Confessional Narrative: Flirting with Impostor Syndrome

The hardest things I’ve ever had to do without any choice or alternatives were to bury my beloved father, my sweet angel mother, and one dear sibling; and undergo an agonizing emergency laparoscopic cholecystecdomy (gallbladder removal).  These wretched events were bifurcating and painful.  I had no say in the matters.

Some majorly uncomfortable, yet surprisingly rewarding life events thus far include leaving a fulfilling job of seven years to move across the country for my husband’s first master’s degree; selling my inherited childhood home; electing to undergo LASIK eye surgery; aborting one career path to become a student again; and then choosing to work as a graduate teaching assistant.  I never in all my days thought I’d be teaching core curriculum at a university. 

Grad school as a TA is the hardest thing I’ve ever willingly chosen to do. 

In the half-semester I’ve been in the COMM TA program, I have developed a distinct, newfound heightened self-awareness.  I think I might be intimidating to some folks; especially young, inexperienced, white people from economically privileged backgrounds.  Of particular interest is how the young men tend to avert their hotly resentful eyes from mine, as if their gossamer views and fickle positions had never been challenged; at least never by a woman of color in a classroom setting.  #fromthefrontdesk

Of further particular interest are the sustained “stare downs” between me and the young white girls of apparent materially privileged backgrounds.  In their openly accusatory frowns, I can almost see their silent, freshly outraged, ALL CAPS thought balloons indignantly demanding, “What are you?”.  Almost as if they need me to justify my presence because they don’t see a mop or a bucket.

Ugly looks are not constrained to undergraduates.  Professors, graduate scholars, and teaching assistants remain painfully ignorant of their effusive nonverbals!  In Teaching to Transgress, bell hooks terms this a “blind spot in the vision of [people] who have profound insight to themselves”; they can discuss and process highly complex social theories, and yet remain so “profoundly unaware of their own biases and [in]capacity for true insight…the gap between theory and practice” (65).

What do these hostile oculesics really mean?

Rather than attend and graduate from college before marriage, my husband and I elected to marry and see each other through our respective scholastic journeys.  He attended Baylor University for undergraduate school and the University of Miami for his first master’s degree.  My experience as the undereducated spouse of a student at private universities was to quickly learn to painstakingly listen.  Watch.  I learned how to hide myself in plain view.  Disguise.  Practice the regional diction.  Blend.  Be aware of the little things that people who are wrapped up in themselves do not notice themselves doing.  Perform.

One particularly disturbing manifestation of applying this learned set of oppressor behaviors (in praxis) was to develop the “you smell like shit” face which I adopted while my husband studied at Baylor.  Something as innocuous as sharing a sidewalk with another pedestrian became a chance to show off my “you smell like shit” sneer.  Once the other party identified my “you smell like shit” stare as like them or one of them, they would eagerly raise their eyebrows and invert that repulsive frown into a myopically squinty false “social smile”; which would quickly relax back into its normal shitty look.  At UNT, I see this look reciprocated in the BLB far more frequently than in the GAB.  A product of what bell hooks calls “the culture of domination”; a highly valued culture where denizens become addicted to lying (to self) and denial (of self).  Where no one belongs, but everyone fits in.  #pleasedont

With that protracted assimilation, in combination with my past life as a performing arts center operations professional, I learned to do what bell hooks quantifies as learning to blend in and not give away what I really am; I acquired the ability to perform the part of middle-class normativity.  Accordingly, multitudes of people ask me for wayfinding directions.  What nonverbals do I send out?  Are dress, demeanor, age, vocabulary, good posture, and a sure step enough to convince them I really belong here?  The unapologetic silver in my hair; the wizened creases on my face?  I am a “ma’am” now.

Friere’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed was a great check to my development as a would-be oppressor.  I could easily see myself as an oppressed individual becoming an oppressor; quickly adopting the habits and customs of the dominant social majority to further assimilate and chameleon my way through life.  bell hooks’ Teaching to Transgress took my self-awareness to another level:  I must keep sustained vigilance against the oppressor syndrome!  I must actively break the oppressor cycle by continually embracing the pain of challenging the status quo; allowing myself to be my authentic, vulnerable self; and enforcing systemic resistance to dominant normative discourse and the white supremacist capitalist patriarchy through my actions and my very existence!  The hardest things I can ever choose to do.  #pleasedo

I am fortunate to have such a diverse, mature, and engaged group of students in my section of COMM 2020 this semester.  In my supreme privilege of spending one hour and 20 minutes a week with this excellent group of students, I am reminded of something we read pretty early on in Pedagogy, where Bain said something like,—I’m paraphrasing—“All we can do is make sure we don’t cause any permanent harm to them (the students)”.  I took on teaching as a job to try to work my way through grad school; a task; a duty to fulfill.  I like it more than I ever thought I would.  #fromthefrontdesk