Academia Has Outlived Its Usefulness: Palestinian Solidarity Encampments And My Experience as A Former Blackcademic
“It cannot be denied that the university is a place of refuge, and it cannot be accepted that the university is a place of enlightenment. In the face of these conditions one can only sneak into the university and steal what one can. To abuse its hospitality, to spite its mission, to join its refugee colony… to be in but not of — this is the path of the subversive intellectual in the modern university’.” — Fred Moten, & Stefano Harney, The Undercommons, Fugitive Planning & Black Study
With attention to the pro-Palestinian encampments that have surfaced in US colleges across the country — Columbia University, Harvard University, New York University, California State Polytechnic University, University of Michigan, I will speak to the role of the academic and my experience in having been one of its many members—its scholars—its victims. I feel like many of those who I have met—and those of who have “met me” by word of mouth—social osmosis, or what have you, have built up somewhat of a parasocial relationship to me in correlation to the idea of me being an academic—not to the visceral experience that they have thoroughly met me. With that said, I give a shoutout to all the European colonizers and nonBlack people of color who used me as a political prop — interacted with me as a means to an end for their character development. May they never see peace in this life and the next.
In the back of my head, I felt fond of being admired in this regard — as an intellectual — as an academic. This equivocal experience was, however, at the cost of butting heads with racists on occasion, in the classroom and on the campus — students and professors — advising to, two to three of whom were English professors, to not say Negro or Nigger, even if a European wrote the text — even if I, a Black person, is not present — even if they were reading Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God word for word and they stumbled upon the word to justify it and say that they’ve been teaching African American Studies for over ten years — to not say Negro nor Nigger in reference to discourse on Sylvia Plath’s works. In spite of these jarring experiences, when I think in retrospect about my academic history, I used to wear these accolades as badges of honor.
For a while, I did and to an extent one might say that I’ve reclaimed the accomplishments of academic aptitude as a milestone for myself outside of what I presumed my biological family expected of me. Having an education was fundamental in my Haitian household, or rather, going to school was fundamental. Forever and always, my family’s interrogations made it all seem as though they were demanding I tell them what meaning or what purpose I could cultivate if I wasn’t attending school. When I attended community college at SUNY Orange around the same time I took a liking to not only drawing and writing, but also transitioning my poetry into music.
I wasn’t sure what I was looking to get out of making music, but I remember using FL Studio and Audacity for a bit. Then it hit me. I didn’t want to be in school. In that moment, I can say it really wasn’t fear of what my family ingrained in me that was holding me back, it was rather curiosity and creativity that invited me to make the decision to drop out of school. I was apprehensive but I anxiously told my aunt Fifi the truth. Subsequently, she kicked me out of her house. I was practically homeless. Even though my mother convinced me to continue and finish school and get my associate’s degree, I felt betrayal — anger — distrust at the pit of my stomach. It was from there that I felt the extent to how much going to school meant to the family.
This didn’t make sense to me at the time. As a youth, I will say I liked learning, but it was at my own pace that I appreciated the experience of learning a lot more. Even as I took up poetry more rigorously post high school, I took it upon myself to adopt the lexicon, the poetic forms, scansion, everything. I was and still am an autodidact in this way. As I neared the end of my academic career, the question of whether or not school was a necessity came to mind and I kept saying to myself, do I actually like school or was I conditioned to revel in predominantly white institutions? The more appropriate question for me has been, do I love learning, but hate school?
Fast forward to now. I am with three college degrees: an Associates Degree in Graphic Design, a Bachelor’s Degree in English with a concentration in Creative Writing, a minor in Black Studies and a Master’s Degree in English. The idea was to keep going — pursue a PhD in Creative Writing and fulfill a position as a Creative Writing professor. I would soon come to feel like this goal — this objective was a filler phrase.
In small talk, I would preemptively reference this objective as a way to get these narrow-minded careerists and capitalist-driven folks off my back. Talking about this shit in such a one-track minded way left no room for uncertainty — for me to express vulnerability in feeling uncertain about my life trajectory and so, these abrupt moments of small talk weren’t meant to keep the conversation going — but to keep us abiding by the antiBlack capitalist system — by having these fleeting and meaningless words of exchange, only for it to come to these abrupt, short endings.
Purpose isn’t always known at the outset as every individual comes from different walks of life. The idea of having a career was to an extent, inseparable from purpose. At a time, I couldn’t seem to shake this feeling of inseperableness even now, as I admit, that I don’t aspire to secure a career in academia anymore. I believe this is probably the first time I’m admitting this publicly. The only difference is I am without my biological family hounding me to seek work not necessarily because they cared about me because they didn’t. The so-called “love” was conditional. It was all about the procurement of employment.
I aspire to someday create my own space that allows for artists of all kinds from typographers, poets—painters— music producers to create things—not necessarily for careerist or occupational intent, but rather because it is fun —it brings out the inner child in full for them. That is what I’d love to do before I transition from this world. It is from when we are children that we imagine, contrive—create, but at some point, that part of us—the inner child—the imaginative part—does not die; someone has killed it — killed us, whether it was from their so-called “caregivers,” outside influences from the misdirected callousness of a stranger, or what have you.
To age is inevitable, to grow up is to a great extent, a punitive directive. In the colonial West, to tell someone to grow up is to self-murder all of that which is representative of the inner child. The self-murder of the inner child is a central part of why these adults and most of us are melancholic.
As these academic institutions become the central sites from which they are rightfully being challenged by its students and faculty, shit like this brings me to reinforce and confirm my own thoughts, feelings, and experiences about what it was like being a student—a scholar—a victim of these white supremacist institutions. As many of these brave college students and professors occupy their campuses in solidarity against the murderous Zionist, American and UK entities massacring Palestinians, I would also wish that my alma mater SUNY New Paltz, would do the same. I suspect, however, that because New Paltz, the city and the college, is a hotbed of individuals who more or less adhere to liberalism conjoined with a white feminist politic, their so-called benevolence is merely conditional as it has only taken them so far beyond the bubbles from which them submerge themselves in.
For years have colonized peoples like myself have been groomed to follow the same directive—without school, what will I do? This phrase suggests a sort of ontological predetermination. In other words, when we come into this life, it is with this fated assumption that school is the only choice and work is our future. Attending school and or being a student has been conflated with the necessity to learn and accumulate knowledge. The phrase, more or less, translates to, if I am not adopting Eurocentric enculturation as a model for pedagogy—I am intrinsically nothing. For colonized people, the necessity for school was the only tenable option, but it was like a double-edged sword for us — a double-edged sword for the reason that Europeans have deprived colonized people of all necessities to live and learn. Being bereft of education is all the more reason for us to retrieve it, but to what end has this helped us? My question is why become encultured by something only to go through trial and error to undo imperialist white supremacist capitalist cisheteropatriarchal ideology? I say this to say that colonized people shouldn’t have to experience this only to unravel these truths later in our lives.
The truth — the necessity of learning and education should be delivered at the outset. I deliver no alternative to American schooling—these, what one of my former colleagues would call them, assimilation facilities—home or at a public school. One of my main inquiries is, how do we motivate the colonized youth of this generation to fulfill the need to educate themselves, to learn, without feeling the license to be paternalistic or elitist towards them as many so-called educational non-profits do? Is it appropriate for me as a former academic, who is thousands of dollars worth in college debt (which I will never pay off because I can’t afford it) to tell a Black youth that school is no good? That learning is an iterative process by which individuals will grow in all aspects of life? Is it reactionary of me to define school as fundamentally useless?
The thought of returning to school has invoked more trauma than I have allowed myself to admit experiencing. My degrees are arbitrarily pieces of paper that grant me a modicum of access to find employment — employment that can be taken from me for whatever reason, be it my political leanings or ontologically, my Blackness.
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Patrick Jonathan Derilus is an American-born Haitian independent writer and Goodreads author who resides in Brooklyn, New York. Their pronouns are he, him, his, or they, them, theirs. They write poetry, short stories, and essays. They are published in RaceBaitR, Rabble Literature Magazine, Cutlines Press Magazine, Linden Avenue Literature Magazine, and elsewhere. They are the author of their 2016 anthological work, Thriving Fire: Musings of A Poet’s Odyssey and newest ebook, Perennial: a collection of letters.
