Habitus of the Hood by Hans Skott-Myhre Chris Richardson

Author:Hans Skott-Myhre, Chris Richardson [Hans Skott-Myhre, Chris Richardson]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781841506906
Goodreads: 43330645
Publisher: Intellect
Published: 2012-12-04T00:00:00+00:00

Addressing others’ suffering as outsider-within activists

The second theme that emerged from our interview data is “addressing the suffering of others” through our “outsider-within” status. This theme is based on Patricia Hill Collins’ (1990) work, Black Feminist Thought, in which she describes the type of knowledge that women of color (African-American women, in particular) bring to bear on their work as teachers and scholars. Hill Collins contends that one’s lived experience is a criterion for making meaning and generating theory among African-American women. This very personal type of knowledge is often generated by women of color in the Academy. Yet, because of the positivist over-reliance on objectivity and the scientific method as the privileged means of arriving at “truth” in the academy, Hill Collins points out that this type of knowledge generated by women of color is often delegitimized and subjugated within the Academy.

As women of color in a university system created and led primarily by white people, we are expected to be familiar with and behave according to the social norms and values of whiteness.4 James Scheurich and Michelle Young (1997) describe societal racism as the notion that non-whites should behave in accordance with the “prevailing social or cultural assumptions, norms, concepts, habits, expectations [that] favor one race over one or more other races” (p. 6). Societal racism, unlike individual or institutional racism, does not necessarily call for exclusion of non-whites from major social institutions such as the Academy. Instead, societal racism tells academics of color how they must conduct themselves once they are included in institutions of higher learning. From expectations of appropriate dress and speech to the values which guide one’s research and writing priorities to the criteria by which one earns tenure, Scheurich and Young (1997) maintain that even our research epistemologies are racially biased:

Epistemologies, along with their related ontologies and epistemologies, arise out of the social history of a particular social group. All of the epistemologies currently legitimated in education arise exclusively out of the social history of the dominant White race.

(p. 8)

Societal racism thus forces academics of color to become “bi-cultural” if they want to advance in their careers and be successful in the Academy. In other words, we have learned to speak and act in ways that are “normalized” by the dominant racial group of a particular socioeconomic status, while validating our experiences as women of color from Compton. As scholars and educators, we acknowledge our “outsider-within” status: the contradiction of simultaneously being members of a faculty elite while holding onto our stories of origin that clearly place us outside of this elite. We do this because we view occupying the margins as a source of power that gives us a lens by which we can view and critique the world. As “outsiders-within,” we understand the suffering of others as we have either experienced or witnessed suffering in our own lives while growing up in Compton and even as we left Compton to pursue our educational and professional goals. Taking this stance allows us

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