The Struggles of this Black PhD

If you’re black and have Twitter or Facebook, you’ve probably heard about the Umar Johnson fiasco.

If you’re not, I’ll break it down really quickly: the dude seems like a fraud.

He seems fraudulent in the way in which he’s handled funds.

He seems fraudulent in the way in which he speaks about Black Women.

But most important to me: he really seems fraudulent when it comes to his credentials.

Very Smart Brothas just wrote a piece explaining why this is so upsetting to folks with advanced degrees like myself — especially those of us who carry PhD’s from accredited institutions. The amount of time, money, energy, money, tears, money, and — you guessed it — money (even for people who have stipends, it’s rarely enough to finish the process) that PhD’s expend on trying to finish their process is grueling and often psychologically and emotionally painful. Without the right mentorship and social support, a PhD can be a soul-withering process — and even then, it still can wither your soul because you must wrestle with your own demons (am I good enough? Do I write well enough? Is my thesis going to pass? Have I read enough? Have I done enough research? Is my research actually original?).

These questions haunt us long after we’ve finished, and they amount to one insight that — at least in my own experience — marks the process of earning a PhD: it is earned.

I don’t mean this in some neoliberal, hyperindividualist, “pull-yourself-up-by-your-own-bootstraps” type of way. Earning a PhD is a communal process, requiring mentorship, friends, and family.

I also don’t mean it in an exceptionalist, elitist-type way either. Most people who finish their degrees are indeed brilliant. But one’s brilliance is not what pushes one through the finish line. Getting a PhD is not about being the smartest — because if it was, I wouldn’t have one. (I’m bright, but I make no claims to be the most intelligent at anything — and I don’t mean this in some self-deprecating way.)

No, what I mean when I say that PhD’s are earned is that PhD’s are, quite simply, not given. The diplomas we receive literally paper over the economic, emotional, interpersonal, analytic, spiritual, and physical stresses graduate students endure. Add blackness, queerness, womanhood, or any combinations of these factors into the mix, and the process becomes that much harder: in the humanities (philosophy, religion, english, history, etc.), a student of color — especially if the student is a woman or queer —can often feel a sense of disorientation, reading white man after white man after white man, to the point where one often feels out of place. Struggling with this “out-of-placeness” can be incredibly difficult — and I cannot imagine what it might be like to be a woman struggling with this out-of-placeness. So when our dissertation committees say “congratulations, Dr. ___,” or when we get hooded, or when we get our degrees conferred, it’s important.

So important that, for many of us, we demand to be taken seriously.

We demand to be taken seriously because our bodies have withered under the duress of trying to decipher confusing texts — often written by people who did not have us in mind — armed with nothing but a cup of coffee, a pen, and a few good friends who are trying to do the same thing, and whose bodies have also withered.

We demand to be taken seriously because many of us struggle mightily to put the right words on the page, scouring the recesses of our own minds and libraries to ensure that our thoughts are compelling, cohesive, and creative.

But most of all, many — not all — black PhD’s struggle because we pursued the degree out of a sense of calling; we came at this in the hopes of trying to better our communities through the production of knowledge. Many of us came at this because we hoped we could use our intellect to help better the lives of ourselves and others. For some of us, the PhD is a spiritual process, drawing us in and demanding things of us that we often didn’t know we had the capacity to do.

So when a man like Umar rises through the ranks, spouting a brand of pan-Africanism that is as unsophisticated as it is insensitive — and then cajoling thousands of people out of hundreds of thousands of dollars — all while claiming that he’s underwent the process many of us have gone through, forgive me for throwing him the nastiest side-eye I can throw. It’s too many of us out here trying our hardest to think through the complexities of black life — the beautiful, hard, contradictory complexities — for me to give Umar a pass. I don’t demand to be taken seriously because PhD is behind my name; I demand to be taken seriously because I’ve taken my community seriously enough to try and contribute through the best gift I have: my intellect.

This ain’t about degrees. It’s about commitment.

P.S. Roland Martin was absolutely out of pocket for assembling that panel.