Degrees of Difference by Kimberly D. McKee

Author:Kimberly D. McKee
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Illinois Press

CHAPTER 5

Disciplinary Peripheries

A Conversation between Canadian Women of Color

Jenny Heijun Wills and Délice Mugabo

The last time I saw you, like every time I see you, I felt immediately sustained.

You see, when I am around you it's as if all of the pieces fall back into place, everything shifts just a little bit to the side, and there is this comfort that I don't take for granted because I know it's not an everyday kind of comfort. I think it's this mutual knowledge—a kind of no-need-to-say-it knowledge that we share. It pulls me to you. I imagine it pulls a lot of people to you. You hold on to me for a long time when we say hello, even the very first time we said hello, and I'm always a little bit surprised. I'm surprised because it is so different from the other casual embraces that are slightly more than a handshake but still less than the double-cheek kiss I know we are both familiar with. But you hold on to me for a long time and in those moments, when I start to draw back but you're still there, I think about the no-need-to-say-it knowledge passing between us that tells you to continue. Because I need it. I think a lot of us need it.

We need this kind of communication with women of color doing race work in and beyond academia in Canada because so often we exist in spaces that make us feel alone and distrustful. Academia has left me with the words don't touch me on the tip of my tongue. In the Anglo-Canadian universities at which I have attended and worked, I was the only graduate student of color and now faculty member of color in my departments. This mirrors the discomfort I felt growing up a Korean adoptee, the only family member and community member of color as well. There is no one with whom to share any no-need-to-say-it knowledge, and it is too much work to explain all of the back pieces to concerned allies and supportive colleagues. So, when you hold on to me, I feel resolved, secured by your embrace that despite all of the things that separate us, we are together.

That night that I last saw you, I was also unsettled. I wrote to you after about my discomfort over a comment made by a woman witnessing our long embrace. I didn't know her, and you didn't know her, but she was so enthralled by the image of you holding me, of me holding you, that she outrageously exclaimed a desire to take our photograph. What did she want to capture in that moment? What did she see? Was it the liberal fantasy of an Asian woman from the Midwest and a Black woman from Québec brought together as the embodiment of a successful Canadian multicultural moment in Toronto? I'm not sure. But I do know that she didn't see two scholars working—holding on to each other because it is in these

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