Black Doctoral Network Speech, 2019

In 2019, I gave a keynote speech for the Black Doctoral Network Conference. I decided to tell them the things I wish someone had told me when I was in graduate school at Harvard and UCLA. I was one of very few Black PhD students at both campuses. The year I started at UCLA, 2005, was the year they had the fewest Black students in their freshman class. If that was not lonely enough, I did not know any other US-born Nigerians for most of my time in graduate school. I experienced quite a few struggles: getting caught between being a "good girl" who shows elders a lot of respect vs. sharing your thoughts on your research "ad nauseum" to be taken seriously by those with power; expectations to not date until done with school but then getting married immediately after; never being American/Black/Nigerian/Igbo enough.

I wrote this so that those who come after me could feel less alone. I gave a similar talk at Northwestern and I will never forget the Haitian woman running into the room when I shouted out her people to let me know excitedly, "I'm here! I'm here!" Invisibilization hurts.

We need to see each other to live and grow. Whatever is not growing is dying.

Let's live.

First, I would like to thank the organizers of BDN for allowing me to be here today. I am excited by this opportunity to talk to you all. I am also grateful to God for providing opportunities such as these.

So, where are my African people in the house? Fellow Naija? Any Igbos? Is this the right setting for an Igbo kwenu? No, okay.

Do we have any Afro-Latinos here? Dominicanos? Afro-Boricua? What about our other Caribbean peoples? Trinis? Bahamanians? Jamaicans? Haitians?

What about our formerly Afro-American NOW African American-“Just Black” people?

Any biracials and multiracials in the house? I see you!!

The wonderful thing about this country is that HERE in the USA, we can all celebrate our unique histories, cultures, and ALL of the Independence Day celebrations as we remain united as one Black people.

There is no other country on earth where all of us together can live as brothers and sisters. As much as this country gets to us, it is HERE that our blackness unites us across borders and oceans of origin.

And yet…. We are in the Ivory Tower, what I like to call the Tour d’Ivoire. I call it that because it can truly feel foreign to many of us. It’s like navigating a new country with a new culture and new rules of being.

I have three main points for navigating this Tour d’Ivoire.

1. It’s okay not to fit in. YOU WERE NEVER SUPPOSED TO FIT IN. The university was never designed for you to be there. The Tour d’Ivoire was never meant to fight for Wakanda.

2. WORK LIFE BALANCE IS A MYTH. It’s the line that will not die. It’s never going to happen so you just have to strike a pose. I’ll explain what I mean later. (1200 words)

3. Do not take allies for granted. You cannot assume that people who should be your allies will be and some of those who shouldn’t be will help you out the most. (1200 words)

I moved to Chicago from Michigan when I was 3 months old with my parents who were recent immigrants from Nigeria. I grew up on the Northside of Chicago down the street from Wrigley Field in public housing. We were in the heart of Gay Chicago aka “Boys Town” when it was browner and poorer. With their accents, Clifford and Lillian decided to have Chinyere, myself, my brother Chidi, my sister Ndidi, my brother OJ (who now goes by Jeff after the OJ Simpson murders), and my brother Obinna.

Nigeria began at my parents’ front door. I was not supposed to be an American, but a Nigerian living in America. When I would eat my fufu with a fork, instead of with my hands, when I talked back to my parents or accidentally gave them something with my left hand instead of my right, I was too “Americanized.” When at the age of 11, I placed a hand on my hip and talked about equal rights and how my brother, Chidi should wash dishes alongside me and not just play Super Mario Brothers, I was the devil’s spawn.

In the 1980s, not speaking English was even more stigmatized than it is now. My teachers told my parents that speaking to us in Igbo would “confuse” us. Not speaking your home language was why a generation of immigrants from Mexico spoke to their children in broken English rather than their fluent español. This was why none of us Osuji 5 speaks or understands Igbo.

My aunties and uncles who immigrated to Chicago had the pleasure of arriving in the blackety-black 1990s. X caps were king, Living Single had just been copied by Friends, and Ice-T was in his pre-SVU days singing “Cop Killer” in a band.

Now that we are in multi-ethnic-Diversity-is-King-USA where Kim Kardashian, not blonde Barbie is the ideal California girl, I am glad that I am the last of a generation who grew up without “knowing their culture.”

As a child, I did not feel like I fit in to any community. I didn’t speak or understand Igbo, I was a feminist, and I preferred pizza to fufu.

Still, whenever I left the house, my fellow students, whether, white, Asian, or Latino, made it clear that a gifted school was not somewhere I should be. When Haydn Bush created a song to the tune of Blue Suede Shoes dissing my juicy jherri curl, I knew this school was not created for people like me. As a girl with unambiguously brown skin and a wide nose, my test scores were questioned while those of the majority of students – mediocre at best— were not. Things changed when I went to Whitney Young High (long after fellow alum, Michelle Obama), there were a wide variety of black people, from those who shopped at Payless to those who wore Coach to school, my black excellence was quotidian. I am grateful that I was not the only black student in AP and honors classes. I had black male physics and biology teachers. I had female math teachers. Those four years of dolphin glory ended very quickly.

Long after the scent of stockfish and dried fish stopped permeating my clothing from living in a Nigerian household, I went to University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana, did a Fulbright in Spain, and entered Harvard’s PhD program. I knew that I did not fit in at Harvard at all. My lack of generational wealth, which many of my African American colleagues had, made me feel out of place. I was also too curvy, too unambiguously brown, too broke, too overt, too MUCH to be successful there. I was miserable. I left the program.

I wish someone who had been older and wiser had told me that there was nothing wrong with me. So that is what I will tell you. THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH YOU!! If you are too blackety-black-black in your biracial identity or your hair is too kinky or you can’t sit still when you hear a good bass line or drums speak to your soul or people act like they can’t possibly say your name but say Dostoevsky and Rembrandt and Almodóvar, remember, you were never supposed to fit in. THE TOUR D’IVOIRE WAS NOT DESIGNED FOR YOU.

But you know what?

I thank Black Baby Jesus, Brown Palestinian Jesus, even White-Nordic-to-Appeal-to-Vikings Jesus that you have infiltrated the Tour d’Ivoire. WAKANDA LIVES!

The elites will let you know that this university was not designed for you. They may do it in overt ways when you are stopped by University Police or colorblind racist ways when you walk into the room and you can sense them clenching, just a little bit.

But guess what? You have tools! You can not only survive, you can THRIVE!

YOU HAVE TOOLS.

Look for those black mentors, they are tools designed to help you thrive.

When I was at Harvard, I wish I had reached out to more black faculty of color who did a great job of mentoring students who looked like me. I did so, but not nearly as much as I should have. Larry Bobo at Harvard was a godsend in my department. I wish I had had the balls to reach out to William Julius Wilson, but I did not.

I wish I had known about the free student counseling that was available at Harvard long before I said goodbye. It was only when I was leaving the program that I used the free counseling service. I sought it out and continued to use it when I moved on to UCLA.

Everyone take out your phone. Google the name of your school, “student counseling services.” Find the link that has the phone number for those services.

I’ll wait.

Now, take a snapshot of it. Email it to yourself. Use the subject therapy.

You may not call for yourself, you may need to call for a friend who is not here today or give the number to someone else at your University. Often, you can schedule a same-day phone appointment with a counselor. That’s for when things get really bad.

Graduate school was one of the first times that I saw a therapist and it felt weird to take that step. People in the Nigerian community do not go to therapy, I was led to believe; you’re supposed to go to elders and aunties and uncles, even if they are the cause of the stress in your life.

I wish I had known about tools for good mental health early on, because the mind is a central part of healthcare and wellbeing. I was miserable and sad at Harvard and I did not need to be. Going to therapy helped me to manage life as a black grad student as I continued on and it STILL does so.

While at Harvard, I realized that I wanted to study race in Brazil. I had entered Harvard’s PhD program wanting to do work on African immigrants, but became more and more interested in affirmative action in colleges and universities in Brazil.

Latin Americanists at Harvard were arguing that class, not race, was important for inequality. This let me know that it was not the place for me. Edward Telles, a professor at UCLA, gave a talk at Harvard that was amazing. I knew that despite not speaking a lick of Portuguese or having been to Brazil, I wanted to study race in Brazil.

I moved back to Chicago and worked for a nonprofit. I petitioned Harvard to receive a Master’s degree from the qualifying paper I had written. While working, I applied to several PhD programs and got into UCLA’s program in Sociology. I worked under Edward Telles, one of the foremost experts on race in Brazil. The following May, I marched through Cambridge, MA in my cap and gown with my AM from Universitaria Havardiana because nothing says elite like a degree in Latin.

Where are the Californians?

I got to live in Los Angeles, people. I saw the ocean for the first time. I asked for avocado on things, which made everything taste better. (Even if Chicago has better Mexican food.) In n Out Burger became a part of my life, as did Stan’s Donuts when it was only a West LA phenomenon.

Moving from Chicago, I saw more interracial couples than I ever had in my life. I learned that my school’s nickname was University of Caucasians Lost in Asia. White women complained that Asian women were stealing their men. White men were growing crazy over stereotypes of geishas and submission. I saw black men with Asian women, white women, Latinas, but rarely with black women. Everyone was down for the swirl, but my friends and I said LA was BYOM- Bring Your Own Man. Very few interracial couples involved black women.

Then, I got a white boyfriend. A black man whom I had never met in my life came up to us to ask me if I was okay. No one had ever did that to me before on my previous dates with black, Asian, Latino men.

But whatever, I was there to study affirmative action in Brazil.

I went to Brazil for the first time in my life and saw very few interracial couples. I was in Sao Paulo and saw whites with whites, browns with browns, and blacks with blacks. This was not supposed to happen. Brazil was the land of race-mixing, not California. So, I changed my focus to studying interracial couples in Brazil.

As I was working on my proposal, I was going to Santa Monica to get my yoga on. I lived in Cali so I ate fruit with chile and lime, and did yoga. That brings me to my second point.

#2 WORK LIFE BALANCE IS A LIE

There is one word that I love that my fellow Naija are already familiar with. It’s wahala. Wahala essentially means trouble, problems. “Please, no wahala! A-beg-oh!”

Life is full of wahala. Many gurus and life coaches make a lot of money telling you the secrets of obtaining work/life balance. If it works for you, great. If not- it is something you still struggle with, you are in the majority. You know why.

Sometimes life brings you wahala.

How many of you have ever taken a yoga class? For those of you who have never taken a yoga class, have you ever in your life tried to stand on one foot? What happens when you do so? Eventually you have to put your other foot down otherwise you fall down.

Some of you guys can stand on one foot, place your other foot on your knee, with prayer hands, all Namaste about it. You’re the graceful bronze doctoral swan. You’re the person I would love to be.

However, the rest of us topple a little. The more we practice we get, the longer we can go. However, eventually, our other foot comes down and we have to catch ourselves.

But standing on one leg: THAT is work/life balance. For a second you GET IT! You’re IN IT! You’re winning. You go to the gym three days a week, four days a week! You found the right edge-control and your hair looks fabulous! You are lifting more weight than you ever have in your life and are looking swole as hell. You’re seeing your biceps and your chest look a little bigger in the mirror.

Then BOOM!

WAHALA!

Your experiment goes wrong. Your advisor wants you to revise some tables. You have to retake your qualifying exams. Your advisor DIES! Your family needs you to pull more weight. Your child gets sick. You find out that you cannot go to Rio de Janeiro for another year and have to stay in Los Angeles because of the type of fellowship that you have. You get an illness that leaves you disabled. And BOOM, that other foot comes down. You stumble.

IT’S RUINED YOUR POSE! WAHALA HAS RUINED YOUR POSE.

That’s okay. I’m here to tell you it’s normal. YOU CAN GET THROUGH IT.

You can get stressed out. You can cry when no one is looking. You can even ugly cry in front of your good friends. I’M HERE TO TELL YOU THAT IT’S OKAY TO STUMBLE.

The most important thing is to get back on the horse.

That’s because work/life balance is a myth. You will constantly be trying to strike that pose.

For those of you who have done yoga, you know the effort it is to stay in a pose. No one else can see, but you are making little tiny muscular adjustments as you are in the pose. You’re tightening muscles you never knew you had, you’re breathing deeply, you are focusing on an object in the distance, ignoring the bodies around you that might fall over or move, distracting you.

In life, wahala will come. You will make too many adjustments and fall over. You may be balanced for a bit, then become unbalanced and then balance yourself again.

That is life.

Just remember: You CANNOT HURT YOURSELF. YOU CANNOT HURT OTHER PEOPLE.

The important thing is to remember the tools you have for when you stumble. I mentioned therapy earlier. Ask for help. Pay someone to clean your messy house if you can afford it. Eat some Lean Cuisines for a while until you have time to cook a decent meal for yourself. Eat just a little more fast food than you normally do.

But then assume the position once more! Do the experiment again and hope your mice do not die. Find a new advisor. Pull your weight as long as you can but put a time limit so that people know and prepare for your ghosting them while you handle your grad school life.

Or keep pulling your weight, recognizing that something else will have to go that does not jeopardize your health or the health of those around you.

When I work hard, I look it. When I was finishing my dissertation at UCLA while applying for jobs, I was looking rough. My new growth from my locs was hella long. I was surviving on frozen dinners and Trader Joe’s Two Buck Chuck (which is now $3) was my idea of fun. The same thing happened when I was finishing up my book manuscript for my editor. I broke up with my gym. But in the end, I conquered turning every one of my book manuscript’s in-text citations into a Chicago Manual of Style endnote placed not at the end of the text but at the end of the substantive text right before the bibliography section.

(Those of you who have to write theses and dissertations will know exactly what I mean when you have to fit your universities’ guidelines.)

The important thing is not falling 7 times but getting up the 8^th.

Getting into the pose again allowed me to get a PhD from UCLA under happier, healthier circumstances working with a top-notch scholar. Former fellow grad students at Harvard were shocked. One friend said, “People say you are at a better program now and they wonder what happened.” What happened was God. He gave me the strength to try the pose again and I held it. I was all Namaste about it.

Then BOOM!

WAHALA!

My fellowship would not allow me to go Rio de Janeiro and I had to stay in Los Angeles. I was in the pose, standing on one foot and had to shift my balance just a smidgen. My dissertation now became comparative. I interviewed  black husbands and their white wives as well as black wives and their white husbands in Los Angeles AND Rio de Janeiro.

What I had thought was wahala was a blessing that allowed me to do something that to my knowledge had never been done before. I have now written the very first book comparing how Americans and Brazilians, both black and white, make meaning of race and ethnicity in their lives. My book, Boundaries of Love: Interracial Marriage and the Social Construction of Race in the United States and Brazil was published in May 2019 with NYU Press. Boundaries of Love is the fruit of getting back into the pose, falling again, tightening up the pose, and trying again.

Sometimes, my hair is still not in tip-top shape. I don’t go to the gym as often as I should. I am a work in progress and will be until the day that I die. I strike a pose, fall down, and try again. This is life. None of us is getting out of it alive. But when wahala comes, sometimes after some tears, I get back into the pose; I assume the position and EXHALE.

31 Know who your allies are in the Tour d’Ivoire.

As I learned at Harvard, all my skinfolk are not my kinfolk. You have to know the safe spaces where you can ugly cry. Maybe it’s with your Black graduate student association friends. I made the mistake of thinking all black people were for me until I got there. Then I realized not only are some black people not FOR me, but they may actually try to sabotage me. At the very least, make sure you know the politics of the people who mentor you. I did not realize it, but I had been recruited to work with a professor who enjoyed blaming African Americans for the structural disadvantages they faced. It was another professor, Larry Bobo an African American professor, who mentored me and helped me to land on my feet both at Harvard and afterwards.

When I entered UCLA, they had the lowest black enrollment since the 1970s in terms of sheer numbers. I was the only black woman in my program; out of 120 students, only three of us were black.

I became familiar with a new discourse of people of color uniting together against white racism. It was comforting until I realized this politics too often excluded the particularities of black female rejection. However, through BGSA, I made friends with black people across campus! I no longer had to chase down the other black person I saw at Royce Hall/ Winchester University/ the Vatican in the distance. No more painful goodbyes as we went our ways to slay in the Tour d’Ivoire (cue Color Purple gif). Blacks at UCLA were not as surprised by the structural racism in academia as the other people of color in my program. We were there to get our degrees, go to Black Ski Weekend, and move on to cities that were less hostile to black people. A surprising number of us ended up in DC.

At UCLA, Darnell Hunt and Mignon Moore, Now at Barnard College, were and are great mentors who repeatedly showed commitment to understanding understudied black populations. They were amenable to my studying black people who intermarried. Mignon Moore was the only other black woman in my department, so of course, the chair of the department had to confuse us. I also linked arms with non-black people of color who also had work experience, were a little older, and shared my sense of humor.

However, in the Tour d’Ivoire, we cannot take for granted that the only people who can help us meet our goals are black people. Some of you have already reached that conclusion on your own. At UCLA, a white woman, Ruth Milkman, now at CUNY, created a book project with graduate students on labor organizing in Los Angeles. I was a terrible writer at the time. She spent copious hours in her home with me helping me to write a better draft and teaching me about writing well. No other professor had ever done that before. Years later, I won a paper award from the American Sociological Association Section on Racial and Ethnic Minorities. I am certain it was, in part, because of her mentorship.

On the other hand, the Tour d’Ivoire is the land of the white liberal ally. Tread very, very lightly when you see white liberals who want to claim allyship while living white segregated lives or whose love for black people only involves black men. These are the people who do not see color except when it comes to who they bring over for dinner, marry, or think has an easier time on the job market.

Some of them will want to play “devil’s advocate” as they explain why doing anything to end racial injustice is wrong. Never let them play devil’s advocate. Just walk away. Never let your cortisol levels get heightened because of a discussion with people who ask questions but do not want to hear answers. If you’re at a party, go have another beer, grab a napkin, go to the bathroom, rebuke it in Jesus’ name, or have some more brie. PROTECT YOURSELF FROM THOSE CONVERSATIONS. THEY GO NOWHERE AND BRING UP YOUR STRESS HORMONES FOR NO REASON.

You have to know when it is time to fight those battles. Store up your energy for the occasions that really matter. If you are teaching on those topics or are in the fight to undo racial inequities, save your mental energy for THOSE moments. Otherwise, find a way to gracefully exit. It is not worth your time.

You don’t have to educate everybody.

They are in academia, there are literally HUNDREDS of books written on issues of race and inequality. In a pinch, recommend Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s “Racism without Racists.” Have no further conversations with them until THEY have done the work.

If they aren’t willing to do the work, you shouldn’t be willing to risk future heart attacks and diabetes because of elevated cortisol levels due to “educating.” Do not cast your pearls before swine!

So, in conclusion, remember:

1. It’s okay not to fit in. US academia was not created for us. So, USE YOUR TOOLS.

2. Work life balance is a place you never get to. And that’s okay. When Wahala comes, crawl under the desk, get a manicure, and get back on the horse. Try again! Si se puede!

3. Choose your allies wisely. Do not get caught in traps that raise your stress hormones for no reason. Just because people are asking questions does not mean that they want an answer.

Anyone here at an HBCU? Lovely! So it behooves you to remember your brethren at PWIs. Pray for us, light a candle for us, burn some sage over our heads, do what you got to do to give us good vibes as we struggle to make it at our PWIs. We will do the same for you since we are all surving and thriving in a white supremacy!

Thank you!

Dr. Chinyere Osuji