Decolonize Me

During my life as a student, I was often well-supported by the uncompromising inflexibility of higher education.  This might seem like a weird thing for me to say.  I realize why, as I think about it now, that I felt this was the case: I have a thoroughly colonial and colonized brain, augmented by privilege to boot.  Colonized me really likes rules.  Although I might not always agree with them, I like to follow the rules.  I am compliant.  The idea of hard and fast deadlines makes sense to me, and I actually prefer to work toward a concrete target date.  My thought processes in this respect are stepwise and linear.   You might guess that, as I moved into teaching roles as part of my professional career, I carried the ideas about inflexibility in education with me like an invisible backpack. After all, it had worked well for me. I toed the colonial line as I began to design curricula and develop course plans: I embraced many of the university'...

I screwed up recently when in the midst of attempting to engage in decolonial work.  I have let some time pass, in between the screw up and the reporting of it here.  For a while I thought I might be cognitively dodging it, as coming to terms with my own white feminist behavior is most often troubling and uncomfortable.  Regardless, I realized today, as I sat in the spot pictured here with my bare feet on the ground, that it was time for me to talk about it publicly.  I'm going to do this in a confidential a way without disclosing identities, so please forgive the opacity at times.   A group of colleagues and I organized a virtual session with Saira Rao and Regina Jackson, authors of "White Women: Everything you Already Know About Your Own Racism and How to do Better."  We crafted an invitation to this event and sent it out to multiple interest holder groups (staff, faculty, etc.).  The focus of this session was dismantling white feminism, bu...