From the Archives: How I Survived Until Then (Black Mama Down, 2017)

Occasionally I will post old blogs and writings on this site, because I love to look back at who I was at different times and think about how far I’ve come. Black Mama Down was a blog I started after I was diagnosed with postpartum depression after the birth of my first child.

One of the chapters in Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ new book Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity is “How She Survived Until Then.” I find myself combing this chapter so often, or even just thinking of the words in the title, as I make it through the homestretch of this graduate school process. And it really does feel like I will barely make it through. I will not thrive through the end of this process. I will survive it, and that actually feels like enough.

I have been marked in many ways, big and small, through this process. But perhaps one of the most profound ways I have been marked was having my original dissertation project scooped by a cohort mate. Stolen, really. A year before my cohort mate presented her dissertation proposal in public, I had conceived of and shared that very theoretical scaffolding in a class with her and other students. My project was the culmination of 3 years of wondering about how race was marked through space—especially in the context of gentrification. The project was beautiful when I conceived it, because I had expanded to other places based on what I was, at the time, trying to put words to.

Attending my cohort mate’s dissertation proposal defense marked a moment of trauma in my graduate student journey. The other moment I’ve already written about here. I watched as my cohort mate presented the bones of my dissertation proposal, but with the site changed. I watched as my entire theoretical scaffolding was presented as someone else's work. Except I knew that it was not hers.

A year prior, my cohort mate had presented her own dissertation proposal draft in the same class I had. She presented a project on Black politics in the legislative branch. It was a strong project, but our feedback for her at the time was to think about what makes that project an Africana project, as opposed to a political science project. In the year between, I went on to pass two exams before giving birth to my son. And in that year, she somehow moved from this overtly political science project to a project on gentrification that looked strangely, eerily, like my own.

The signs were there all along in that year, but being trusting by nature, I could not see them for what they were. My cohort mate asked me for some resources, syllabi, and papers related to courses I had taken on space and place. She said she was “getting into questions of space more.” I obliged, because as a cohort mate I didn't have any reason not to trust her. But then she asked for my field list on urban community making. That gave me a long pause. The field I had constructed came from months of thinking and writing about my specific questions about my project.

And while I’m all for collaboration, I didn’t have any peace about sharing that list, which was a mind map of my thinking up until that point. My intuition told me there was danger ahead. So I shared resources instead of the list, in an effort to be collegial but not give up what was so precious to me.

Leading up to her proposal defense, I asked her more than once what her new project was going to be on. Her response was consistent, if strange: “Girl, I don’t even know.” Two weeks before the defense, the answers continued to be evasive. I, in the throes of postpartum depression, didn't have the wherewithal to interrogate further. I just waited, in excited anticipation, for the day my cohort mate would present her project to the world.

Except she presented my project, as hers, to the world.

I wasn’t really prepared to watch my theoretical scaffolding, my phrasing, my intellectual interlocutors, my project outline appear on the screen outside of my control. I wasn’t the only person who noticed the similarities between our projects, either. After the presentation, multiple people who had read my proposal asked me, with confusion on their faces, what happened. I felt my face get hot. “I don’t know.” I said. “I think I just got scooped.”

I thought back over the past year. I thought about how my last comprehensive exam had shifted my questions, how pregnancy had shifted my plans. I thought about the one time I spoke out loud that I didn’t know if I could do my project the way I envisioned it now that I was pregnant. Who did I say that to? Did I give her permission to take my work and stuff her own site into it? How much of my own work did I give her? What else was she using? And most importantly, why did she never once talk to me about this?

In the days after my cohort mate presented her (my, our?) dissertation proposal, I was awash in tears. I felt angry and vulnerable. I felt like I couldn’t continue with the project the way I wanted to, because I was a mother now. I didn’t want to compete with a cohort mate for jobs, conferences, funding for the forseeable future. And frankly, I felt at a serious disadvantage. I had just had a child. There was going to be no circumstance in which I could compete with her, my thinking went. She would always have more time, more freedom, more support than I would have because she was single and had no demands on her time in the form of a baby. How was I, a fat, Black and poor mother, going to compete in this stupidly competitive environment against someone so much better positioned—and clearly less ethical—than I?

So I abandoned my project. I left it completely behind. In hindsight, I wish I had stuck with it. Not because I wanted to compete with the cohort mate that scooped me, but because I believe I chose against myself in that moment. I made a profound choice against my abilities, my purpose, and my vision by ceding my project to my cohort mate. I was in the depths of postpartum depression, and so I could not see myself as I really was at the time—a brilliant scholar whose work was good enough to steal. Rather, I acted out of fear and anxiety, and walked away from the work I had spent three years preparing for, because I did not think I was "good enough" to do this work alongside another person and be noticed.

It has been two long years of healing from that experience, but I still live with pain every day. I miss my old project. I feel fully out of my depth with my new project, precisely because I didn’t do a field in Black feminism. And, I recently had to witness my cohort mate win a national fellowship. With my project. This trauma is citational, and continuous.

I oscillate between the better and worst parts of my nature as I navigate this experience. It has taught me to protect those who share ideas with me. It has deeply affected my politics of citation. I don’t let an idea or a process pass my lips without giving credit to those who helped me with an idea, or those to whom an idea belongs, because I know what it is like to have your work stolen. But writing this new dissertation has been harder than I imagine my old project would have been. I am inherently suspicious of anyone who asks me about my work, and I still cannot look my cohort mate in the face without wanting to scream “Thief!”

So I don’t look her way anymore.

I have drawn what boundaries I can, not only with her, but with the department that knew it happened and did nothing. I defend my right to tell the story as it happened to me, recognizing that it is not the only story, but just my truth. And, for the first time, I am writing it down and putting it here, because I am tired of carrying it in silence.

Everything is not ok in academia. I don’t know if I was targeted because having a child made me vulnerable, or if I was really just collateral damage in the pursuit of a brilliant idea. I do know that I watched the scaffolding of my project be presented by my cohort mate, and that I experienced that as trauma. I also know that the fact no one said or did anything about it, no one stopped her, no one has spoken with her, tells me that the academy is operating as planned—with full indifference to the forms of relation that emphasize community, collaboration, and accountability. The academy operates on competition, individualism, and dishonesty, and in this regard, it is always a place to be survived. Survived "until then."

Everything is not ok in academia, but I will be ok. In a prophetic moment a year ago, as the graduate students in my department, including my cohort mate, were courting a new class of students, the following words came out of my mouth: “I know my ideas are brilliant, because I already have biters. And it’s cool. People can bite my work, because at the end of the day, when I decide to write what I have been put here to write, no one will be able to stop me. What’s for me is for me. So I might be slow right now because I have this baby, but make no mistake, when I step into my purpose, everyone will know.”

Some days, I still believe that. It is how I am surviving until then.