You Won't Break My Soul: (Re)generative Powers of Black Sisterhood in Academia

• In Event: A (Re)membering Renaissance: Black Sisterhood, Academia, and Possibilities

Abstract

“I done found me a new foundation, I'm takin' my new salvation, And I'ma build my own foundation.” (Beyoncé, 2021) The demands of academia on Black women often require forced assimilation to a patriarchal standards. As doctoral students, we experienced the oppression academia as we prepared for our 2022 Fulbright to Ghana. We quickly developed a sisterhood that gave us collective space to process our journey, our reconnection to the continent, and our individual grapplings with the (re)membering process. Beyoncé’s “Break My Soul” provided a collective call to resist the oppression of institutional spaces on the Black female body, and gave us hope that we could build space for ourselves, that our journey in Ghana could be the foundation of the strength needed for a new salvation. “You said you outside, but you ain’t that outside,” was echoed from Beyonce’s song on our journey. We were outside outside—outside of the constant constraints of our institutions and outside of the expectations of whiteness, and what we found was a deep connection inside through (re)membering. As Black female educators, our sisterhood continued when we returned to our institutions and served to support our navigation of academia. We found a new foundation of academic strength through this sisterhood formed by collective experience and embraced an endarkened feminist epistemology together, and through our experiences guided by elder Black scholars, deepened our understanding of our individual needs for connection both to each other and to the diaspora. Dillard (2019) explains, "endarkened frameworks often arise from an African cosmological space: I am because you are. This means we both honor and need the friend-friend, those persons, and spaces across differences that through their living and being are those life/love lines that keep both of our heads above water when racism threatens our emotional, intellectual, and spiritual existence” (p. 115). In co-defining sisterhood with each other, we were able to tap into the interdependent space of sisterhood, which led to a greater collective strength. Our institutions, especially the predominantly white spaces of doctoral research, demand that we conform to speech, patterns of interactions, and deeply cultural ideologies to jump through the hoops of the doctorate. Even in institutions that espouse to value equity, the world of academia can feel constraining for Black women who choose not to play into respectability politics or conform to dominant cultural ideologies that devalue their worth, words, and work. The labor of Black women in these institutional spaces is undermined by microaggressions, which serve in counteractive measure to de-center and de-prioritize the creation of educational spaces that are humanizing for the students of color we seek to serve. In the words of Big Freedia, we are able to “release ya anger, release ya mind, release ya job, release the time, release ya trade, release the stress, release the love, forget the rest.” (Knowles-Carter, 2021) Sisterhood continues to be the way we prevent academia from breaking our souls, and provides collective strength to release the wear and tear of academia on the Black female body and mind.

Author

• Celeste A. Housey, NYCPS