it’s been a long time coming and I just decided I want all the smoke today so here is a thread on the mess I’ve witnessed and received as a Black woman from students and faculty in the UCLA gender studies department:

I had a white male professor allowing space for non-Black people to debate whether or not Black trauma should be depicted in film, and agreeing with non-Black students that said it should be depicted violently “because slavery was violent and the reality should shock people”.

the same white male professor also allowing space for non-Black queer students to debate whether or not ballroom culture (a cultural space for queer Black youth) was a spectacle and why, while queer Black students were visibly uncomfortable and pushed out of the conversation.

I also had a white woman professor who self-identified as a “radical feminist” that made space for ignorant white students (regardless of how violent they were “because they’re learning”), but was quick to correct her non-white students if they didn’t come off as respectable.

she constantly allowed space for white students to romanticize non-white people’s oppression. she also had us read and engage with a lot of trauma porn about the global south, while white students would call their pain and oppression “fascinating” and “interesting”.

she had a discussion about veganism for feminist geography with no analysis of how class and food deserts affects dietary preferences and gave a girl in our class the space to say poor people should eat vegan because “Burger King has an impossible whopper” lmao

she, a non-Indigenous woman, allowed space for other non-Indigenous white woman to fetishize Indigenous culture through a cultural ritual that us non-Indigenous students had no profound understanding of, and allowed space for young white woman to call the drumbeats “hypnotic”.

she would make space for problematic ideologies and harmful arguments from theorists, such as “we’re all transgender in some way” which is a violent statement for obvious reasons.

this professor also approached me OUTSIDE class to ask me questions I did not want to talk to her about, such as “how are things at home” and ask me “do you have a job” all to reassure me she’s “not too worried about my performance in class”, which she reminded me all the time..

I could tell she expected less of me than her other students, because she was constantly reminding me “how good I was doing in the class”, which felt very microaggressive and patronizing, considering she didn’t feel the need to remind anyone else this often (or at all) but me.

she said she’d be “accommodating to my situation”, but preceded to give me the lowest attendance grade out of the whole class (I didn’t miss many classes) knowing I had the longest commute of everyone in the class, yet I still submitted all my assignments well done and on time.

on the final, she put a question like “what would bell hooks say about (global south documentary)”, and when I refused to be respectable and wrote “bell hooks would not appreciate an exploitative documentary that fetishizes struggle in the global south”, she docked me points lmao

when multiple students requested that she cancel the final or at least push the final back (this was the very beginning of COVID), she basically declined and emailed us telling us that “it’s hard for us all” and to “treat the final as a break from the coronavirus”.

when I wrote an unfiltered review of the class and clarified I’m a Black woman (the only one in the class), another student wrote a gaslighting review in direct opposition to mine w microaggressive language, calling my valid criticism “over the top”, “extreme”, and “unwarranted”.

during my senior research seminar, I was the only Black woman and had to listen while the white people talked about how BLM inspired them over the summer. one girl even talked about how her racist Republican daddy hated Black people, but she got him to read white fragility

the same girl also referred to Black people as “Blacks” constantly throughout the course and especially throughout her final project lmaooo

we had to discuss ethics in research, and our professor asked one of us to explain why the Tuskegee experiment was unethical. before I could volunteer, a white girl volunteers and says “it was because they injected men of color with syphilis”, when that’s not really what happened

this same WHITE girl btw also initially proposed to do her capstone project on misogyny in hip-hop, and wanted her prime example to be, according to her, how “woman of color Saweetie was shot by tory lanez”. I had to jump in and correct her that it was MEG THEE STALLION.

another girl did her capstone project on influencers on social media during COVID. she studied Kylie Jenner and followed her social media and how people engaged with her aesthetics, but when I recommended she should address how Kylie gets her aesthetics from Black women, 1/2

she said she didn’t want to because “that would distract from her topic” and “she didn’t want to get carried away when she didn’t do her project on Black women to begin with”, because race and gender are always treated as separable in this white ass department. 2/2

anyways this is all I could think of for now. I know there’s more, but it’s likely that I repressed a lot of that violent misogynoiristic memory as a trauma response and a defense mechanism. UCLA’s gender studies department is full of white feminists and needs to do better