Disrupting the Status Quo Through Racial Justice: Reflections on the Grad Prep Academy

• In Event: 69.031 - Diversifying the Pipeline to Professor: Insights From the Grad Prep Academy

Abstract

Moving from undergraduate straight into a Ph.D. reflected my desire to find spaces to study, theorize, and dismantle white supremacy. My experience in the Grad Prep Academy demonstrated the doctoral degree and a career, as an academic, could be these spaces. Through exposure to racial justice-focused scholars and research, I learned the field of education can be repurposed to center Black lives.

While many in our field praise access programs for contributing to diversity, this is not how I understand GPA. I already knew little is accomplished through cherry–picking Black people (in this instance men), placing them in doctoral programs, and calling it progress. I applied to Shaun’s Academy because the application called for students who were interested in addressing racial disparities. This call, one focused on justice, was imagining a different type of access with alternative ways to be a doctoral student and future professor. To be sure, I am here as a Ph.D. candidate because the Academy provided resources and support on how to navigate graduate school pathways, but more importantly it offered a space to imagine justice.

To understand how Grad Prep Academy serves as an alternative model to graduate school access, we have to stop conflating diversity with justice. Dr. Harper’s published work on the Academy shows hundreds of Black men applied not to just be a “diverse” person in graduate school, but instead to seek racial justice. When I attended the Academy, Shaun asked us to be truth–tellers who first can see Black people as human and then critically, rigorously, and relentlessly imagine what racial justice looks like in education. He did not want more people producing the scholarship that narrates Black people only as dead and dying. He wanted us to be committed to racial justice in ways that extended and disrupted the field –even his own work.

Thus, those who desire opportunity and justice for Black and Brown people cannot settle for the current terms of access that require few to be accepted in order to deny many. Often initiatives do nothing to challenge the terms of access wherein GRE scores, class status, institutional prestige, and race remain large determinants of who becomes a graduate student. In access programs, meritocracy stills defines who is worthy of access and who is not despite critical race scholars documenting how meritocracy is a mask for white supremacy. Access showcases some of us as diversity, only to mark others like us with no value. We do not need diversity that only aims to change hearts and minds. We need diversity to be dangerous –in fact, the ways we provide traditionally excluded groups’ access should endanger the status quo that still ignores them. If academia is a space of possibility, then those who occupy it need a radical imagination. Imagine ways to subvert what makes one a scholar. Envision centering those who are marginalized in our access discussions. Dare to put our scholarly investments in the graduate students who thirst to write, read, and teach freedom.

Author

• Jalil Bishop, University of California - Los Angeles