i was having a convo with a friend today about elections and representation and it came up that i work for thomas jefferson's university and how we're all complicit and make compromises to share proximity to power. and it is true that i work for TJ's university.

but i am not a professor because i want power. i am a professor because, no hyperbole, a university classroom saved my life. it wasn't the only instance of saving. but it was an interruption that was necessary for my growth and flourishing and necessary change.

i'm sure i've told the story before but i'll tell it again.

i went to university of pennsylvania. K-12 public school baby from east orange, new jersey. very unprepared for the class differences i'd experience. i thought my parents were comfortably middle class until i arrived at penn. they were not. we were not.

the class differences was a difficult thing to accept. so i tried to keep up as much as possible the appearance of financial stability. averaged $30 in my PNC bank account. maybe.

i remember one time, very very distinctly, having $5.30 in my account. i could go to the supermarket. buy some beans. some rice. and be able to eat until payday. i was broke. and couldn't call home to ask for money. so i made do.

but still tried to keep up appearances.

but that, the financial part, wasn't the most difficult part. it was the queerness that i'd been escaping because the church kept telling me it was sinful to engage in queer behavior or relationships.

i VERY DEFINITELY fucked up what probably maybe could've been a good thing because i ghosted dude instead of showing up to a date because i was very very afraid that i'd like him forreal and that it'd work and how would i even be able to explain it? so i just didn't show up.

(he still fine. as hell. i've shown pics of him to friends. and they, too, say, damn ashon, you fucked that up. he won't talk to me. and i don't blame him at all. definitely my fault. you live, hopefully you learn. lolol)

ANYWAY...

i took a class in my fourth of five years. i'd left my position as director of the gospel choir the year previous. i'd been very quietly and secretly reading things i could find on the internet that made different arguments about Romans 1 and 1 Corinthians. i was listening.

but i was also very very afraid. because what i was reading was not just an abstract concept but would have a difference in my personal life.

so the course i took was titled Minorities in the Media. i thought it would be an easy A because, and i lie to you not, i said to myself, "i'm a minority, and i know about media..."

figured because i was black and experienced racism, i wouldn't have to learn anything.

and the professor was a white woman. i legit said to myself, "there ain't nothin she can teach me..."

so yeah. young-shon was on one. lol

the first section was on black folks in media representations. read a lot of bell hooks. i *still* teach From Reel to Real because of this course. learned a lot. said to myself, "wow, look how they treat us ... this is terrible!"

the second section was on latinx representation in the media. i don't remember who we read but i remember saying, "wow, the consistency between how black folks are treated and latinx folks are treated ... this is a mess."

like, it's not the same. but there's consistency.

third section was on asian and asian american representations in the media. said the SAME THING. "wow...the consistency. not the same but there is use of religion and there is use of images to marginalize black folks and latinx folks and asian americans. terrible."

the FINAL section was on ...

lgbtq representations in the media.

uh oh.

we read whoever we read but i checked out mentally. had to. couldn't. because if i wanted to be honest, and have integrity, i knew based on the readings that there was at *least* a shared repertoire of practices that marginalized queer folks and produced violent representations.

and i knew that if i wanted to have integrity, i'd have to admit that the consistencies could not be explained away through recourse to religion or the social norms we adhere to. and i knew i couldn't say, "but the bible says it's sinful" because that wouldn't hold anymore.

because now not only were the things i was quietly reading on the side in private affirming there might be another way to think about biblical language but there is this class that's like, yeah, everything you were taught about the representation of queer folks is violent.

i couldn't choose affirm the readings bc my earth would shatter. i couldn't choose "but the bible says" bc i knew that was not just nor good. and, i might've been a churchy dogmatic mess, but i didn't want to lie. or misrepresent. i wanted to have integrity as much as possible.

so i'm pretty sure i didn't turn in the writing assignments for those weeks. i couldn't commit to thinking about it. it was overwhelming.

overwhelming not because i was talking about abstract concepts of marginalization or what i could easily point to as racist infractions that meant *they* had to change (which, true, racist folks and institutions do gotta change. full stop).

i was overwhelmed because what the last section of the course meant was that if i wanted to practice integrity, i'd have to actually become accountable to the knowledge gained and produce change...in *me.*

it was a literal existential crisis.

that white woman professor had no idea. at all.

but the course caused a confrontation and reckoning with who i thought i was, who i thought i could be, and more importantly, it caused me to ask questions that i didn't think could be asked. (it's not the first instance but it was the most profound one for me.)

which brings me to ...

representation.

(this really shoulda been an essay, too many tweets, my bad ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯ )

the professor taught a course about representation but it was not representation that caused any kinda change in me. it was the course's capacity to cause a reckoning that changed me.

a reckoning is what is necessary in this particular world. there needs to be a real and urgent and unflinching and ongoing critique of who it is we think we are, and who it is we think we want to be, and what we think is possible, askable, and imaginable. a reckoning.

representation, i've said before and i'll say again, is about acceptance within the current order of political economy, a widening of its enclosure to include us, whomever is that "us" in a given moment.

but representation cannot be liberation precisely because it does not challenge or interrogate the order of exclusion that produces the need for representation in the first place.

a reckoning, however, is in the service of liberation for the masses. because a reckoning is not personality based or driven and is not about the protection of celebrity political class elites from critique.

a reckoning is about contending with violence, speaking truth always and unflinchingly.

i teach at thomas jefferson's university. certainly. he was a terribly violent man and amassed wealth through the stolen labor of black folks. and if i could not say this, unflinchingly, or if i had to not say it to keep my job, is it a job worth keeping?

i teach, here, and i taught at university of california riverside, because i believe the classroom can be a place of reckoning. it is not always and does not have to be and certainly lots of professors i studied with in undergrad didn't give a shit about changing the world.

but there are those, like that professor, that forced me to confront things in me, that were not only or even primarily about *me* ... and that is what reckoning allows.

if the classroom couldn't be a place of reckoning, i'd still work for morgan stanley (which i did for seven years.)

if the classroom couldn't be a place of reckoning, i'd have chosen the first university that offered me a whole lot more than the one i went to because they are "prestigious" and i'd have been there for representation's sake.

so maybe ask how these things we're supposed to celebrate allow or disallow reckoning with the violence of the world as it is, ask how it allows or disallows critique under the guise of the necessity of certain faces in high places.

why do we need high places?

anyway. the representation convo bores me precisely because it's so deeply individualist in scope and frame. and their success is supposed to be mine. but that doesn't produce liberation. and i'm interested in liberation.

the end.

oh, i'm not done. i forgot why i started the thread

so maybe ask how does the person we're supposed to celebrate because of representation allow or disallow a reckoning with the political economy and its violence. if we cannot hold the space for reckoning, with really interrogating who we think we are, what is it all for?

ok, now. the end.

oh, i guess i should say, i emailed the professor literal years later to thank her for the course, told her that it really interrupted my life and how grateful i am.

if it wasn't for that course, i don't think i'd be "here" ... happy, healthy and hella queer. lol

if i want the classrooms i lead to be anything, i want them to be spaces of gentle and tender but necessary reckoning. reckoning should not be done alone but in community. so i want to teach in a way that is a soft place to land when confronted with the urgency of our times.

reckoning does not mean the lack of care or concern? reckoning is not antithetical to holding folks with care and tenderness. reckoning means, to me at least, speaking forcefully and truthfully.

reckoning is not about being or playing nice, but it isn’t unkind or cruel either. reckoning allows us to sense with clarity the urgency so we may imagine alternatives, otherwise possibilities.

reckoning can be playful. it can be fun. i love to, for example, have my students listen to tribe’s “electric relaxation” and then play ronnie foster’s “mystic brew” ... i say tribe took this and made something else from it, built from it, made otherwise with it.

we are from a tradition of reckoning. reckoning is what got us free, it’s what allows constant escape. reckoning can be sensed in our song and dance and laughter and love. and we disrespect and misrepresent that tradition when we make it subordinate to representation.