ: Yes. I think there are other initiatives in the department that I have seen and been like, “Um, wasn’t that in something that we talked about? Wasn’t that in something that we wrote about?” And there’s not even so much as a, “Hey this is thanks to the dedication or commitment to our Black students of blah blah blah,” but anyways [laughter].
[00:20:06] BT: We’re willful subjects [laughter].
[00:20:08] AJ: Yes, but [laughter] before we get to [laughter], before we say too much and not be able to get jobs one day—
[00:20:21] BT: Which [laughter] again is part of the things that—part of the problem.
[00:20:28] AJ: Exactly, um you know, it’s one of these situations where we’re forced to interact with these colleagues and we’re forced to “repair” with racist colleagues, you know. And so, we become willful subjects and resist and reject their attempts to mollify us, to turn us into the respectable academics who revere our status as tokens. Like, “Oh, you just better be happy that you’re here.” Like even you saying that, to say that we’re in the institution and we’re protected, it’s like how many stories have there been about campus police assaulting Black students on campus because they don’t think that they should be there. There have been cases, and I’m thinking about a case in Toronto where a group of graduate students, they went to a restaurant—some of them were even wearing their university sweaters and stuff like that, which they actually wear on purpose so that people won’t treat them like they’re just another nigga—they were asked to pay for their meal in advance. And when they asked everyone else, “Were you asked to do this, were you asked to this,” nobody else was. It was just a group of Black graduate students, and they won a lawsuit. Go them.
[00:21:41] BT: [Laughter] Go them. Get some money.
[00:21:43] AJ: Get that money. So, we stop showing up to events or insisting on participation in the department. Glover writes that “when you stop showing up, it positions you as unprofessional and having failed to meet expectations without considering their failure to create a space that supports your well-being in the first place.”
[00:22:04] BT: Right. Like, I’ll speak for myself again, I definitely have experienced that critique of just “How can you expect to be heard if you don’t show up?” Like, “How can we hear you if you don’t even go to the town meetings?” And I used to show up so that I wouldn’t get fined, and for those of you who know that’s a reference to some football player.
[00:22:28] AJ: Marshawn Lynch [Laughter].
[00:22:29] BT: Yes, you know it’s all one game to me. I don’t know. But then would inevitably find myself doing some kind of labor in that meeting. Whether it be internally—of just like “Girl, just tune these people out, yeah they’re saying whack shit, but you don’t have the energy to argue”—or opening my mouth and then having to teach people why what they said, they shouldn’t have said, or why this doesn’t make sense. So now, I try to protect my peace. I’m like, “Why must I be present in places where the signal of my presence is valued but my voice must not be heard?” And just like, what I mean by the signal of my presence, just my Black self being in that space but just that, I can’t speak, can’t talk, do anything or else I’ll be written as angry. And so, I’m thinking if I wanted to be silent for two hours, I would just go watch a movie. I could just turn on Lifetime and see something exciting and new. I would be less broken apart after it’s over. But I’ve found that fighting for my life, especially in academic spaces, means going where the love is, as my friend Dara says.
[00:23:45] AJ: Yes, Glover discusses the ways we often engage with these liberal departments. We may choose dissemblance, which if you’re unfamiliar with that term, it was originally coined by Darlene Clark Hine. She studied the affective lives of Black domestic workers and discovered that they survived through a culture of dissemblance, where they separated their personal, Black interior life from their professional lives in horrifying white racist environments. So, in our departments, this might look like putting on that professional, respectable face and then going home. Other tactics of survival might be strategic silence or direct, vocal opposition. All of these tactics have their own pros and cons, and we might deploy them in varying ways at varying times in order to get through our programs.
[00:24:30] BT: Yes, this sounds like when you said earlier racial conflict, it feels like war [laughter] sometimes. It really does.
[00:24:39] AJ: A cold one.
[00:24:40] BT: A cold one.
[00:24:41] AJ: It’s a cold war.
[00:24:42] BT: A long cold war. And even when we do what’s best for us in any given situation, we can still be troped as the Angry Black Woman.
[00:24:54] AJ: I mean, [exhale] oh, that class, with the face, [laughter] where one of our colleagues made a face [pause] and a white woman cried. That’s just, over a face.
[00:25:09] BT: She did. Over a face. That was—anyway. That’s okay, I had a conversation with her afterwards and things worked out better. At least she was scared to say something again and that’s all I really care about. At this point, I’m not trying to change you, I just want you to know that I’m not the one. So, but even as we’re wrapped up in this Angry Black Women image, people still engage us with their racist and sexist conversations. Like, I don’t even know if you’ve experienced this but like that part really hit me. Folks will really call us angry and then drag us into debates about whatever topic they choose or ask you to do some type of labor for them. I used to have this problem where non-Black students and faculty and Black men used to pull me into whatever problem they had to serve as a mammy or a “sounding board” and then I would hear my ideas chopped up and re-presented in class as their original thoughts.
And when I would say something about it, I would be gaslit or told that my tone was inappropriate. All that to say, I am so glad to be out of classes. I hope to never be a student in someone’s classroom again. But I think this really underscores what Glover discusses about the impossibility of being a Black queer person in the academy that practices their values fully. There’s always some part of us that we have to hide away or protect. The very design of “professionalism” and civility require you to hide as much of the “Black” in you as possible in my argument. Professionalism is what got me caught up in the harassment that I faced in graduate school. Even among Black people, which, you know, we need to underscore that. The Black Studies part of this as well, not just the women’s studies part but the Black studies part.
[00:27:13] AJ: Yes, that is a big part of this article which is that you are not safe in the women and gender studies, in the feminist studies, and you are not safe in the black studies because of the androcentrism of their justice centered narratives. We don’t know, who knows. Glover talks about what you were saying as well, hearing her ideas being repeated from white mouths and people stealing her ideas and things like that. And we’ve experienced it too, of course, in our classes. We’ll be the ones to be like, “Hm, something about this article is anti-Black,” or something about something that we read has these issues and then, all of a sudden, everybody else has that critique now. They’re like, “Oh yeah, I see it, lemme say that too.”
[00:28:04] BT: And you know, don’t you just feel your back being walked on in those moments, like ehh.
[00:28:10] AJ: Oh, I love when they say, “Yeah, I don’t remember who said this but—” [laughter]
[00:28:15] BT: Oh, it’ll be like you just said the shit too or— [crosstalk]
[00:28:19] AJ: “I can’t remember who brought this up but—” [laughter]
[00:28:23] BT: You know good and goddamn well you know who brought this up. You know you need to be citing me in your work and all your response in your final papers but—
[00:28:29] AJ: Facts.
[00:28:30] BT: In one class we basically staged an intervention—in that same class with the person who had the issue with the look—and we noticed that everyone was taking notes as the Black students were talking about the different readings. One day I was like, “Y’all, we’re not gonna speak for the first like ten. fifteen minutes, and we’ll see what happens.” And, of course, it was so silent. The professor, bless his heart, was confused and was like, “Okay, what’s happening here?” And then, once we broke our silence and spoke, we addressed the inequalities. It didn’t change the classes moving forward. I mean there was a little shift but at least we pushed back on that power dynamic. Because, I think, people focus so much on “being heard” but sometimes, that too, in and of itself, is racial oppression. If you’re always the one talking, you’re always the one interpreting, you’re always the one offering knowledge, and they get to sit in their privilege and power and absorb and consume, sometimes it’s good to push back on that. On that power dynamic.
[00:29:43] AJ: I think that was an excellent tactic, taking up a politics of silence and then seeing what comes of that. Which was nothingness. Which again tells you, demonstrates the way that we are basically the ones who legitimize and that make this institution run. In many different ways, right, in terms of who’s doing what kind of labor in the physical sense in the university and who’s doing the intellectual labor. And well, what would they do without us? The don’t want us there but they can’t be without us—it don’t—anyways [laughter].
[00:30:26] BT: It only makes sense through the logics of white supremacy.
[00:30:29] AJ: There you go. There you go.
[00:30:31] BT: It only makes sense.
[00:30:32] BT: So actually, you mention that section on Black lesbian impossibility and respectability. And that section really got me thinking about a conversation we had about how we are disposable in this political economy of academia. I don’t know if you remember, it was in a group chat. But it operates in a similar way that elite class reproduction and the circulation of capital do, which I’ve been thinking about recently because I’ve been watching The Tinder Swindler and I’ve been watching Inventing Anna on Netflix and I’m like, “Oh, this is a lot about connections, who you are, where you come from, how you behave, if you know the correct habitus of the environment that you’re in.” So, of course, you’ve got your top tiers are something like the privileged whites, the POC—and I’m using that loosely—you know, the Black and brown intellectuals’ spawn—their children. Because if you know the statistics, I think like the mAJority of PhD students have parents who are professors or who have PhDs. And then, of course, the “endangered” Black man. And so, I believe that the conclusion was, we’re Black, queer, first-generation, low-income women and so we’re basically just—this is not my quote, this is someone else’s quote—”disposable randoms in this economy.”
[00:32:07] BT: [Sigh] I do not disagree [laughter] [crosstalk]. My new thing to say, “I do not disagree.” But I’m just kidding. Um, definitely. And I think the ruse too is that there are things, or actions, that we can do, things we can acquire—awards, etcetera—that make us less disposable, right. Like, if I just get this Guggenheim, if I get this fellowship, or if I just make myself “in-disposable” in some way or indispensable in some way, they’ll keep me around. But that’s the lie. That’s the rub there. And so, Glover kind of brings us towards the end—to this praxis, is what I’ll call it—where we have to find value within ourselves and then move from there. So, it’s the self-care but also the ultimate self-prioritization because you don’t want to be constantly measuring yourself against these anti-Black woman standards, where we constantly fall short and suffer the health consequences because of it. Which, I mean, ss we’re recording, this past weekend a scholar, Valerie Boyd—who wrote what many people are determining is the conclusive biography of Zora Neale Hurston—passed away. And a lot of academics are attributing her death to the violence of the academy. So many Black women like Audre Lord, like June Jordan die so early because of the shit that we gotta deal with.
[00:33:55] AJ: Yeah. I mean when Glover wrote “I couldn’t feed into the lie and gaslighting that their treatment of me was a reflection of my badness, inadequacy, or worth, but instead the truth, which is that my presence served to remind them of their own waywardness and evil” I screamed.
[00:34:13] BT: Periodt.
[00:34:14] AJ: I was screaming.
[00:34:15] T: Period.
[00:34:16] AJ: So, while we are there to legitimize these programs, because as Black feminists have explained, the neoliberal corporate university is secured through institutional diversity, part of the reason we face the violence that we do is because we stand as manifestations of their past and present depravity and violence and moral turpitude. So, like I said earlier, they can’t stand to have us there but they need us there and so we end up bearing the brunt of that violence which lowers, shortens, life spans in an unfortunate way. And we’ve talked about that in terms of weathering on this podcast and all of those things. So, Valerie Boyd rest in peace. In peace, peace, peace.
[00:35:15 BT: And I think, for me too, I think our presence highlights their mediocrity, so that their violence is really just a corrective kind of “know-your-place aggression” as Koritha Mitchell discusses. To learn more about know-your-place aggression, you can listen to our episode in season one, episode nineteen, “Keep Nope Alive.” But it’s something that I think when you enter into graduate school you are told to come to expect. Which I know we’ll talk about a little more when we get to “What in the World?” but it’s just really sickening honey. It’s sickening to me.
[00:35:59] AJ: But to bring it back to S. Tay Glover, what is disappointing but not surprising—given everything that we’ve read about her experiences and discussed within our own experiences—is that in that interview you mentioned earlier, she said that was just the tip of the iceberg. She didn’t talk about the graduate advisor that stole her ideas and published it, and it was a terrible article. And then, of course, she was pushed out of her PhD program. So, she has not completed her PhD although she was like, “my words are going to be read, I don’t care, my stuff is going to get published and I have earned a PhD. So, whether or not she has one officially from the institution doesn’t matter. She’s like I don’t need the institutional stamp
She writes about being a feminist killjoy which comes from Sara Ahmed—as I mentioned earlier, when you speak up about the problem, you become the problem. That serves as a perfect framing for what we’ll be discussing in our next segment. Which is [in unison] “What in the World?”
[00:37:06] BT: What in the world?
[00:37:07] AJ: What is going on?
[00:37: 10] BT: What is going on? Why is Black history month being anti-Black history month? [Laughter] Yo, I saw that somewhere and I was like I’m stealing this forever, anti-Black history month [laughter].
[00:37:26] [Music Plays]
[00:37:28] AJ: So, if you haven’t guessed it, today we’re going to be talking about the controversy surrounding the Harvard anthropologist John Comaroff and the sexual harassment lawsuit against Harvard University. Now, we checked with our lawyers—okay, we didn’t check with our lawyers, but I did check with A lawyer—and so we’ll make our disclaimer which is that we are aware these are allegations, and we make no intimations of legal guilt of the accused. And, of course, we stand with victims and survivors.
[00:38:03] BT: Yes. So, for those of you who may not be aware, you may not be out here in these academic streets, Harvard University is being sued by three women: Margaret Czerwienski, Lilia Kilburn, and Amulya Mandava, for their alleged “decades-long failure to protect students from sexual abuse and career-ending retaliation.” John Comaroff is the accused named in this particular case. And so, the news of this case has exploded. Like Academic Twitter has imploded around it.
[00:38:35] AJ: It is ablaze.
[00:38:39] BT: Ablaze [laughter]. Which someone was like, maybe this is what will make anthropology burn and I was like [makes sound].
[00:38:46] AJ: The brujería is working.
[00:38:47] Somebody said a prayer, put it on the altar and it’s causing a flurry of tweets and calls to action and the kind of twitter thread tell-alls. We’ve seen people jump to validate their own existence as XYZ person in the academy, validate their great graduate experiences, or even defend the accused and his wife in response. People have also done more research on Title IX adjudication processes, out of just curiosity in addition to reading the case file. As a survivor advocate and former organizer for Title IX, and as someone who’s dealt with Title IX as an undergraduate and a graduate student, I can confidently say that shit is fucked up all around. Welcome to the work of trying to fix universities, especially for Black women and Black queer and trans folx. Like, these systems fall apart every single time.
[00:39:53] AJ: I mean, they’re not really meant to stay together. That’s kind of the sense, right? It’s like it’s one of those situations where you, again, have to say is this a breakdown of the system or is this the system operating the way it’s supposed to?
[00:40:07] BT: You know, it’s always–I mean I always think of it as the system operating how it’s supposed to.
[00:40:12] AJ: Yeah, it was a rhetorical question [laughter].
[00:40:15] BT: It was rhetorical for you to journal about [laughter].
[00:40:19] AJ: But yeah, there are so many layers to consider here. Earlier we talked about hegemony and academic hierarchies. And in the academy, there is an expectation that if you are a woman, a queer person, a trans person, a disabled person, you’re gonna experience some discrimination and harassment from your peers and faculty. That is common knowledge—not common sense. I’m saying it’s common knowledge, it’s very well known, it’s an expected practice, it’s something that you share with people in your whisper networks and one wrong move can end your career through another kind of academic whisper networks. We discussed whisper networks with our friend Chrystel in season one, episode five, it was entitled “Lorde Take the Wheel.” If you already stand at the intersection of multiple violences, then that violence is compounded when you enter graduate school.
[00:41:11] BT: For real. Graduate school is not the place where all of a sudden all of these violences don’t matter, even if it’s within a Black Studies department or without. On the note of people defending Comaroff and the tell-all confessionals, people were in our mentions with “a terrible injustice is happening here, someone’s career is at stake” and when others—thank y’all for pushing back, because who has time [laughter]﹘they were like “well I don’t even know who these people are.” And it’s like, so then why are you in our mentions? But you know, sometimes I think the bots are just getting more and more advanced [laughter]. Some people are born [laughter]. I was gonna say some people are born a bot but sometimes you have life experiences that turn you into a bot on the internet, I don’t know [laughter].
[00:42:24] AJ: I feel like academia—the academic institution—I feel like it really trains you say something when you could say nothing. And so, I just want to [laughter] make a little call back to what Brendan was saying about the politics of silence and the way that that can be used in a powerful way. Of course, I’m not talking about silencing or being silenced, just to add that in there. Sometimes you might wanna take up a politics of silence and that could be defending alleged abusers in our mentions. Thank you [laughter]. One of the things I’ve been finding so interesting is that this isn’t even the first time this is happening. It’s not the second, it’s not the third. I mean we were literally just here a few years ago when news broke of the toxic old boys’ workplace at the HAU journal.
And I think one thing that I’ve been noticing is that anthropologists seem to be at the center of these academic controversies. Specifically, when it comes to power and the way that power is wielded in these hierarchical organizations. And I wonder if that has something to do with the foundations of our discipline, the way that—and I’m thinking specifically about sexual harassment here—but the way that fetishization of otherness is kind of built into our discipline in some senses. And specifically for white cis men to take advantage of. Is it that or is it because of our claims to reflexivity that people are more likely to speak out? You know, I don’t know. I think that anthropologists are so good about being reflexive. For folx who are not anthropologists, we had a whole period in the nineties—eighties and nineties—where there was a reflexive turn.
Everybody was thinking about power, power in the text specifically and there was something that Faye Harrison wrote that was so important. She was like, they actually turned something that could be politics into poetics, right. I’m paraphrasing, that’s not the exact quote because she obviously wrote it in a far more eloquent way, but [laughter]. So really, it’s like they’re thinking about power in the written, in the text, but not really power in the way that people actually experience it. So, they’re like reflexive in their writing but almost never reflexive about their contribution to toxicity in their departments or in their mentor relationships and things like that. That’s why I tweeted from the ZD account that professors were closing ranks rather than asking “What can I do to make structural change so no one else is harmed?” They’re like, “Eh, forget them.” We might be screwed over by this [laughter].
[00:45:40] BT: Yeah. Which is, again, if that’s your response to someone else coming forward about someone harming them is well let me defend the person who’s been accused of harm because then somebody might shine a light on me, then maybe it’s time to retire [laughter]. Like, uh, sometimes the best way for you to make change as a tenured professor, yadda, yadda, yadda, is to retire. But that’s another talk, for another time.
[00:46:14] AJ: They ain’t willing. People ain’t willing to have that conversation.
[00:46:16] BT: No, because, I mean, I don’t know. I’m just like, especially if you work at these elite universities, don’t you basically receive the same amount of pay? But I know it’s about maintaining power and this, that, and the third. I know, but anyway.
[00:46:34] AJ: Like the fact that a lot of these things, it’s like, “Oh, I get to help shape the future of the disciple.” and it’s like, why is the history of the discipline that we know is violent and harmful being the ones to shape the future in the present. I mean, this is my research from a completely different context [crosstalk] but it’s like we’re looking to the past to shape the future, but the past is violent. In my research specifically it’s the colonial past right, but it’s like this applies here. It applies to this question too. It’s like y’all are trying to shape the future of the discipline but you’re not thinking about the future, you’re thinking about how to keep it the same so that you and people like you can continue to succeed and flourish in it.
[00:47:29] BT: Exactly. And it also requires this like—I mean, I don’t even know what you want to call it—forgetting that the past does in fact inform the present and the future. Like you are always already represented in this way, there’s no need for you to maintain this vanguard, gatekeeping thing because you already do. It’s something about—at least from the experiences I’ve had with namely the white women that I’ve had to deal with, it is something about just being there. Being able to be that person yourself that denies, or puts off the opportunity, or wields power. It’s just about the physical presence which I think, for them, validates their own self in some way or at least like, you know. And I don’t wanna get too occult with it but it’s very vampire energy. Very vampire energy.
But we are of course talking about, when we think about the professors that close ranks, those letters written and signed by dozens of professors at Harvard, ones that are popping up at other institutions in defense of John Comaroff as an excellent colleague and scholar—which, okay girl. One of which was swiftly retracted when the full text of the lawsuit was made public. Like, those, you know when other non-Black people come together my disappointment only goes so far. But to see the names of Black people on those lists, which again everybody was like, well it’s not surprising who was on there, who signed it. But still, like, to see their names, and then for them to just go back and retract it. Like y’all could have sat there and ate your food! But instead, you decided to contribute to silencing his alleged victims. You instead decided to proclaim to the world where you stand when it comes to people abusing power. And so now we all know and, you know, the invitation to retire is still out there [laughter]. An invitation to retire. It may not be coming from your departments but it’s coming from me, [laughter] retire. Retire.
[00:50:00] AJ: I mean, now we have a list. We have a list of people that, you know, we should just avoid, that we can stay away from, if we have that privilege. But I don’t, honestly, I think it’s gonna be one of those, the more things change, the more they stay the same. People aren’t gonna stop asking them to review tenure files, and people aren’t gonna stop asking them to write articles and read people’s books and doing peer review. This stuff is just baked into the academy. And it’s like, when you are someone who is in a position of power, it’s almost like it’s impossible to get around them or to get away from them because everybody else is so like—I don’t wanna say enamored—but almost starstruck by the power that they wield. And so, what are you gonna do?
[00:51:04] BT: What are you gonna do?
[00:51:04] AJ: What are you gonna do? And, you know, we’ve talked about this before. There is only so much we ourselves can say. I don’t even know what’s gonna happen. Don’t assign this podcast to your class [laughter] because we don’t need some of the things we said to get too far out there. Of course, because of the political economy of power that I mentioned earlier. It’s built into the way academia works—you’re forever attached to the people who trained you. You’re always going to be so-and-so’s student and, whew, does that mess you up is so-and-so ends up like some of the so-and-sos who have gone down, but haven’t gone down, you know what I mean. Cause you’re supposed to have them writing letters for you almost until you get tenure and sometimes after. And a bad letter, it can mess you up for life and it can go beyond that, right. That’s what, you know, you’re going to talk about now.
[00:52:03] BT: Yeah so, there is this Medium essay written by Professor Paula Chakravartty who talks about her experiences of harassment and academic hierarchies. And she basically goes on to prove how if you’re not advised by the “right” people, or you do not come from the proper background, or you choose not to submit to certain types of abuse, you could be blacklisted in the academy. And even though she is an elite Indian woman, she still [stammers]—oh, I was gonna say some word that didn’t exist—she still faced a lot of harassment because a well-known person in her department was just like, “Well, I don’t know who you studied under, I don’t know who you are, so I decided that you shouldn’t be tenured.” And it’s like, okay, this one person has the power to really determine your career.
And I’ve even had a professor threaten me, threaten to end my academic career—and it’s like, girl, jokes on you honey [laughter]—because of the way I worded an email. And no, she actually was not a white woman. But I will say again that the worst harassment I’ve experienced was from a white woman in our department. I’m looking forward to telling the truth about my experience with her after she dies. I tell my friends, it’s gonna be the obituary of the ages. She is a very “powerful person” in our discipline, but not in my particular subfield, so thankfully I have not experienced much backlash or blacklisting. At least, not to my knowledge. But I do know of other students who, you send an email, or you say the wrong thing in a meeting and your entire career has been foreclosed. And another thing that you were talking about is like that rhetorical question that you asked earlier, is the system falling apart or is it doing what it’s supposed to do?
This is definitely the system doing what it’s supposed to do. And when folx are thinking about change and how do we change these systems, we need to consider that the university at least in the U.S. was originally created to educate propertied white men’s sons so that they could assume the family’s empire. Which is why legacy admissions still exist, but that’s a whole nother conversation. These schools, their rules, and their functions in communities stem from that genesis. When women and Black people integrated these institutions—which happened last century, which I think folx forget, it was just last century that these institutions were integrated by women and by Black people, and Black people integrating allowed for everyone else to come. Their fundamental purpose, which is to educate white men, did not shift.
So, these policies, particularly those that address sexual, gender, and race-based harassment, they still center and protect the white men that these institutions were built for. Title IX offices are not there to protect victims. Title IX is basically a legal guidance for schools, but you can enforce it. It’s not something that’s like, oh these are what schools are built around. It was written because schools were not doing that shit and now you have to enforce it. But all these regulations, they exist to protect the university and the perpetrators—and I put that with a caveat, because again, that is also racially, and gender inflected—from liability.
In my case, I’ll talk about my undergraduate experience briefly. I was physically assaulted by someone I was in a relationship with. And the dean of student conduct—who was known to tell women of all races that, you know, known to discredit their abusive experience. He told one woman that she would eventually fall back in love with the man who abused her, she just needed to calm down and spend some time thinking about it. He told me that what I had to say about my experience did not really matter. And then, in fact, when I asked for them to remove the sanctions that I received as a result of the physical assault that happened to me in the adjudication through Title IX, he said that I had to apologize to him first for “wasting his time” and then he would remove the sanctions, while the ex who physically harmed me was just given a verbal warning.
So, I think that experience, along with the organizing that I did afterwards—because I was so angry, I was like something gotta change about this shit—it really taught me a lot of lessons about who Title IX protects. And I do not see these offices or these institutions as things that protect women in general but definitely Black women specifically. And if you are queer or trans [pause] honey you might as well get a community of people together and jump somebody, it’s honestly—I mean I didn’t recommend that, I didn’t say that, okay. But if you leave it up to these institutions, you’re on your own or you’re pushed out of school. That’s what I’ll say.
So, I feel like this case, the Harvard case, demonstrates on a larger scale who sees themselves as protected and protectable by the university. We have these two white women and one wealthy Indian woman who is suing Harvard, and they will win this case—fingers crossed, right [laughter], they’ll win this case, they’ll win some money to split with their lawyers, which this law firm also has a reputation for gender inequality, which is very interesting—and, you know, that’ll be that. I’m thinking about the Black people Comaroff may have harmed. The ones that are on this continent and not on this continent, right? What is owed to those who are the subjects and objects of African studies, most of which are not members of the Harvard community? What about the generations of his students and students of his wife who have themselves become perpetrators of violence? Like, what about that, what about them then?
And just in a general question, when have we seen white women take up a cause and it open the way for Black women to do something, or to be seen, or be represented? That’s almost never happened. It almost always takes us fighting for ourselves, right, to change things. And so, all I’m really trying to underscore here is that individual lawsuits, like this one, like the one at Columbia, like the one before that, are not going to get us out of the structural problem which is gendered and racial violence.
[00:59:39] AJ: Nope. So many, so many things to say on this. First, I’m sorry that happened to you. That was some bullshit [crosstalk]. And I think what it also is, is reflective of the experiences of everyone, cause that’s, you know. Not of everyone but everyone who has to go to the Title IX office, who has to report abusers and people who harmed them and it’s like what is even the function of this office, of this institution. And it says so much that in our union negotiations, one of the hills the Columbia administration was just about ready to die on was having the option for third party arbitration in these cases. They were like, no, no, no, no, no, no. Why would they want to be legally bound to an external arbitrator’s recommendations? Why would they be comfortable with a third-party poking around their books and poking around in all of the other kind of complaints and things that have happened from the same person? Because you know that if there is one—and this is one of the things I was saying—if there’s one complaint, there are several, several occurrences. It’s never a one-time thing, nobody just one time, accidentally, sexually harasses somebody. It’s a pattern, right.
[01:01:09] BT: It’s a pattern.
[01:01:10] AJ: As Glover explains in the article, she learned the ways that universities are “protected enclosures of unchecked violence and abuse of power.” So, it’s like the only true oversight that comes in these private institutions comes from money. And so, just like hegemony, it is primarily the interests of the donors that matter. They can influence who gets tenure, as we saw with Nikole Hannah-Jones, they can influence which departments are valuable—and that often means putting programs where Black and queer people are most present in positions of financial precarity. Because we know that some of these departments are like, “Yeah, we don’t have the money, we don’t have enough money.” But then you go to the psychology departments offices and it’s like, “Oh, wow, y’all got glass windows and stainless-steel kitchen appliances?” [Laughter]
[01:02:08] BT: What? The printer works. You don’t have to go in and have them play guess which black student are you? Are you a student in order to get stuff from the office? That’s beautiful.
[01:02:20] AJ: You don’t have to be asked, “Do I know you?” Which I have been asked before in [laughter] my department.
[01:02:30] BT: By our friend. Yeah, by our friend. Yes, I know exactly—
[01:02:33] AJ: Oh, no, no, no. Not that person.
[01:02:35] BT: Oh what? [Crosstalk] Wow.
[01:02:36] AJ: It was like a “Do I know you?” and then there was also a very, very snappy email—again, going back to did you write an email incorrectly—there was a snappy email because I addressed [pause] people incorrectly, apparently. Anyways, we’ll talk about that after.
[01:03:03] BT: It happens.
[01:03:04] AJ: But one of the things I wanna say, you know, one of my friends was saying it’s just so different from the way that Black men are treated in the academia. Which is like they’re very much groomed and like, they’re taken under the wing of a professor and they wanna be the person that helps this Black man, this “endangered” Black man. Even if he isn’t. And when I said endangered earlier, I also meant that in like air quotes because oftentimes, it’s like people who can talk the talk and walk the walk too. And then they end up having great teaching jobs and getting tenure at X Ivy League university and it’s like hmm, hmm, interesting what your experience was like compared to other people who, of women who are smarter than you
[01:04:01] BT: You know. And then they get big, bigtime, and they write books where they describe these Black poor women as monsters who made them feel stupid while they make millions of dollars.
[01:04:16] AJ: So, why are you the famous one if other people are capable of making you feel stupid? [Laughter]
[01:04:20] BT: You know.
[01:04:21] AJ: And yet you’re the famous one. But is it not that you became famous by disparaging Black queer women? Hmm? In part.
[01:04:32] BT: In part. In part. And I think this also turns—I mean if we wanna talk about Black men, briefly [laughter] right—it also turns to the other side of the coin, which is for those of us who are Black, possibly queer, maybe trans, maybe disabled, a lot of times the violence that we experience comes from other Black people. And there aren’t really ways to report that without, very much so, the fear that your career is over. Again, because the pool of people in academia is so small, once you start describing it’s like, “Oh, this person? I know this person, I know a student of this person, you’re applying for this fellowship, I’m gonna shut this down.” And so, I’ve had friends who would literally feel immobilized. Cannot express how abused they are by their advisors because their advisor is the top person in the discipline, top Black person in the discipline, and they can’t speak out against this person. I’ve worked with Black people, Black women, Black feminists in particular, who are very abusive and exploitative in their workplace environment. And who do you go to, where do you turn to for “protection”—which I think is a whole nother, that’s a whole nother topic.
[01:05:58] AJ: That’s another episode [laughter].
[01:06:00] BT: I think we gotta let that whole idea of protection go, honey. Yeah, like where do I go to say, “Oh, this. woman, who looks like me abused me.” There’s not really any place to go for that. And what happened to me in graduate school as far like the racial—which I would say was racial and gender based because she doesn’t do this to Black men—but when I was trying to figure out what to do about the situation and was told not to report by multiple university offices and the reasoning being we have so many cases. We have so many cases that we wouldn’t even get to yours until after you graduated, so what’s the point? But I think it shows again, who has the time, who has the mental space, who has the capacity to complain and to keep complaining and to be heard. I don’t have that, so I just said, okay well here’s what I’mma do, I’mma just ignore and avoid and whatever fallout comes, comes. But now there’s like certain conferences I can’t go to or certain things that I wanna apply for because I know that she may have her voice in someone’s ear on that committee. But most of these are like women’s and gender studies stuff that I probably would be uncomfortable in anyways, to be honest, to be real.
[01:07:26] AJ: Yeah, I think as what you were saying is—I mean first of all, is the university not [stressing syllables] embarrassed? That is [stressing syllables] embarrassing that you have so many Title IX complaints that you’re gonna tell a graduate student who is in the university for the longest—a social sciences graduate student, we are at the university for the longest time. Because undergrads are typically four, maybe five years; you’ve got science PhD students who are going to be there for four years; you have your masters students who are going to be there for two years. I should say science four to five. We’re there for seven generally, six if you’re lucky.
[01:08:06] BT: [Laughter] Six if you’re really working hard.
[01:08:09] AJ: So, the fact that they’re like yeah, we probably won’t get to your complaint, is that not a sign to you that something systemic is very wrong at the university? But I think a really good reference for folks who are like, “Damn, why is this process so extensive, why is it so difficult,” would be Sara Ahmed’s complaint. And so, she writes about how the process is designed to tax you, it is designed to make you not do your work. It is designed to have you spending time answering emails, and collecting evidence, and all of these kinds of things. Especially and it’s like compounded for someone who is from a marginalized background or someone who is from a low-income background because you don’t have the money to have lawyers do that for you. That’s all you. Instead of sitting there getting your work done, you are supposed to be collecting evidence and going to hearings and doing all this stuff. So, it’s designed to break you down and make you not actually want to make the complaint.
[01:09:17] BT: Yeah, and that goes back to what I was saying earlier about the university and who it’s designed to defend, right. So, people might not have money for lawyers, the other person might, but also there’s a certain credibility that some people have that’s read as innate on to them, right. So, like a white man in a Title IX case, who may be the perpetrator, might already be seen as a credible voice where all he has to say is, “I got a little drunk, I didn’t do it,” right. And then the victim or survivor has to come up with the evidence that this in fact did happen it did in fact affect them. I think that that also too, when you think about complaint, comes into whose complaints are read as you need to go through a bureaucratic process, and whose complaints are like oh yeah let’s take this straight to the top, let’s do something about it. [Sigh] But again it’s to protect the university liability because one university was sued by a perpetrator. Because he was sanctioned, and his sanction was to be expelled for raping another student and he sued and was like this is keeping me from getting my degree and he won the lawsuit. So yeah, this shit is so complicated and it’s so much bigger than like a professor kissed me—which that happened to me in undergrad, [laughter] multiple times. And so, I was like, “Oh, this is—” That’s when I started realizing that this is a systemic issue, right.
[01:11:07] AJ: And it goes to hegemony, who benefits from this system, and who pays for the system and the way that it is.
[01:11:18] BT: Professors give free kisses [crosstalk] [laughter] which is just fucking disgusting to think about.
[01:11:27] AJ: But anyways, that is all we have for you all today. I will say I hope that in listening to this you feel seen, you feel like someone else knows your experience. And we just want to say you are not alone; you are not the problem. The institution is the problem, and you go and find yourself in spaces of joy, healing, and love.
[01:11:56] BT: Yes, go where the love is even if you have to continue to fight to be seen and to be heard. Gotta go to where the love is. And just know there’s spaces of love here at Zora’s Daughters. Again, if you have experienced this or Title IX issues, the organization I used to work for is called Know Your IX, so like K-N-O-W, your, nine, I-X, so like the Latin way to say nine. And you can visit them at their website, knowyourix.org. I used to do a lot of advising for students and a lot of counseling. I still do counseling for survivors who are impacted by these systems.
But yes, thank you all for listening. This episode was produced by Alyssa James and Brendane Tynes and distributed in partnership with the American Anthropological Association. This season of the podcast is generously funded by a grant from the Arts & Science Graduate Council and donations from listeners just like you.
[01:13:05] AJ: Thank you all for your support! You da bomb, dabomb.com. Again, aging myself on my birthday [laughter]. If you like this episode, please share it via social media, WhatsApp, or in a love note! We would love to hear what you have to say about this episode, so be sure to follow us on Instagram at zorasdaughters and on Twitter at zoras_daughters. For transcripts, a syllabus, and information on how to cite us or become a patron, visit our website zorasdaughters.com.
[01:13:42] BT: Last but not least, absolutely, especially during this time, remember that we must take care of ourselves and each other. Bye!
[01:13:51] AJ: Bye.
[End of Recording]