Blackademia: navigating depression, desire, and deadlines
Depression
I’ve struggled with depression and anxiety for most of my life, but only realized that’s what it was in my early twenties. As an undergrad I had a period where I really went through it and sought help in the form of friends, strangers and friends from the internet (shoutout to twitter), therapists, psychiatrists, and medication. Since opening up about how hard every day is, it’s helped, but my recognition of my struggles doesn’t change them. Change takes work. And even in doing that work, I’m still Black, queer, and mentally ill, even if I’m in better health one day rather than the next.
My first few weeks of graduate school have taught me a lesson that I already knew: there’s no time for depression. Within the first week I missed a meeting I wanted to attend due to my inconsistent sleep schedule, my depression, and an anxiety attack. The second weekend I felt light as air as my partner came to visit. I had a few hiccups, as one human cannot and will not cure another human’s mental illness, but I made it work. As I write this, it’s the third weekend and in the middle of an important conference I find myself trying to reconcile with where my time went. Suddenly it’s Saturday and instead of feeling accomplished, I’m wondering how the rest of my graduate career is going to go when my mental illnesses keep harming my progress.
Desire
Depression and desire sleep in the same bed together, and it’s a bed I have trouble leaving every morning. Sometimes even afternoons, too. There are nights where I just want to stay up until 2am watching Netflix but I cannot do that. There is a certain amount of focus on “on” time that means I must truly schedule in my leisure time. With my previous full time jobs, I could still [seemingly] function well on five to six hours of sleep. But I find myself getting too distracted in a three hour seminar or while reading journal articles. It’s not that the graduate school work is that much harder, it’s just that there is always something to do and something I would rather be doing.
As much as I love reading, I also love sleeping. I often want to nap all the time, sleep in more than my schedule allows, and cancel plans all the time. Being in a long distance relationship means that my carnal desires shift from sex and sleep as priorities to sleep as the primary priority. I am confident that I chose the right school and program, but I just want to nap. Can I get a nap? Can I take a nap? If I nap how much does that cut into my work and leisure time? Can I nap? Can we nap? Let’s nap.
Deadlines
There are some things that are non negotiable and some that allow room. The issue is that graduate school is all about figuring out which is which, and prioritizing where to put the finite energy you have. I’ve always had a set of questions I ask myself in order to decide how to move, but I’m learning I have to really refine those with my short and long term goals in mind.
The benefit of being a grad student is that you literally get paid — although not well — to take class, write, think, teach, and research. And like all jobs it has deadlines you have to meet in order to be able to do maintain that paycheck. With the privilege comes an over abundance of job talks, classes to audit, required classes, homework assignments, reading assignments, pleasure reading, financial aid workshops, interdisciplinary opportunities, networking events, and more. This is all fine and dandy until you realize you can’t attend the class you wanted to audit because you have a grant application due in two days. Or that occasionally going out on the weekend may be possible, but depression got in the way too much earlier in the week, meaning you still have a lot of work left to read.
Even with all of the amazing advice I’ve received (“you don’t have to read everything,” “have fun,” “first year is one of the hardests”), grad school isn’t easy. That isn’t to say it isn’t fun, because it is, but it’s unlike anything I’ve encountered in my life. My brain has to section off making it through the first year, finding funding for the second year, ignoring the exorbitant amount of money I pay in rent, looking for ways to participate in community organizing, and fending off mental illness long enough to make sure I’m actually eating three meals a day.
Blackademia
All that being said, my issues existed before I entered grad school and they will exist after. I just carried them from one institution (the nonprofit sector) to another (academia), and the goal is to adapt and create new strategies of survival. When mentoring fellow first generation, Black, queer, and/or gender nonconforming students I often break it down as a piles of bullshit. There is the corporate bullshit, the retail bullshit, the academic bullshit, the nonprofit industrial complex bullshit, and so on and so forth. The question is, which sort of bullshit are you most supported in dealing with, prepared to deal with, and excited to deal with? So let’s play with some data to get a sense of what it means to be a Black graduate student.
Looking at U.S. Census data for 2016, we’re going to examine the educational attainment for the U.S. population 18 years and over with two things in mind. The first is doctorate degree holders, the second is Black doctorate degree holders, a subset of the first population. We’ll use all U.S. Census data for all races, and “Black alone or in combination,” meaning folks that marked only “Black” or “Black” in addition to another category.
- 4,006,000 people, or 1.64% of this general population, holds a doctorate degree.
- 259,00 people, or 0.11% of this general population, are “Black alone or in combination” folks who hold a doctorate degree.
In other words, less than 2% of the U.S. population held a doctorate degree as of the 2016 Census. Of that less than 2%, Black folks comprise under 1/8th of that particular population. And in comparison, there are 236,000 Black folks in the U.S. who hold a doctorate degree, yet they make up less than one percent (0.77%) of the U.S. “Black alone or in combination” population. But here’s the thing: Blackademia is alive and thriving, despite historically white colleges and universities (shoutout to Eduardo Bonilla-Silva for the term) that hope to keep us out and use us as tokens when do finally enter.
The realities of being not just Black in the academy, but also queer, nonbinary, mentally ill, and first generation — for my bachelor’s, master’s in progress, and upcoming PhD — are not lost on me. Instead, I take pride in the fact that my sociological practice is Black. My Blackness aids in my sociological inquiry in ways white academics tried to discredit for years. Yet the only reason I can say that is because of the work of pioneering Black scholars from W.E.B. DuBois to Marcus Anthony Hunter, Ida B. Wells-Barnett to Zandria Robinson, Patricia Hill Collins to Karida Brown, Aldon Morris to Jason Ferguson, and many many more who are neglected merely for length. If you’re a Black scholar in the making or a current Black scholar, know that we got this, even when we don’t.
