The following poetic narrative/performance ritual tells the counter-story of the “hidden curriculum ” (Henry, 1998; Maparyan, 2012) that Black women commonly integrate into their lives and work as educators. Written in “the” collective voice of Black women educators, this narrative illustrates and legitimizes the hidden curriculum as a tool of critical education, leadership development, and recovery from the tripartite oppressions of race, class, and gender/s. The hidden curriculum refers to Black women who engage in motherwork (Collins, 2000) and mothering the mind (Brown, 1991), while fulfilling the responsibilities of their teaching posts from a range of structural categories—contingency faculty, pre-tenured faculty, senior faculty, and so on. The pedagogical elements of the hidden curriculum span a host of educational and leadership development spheres such as bi- or polyculturalism (DuBois, 1903), racial identity development, intra- and intercultural politics, socialization to and navigation of race-gender identity within the dominant culture (Dunbar, 1998) , presentation of self, and preparation for change agentry and social justice leadership. Most significantly, this whole-person curricular approach transcends the bounds of the traditional classroom. Although this work exists in addition to formal teaching responsibilities, this performance ritual recasts this cultural woman-to-woman pedagogical process beyond the notion of the “extra burden” of mentoring and service disproportionately occurring among Black women faculty. Rather it is re-contextualized to portray and further theorize womanist pedagogies of relational social change and resistance that Black women integrate as a stream of their teaching praxis in academe. By employing a womanist tale of Motherline leadership development, cross-generational bonding for political resistance , and woman-to-woman healing , this piece relays the costs, risks, and rewards of living out the core pedagogical values of the hidden curriculum . Ultimately, the spoken word tradition conveys a multiplicity of embodied experience, emotionality, ways of knowing, and cultural resonance that creates possibilities for readers to gain cultural insider insight. In this way, this piece itself is pedagogy—as it delineates and validates for readers subjugated knowledge occurring “beneath” the ivory tower.

Prelude

Woman in Red. Footnote 1 “If we are to contend in theory and practice, with the educational difficulties of students from working class and racialized communities …”

Woman in Black. “…we must seek answers as Freire argued, within the long histories of economic, social, and political oppression … as they currently exist within our own lives and that of our students.”

Woman in Green. “This concept of culture links decolonizing education to communal and ancestral knowledge …”

—Antonia Darder, educator (Darder, 2013, p. i)Footnote 2

[Woman in Red enters stage left and speaks this poem into mythopoetic being. She symbolizes one of many Black women in the academy. And so, where indicated, should one dare to perform this choreo-pedagogy …enter another woman in Red, and then in Black, and then in Green … in performance spaces of your own creation.]

They seek the thing that has no name.

as if we carry it in our pockets.

they are the girls inter/rupted

the ones we set out to find

there is within each one a mother-less child

when they see us, recognition lights their eyes

they are willing to lay their heads upon our knees

to eat from our hands

they lay their purple gratitude over our shoulders

find us tender

even in the tough-teaching-trenches

they have requested

this is their registration.

some days, our hands are empty, but our minds work

to find something in the wind

the rustle of the trees

their memory of ancestral love

to manifest the needed morsel.

seeing us bloom above ground

is proof

that sunlight waits for them

and they push

through rock.

they

who mostly had a someone somewhere in the desert hegemony produced

who maybe had a big mama, a nana, a teacher, a counselor, a pah-pah

whose houses had no mirrorsFootnote 3, who spoke into the winds of time

“you is kind, you is smart, you is important.Footnote 4”

Those who made their lives mana, we salute. You are modern day Underground

Railroad. They came over on you.

but still far too many suckled on mother-loss

on the wire mesh monkey

matrix of racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism

misogyny/ism , white supremacy /ism

that their mothers suckled on and their mothers

many loved hard,

those mothers, fathers, uncles, aunts, grandmothers

siblings, saviors, saints, sinners,

loved those ravaged by the gynocide of imperialism

the dross of enslavement , the tazing of colonization, the brutality of the new jim crow

know they, you, us, we, were never intended to feel the warmth of the sun

they who saw their communities eviscerated by matricide , patricide

knew its offspring

rejection, abandon, addiction, abuse, betrayal,

failed presence, spirit-absence, and desecration

intended to subjugate.

BUT their refusal to be obliterated

rocked the world

when it learned they had matriculated.

and they came!

Finding us

there

always there

b/cause we had blasted through brick and mortar,

and the thousand fiery hoops of advanced degrees

to be t/heir

they came

bearing unanswerable questions

hearing uncapturable answers

wrapping up in us to stay warm in institutions designed for

their invalid/ation

[Woman in Red leaves stage left as Woman in Green simultaneously enters stage right. The Woman in Green begins]

Some will ask

but what need have they of healing?

in these ivory’d towers of

care,

civic engagement, global understanding, diversity and inclusion, multi-cultural dialogues,

cross cultural celebrations, and sharing across differences.

others will ask in their ivy covered innocence,

what manner of crimes occur within our hallowed havens?

some will seek to

pathologize the injured

as not having the resilience to receive their opportunity

read, lift themselves with their own boot straps

dance backwards in their own stilettoes

write failure to thrive,

editorialize as a “special need,”

theorize as an over reliance on

the mother nurture of “the STRONG Black woman.”

How could the “the world see otherwise,Footnote 5”?

When the lashings of colonization we hear in the background

come from teachers, to tutors, from advisors to conductors, from counselors to coaches, from teammates to roommates, from referees to res-life, work-study to workouts,

from the arts to activism , from feminists to lovers, and sometimes woundings

in “the house of a friend.”Footnote 6

myriad M I C R O aggressions and structural oppressions

that carry the toxic tinctures of annihilation, spirit disconfirmation,

via hypervisibility, invisibility , multiplicative demands for

performances of belonging,

is it her Blackness, her womanness , her gayness, her trans , do her class markers place her here? There? Is she too much? not enough

of the constructions others need?

and what cumulative pressures to acculturate/assimilate /failure to infiltrate/encapsulate

learn the monocultural stand/ards

make the perfect calculations that find all

papers, tasks, meetings, appointments, projects, capstones, classroom vocalizations,

EXTRA curricular machinations

offered in a timely fashion, performed at the speed of white

despite

parental support and advice, familial backing, issues back home, playing academic catch up in multiple arenas, depression, post-traumatic stress called living while Black & female, work-life balance of students as whole persons,

are all the same

after all, one size does fit all doesn’t it?

And so, we close ranks with any who will assist in the soul surgery

necessary for removal of the cumulative incursions of multiple “isms”

embedded in the day-to-day

and now in the “souls of Black folks”Footnote 7

If you have joined us. You will know that

this is our third shift!Footnote 8

But only in the un/nameable

do we gather the injured unto ourselves.

applying balm to lacerated hearts

that for all their wisdom, expected more

on crossing into Canada.

[Woman in Green leaves stage left as a Woman in Purple simultaneously enters stage right. The Woman in Purple begins]

Finding them

we begin

filling holes in the ritual hut with mud

preparing the bath

creating the circle.

all ages, sizes, skin colors, religions, socio-economic classes, sexual(i)ties

We come

permed, natural, wigged, braided, loc/ed, hair-pieced, mohawked, bald, even weaved

All womanist-all the time

no two alike

carrying first and foremost, the intellectual feast

in the community college, city college, state college, ivy league, liberal arts, HBCU, PWI, seminary, professional school, religious private, “for profit” and maybe even online degree

we teach real

we have no care for whether “they” deem us

visiting, pre-tenured, contingency, continuing contract, partner-hire-we-had-to-find-something-for-her-to-keep-him/her, abd, ed.d., full-professor, administrator-with-some-teaching-responsibilities.

Ha!

the college’s mission statement is fulfilled. most of us can re/cite it. Intersectionality of purpose is drill.

What they call win-win,

we know as both/and. Read. “Yes. We can!”

We teach hard, nurture harder, train-up

we prevent ejection, and expatriation, attrition and revolving door

politics of tuition-in/student-out/loans-begin

we know the real deal

of our habitats

mind our p’s and q’s, just enough

to re-main

and bring our curriculum of correction, reformation, protection, liberation

and sometimes just personal presentation

cause it’s really about the acculturative capital of taste,

and coming to a style of one’s own, border crossing included.

As we teach, we are also meeting, greeting, commuting, standing in the gap, paying dues and cultural taxation, fighting for our place,

uplifting, promoting anti-racism, facing the triple jeopardies, negotiating cultural capital, sometimes finding the gates barred, the ivory tower too high, the air behind its walls too toxic,

sometimes succumbing

some have to keep it moving, avoid annihilation, begin anew, seek the long term space, or declare ourselves scholars-at-large, land in multiple institutions with our hidden curriculum in our bags.

throughout, we hold oppositional space within institutional spaceFootnote 9

for men, women, white, black, red, yellow, abled-differently, valued differently, differing values

for peers, colleagues, support staff, administrators

we align, co-labor, co/nspire to correct in/justice

we stay awake.

set out to right the wrongs of educational injustice

de-ice the likelihood of failure

brought on by young jim who leaves no child left (behind)

called

teaching to the test, underfunded districts, closed schools, busing, revised “tracking,” unchecked violence, sexual assault, bullying, drugs, school embedded gang violence, over policed student behavior that places youth in the penal system to soon, where “no tolerance” translates into no way out.

fending against the “extra burden” that chases and chains the Black female academic and those who wear the colors of the universe on our bodies,

we somehow manage

to reach for each/other

the way someone reached for us, and because of who didn’t

we read the need, assess the damages,

put out tentacles to the tentative

coax in from the wilderness

build contexts out of kindling

light the hearth

the true-real as major

101 through the capstone

racial identity development required!

[Woman in Purple leaves stage left as a Woman in Yellow simultaneously enters stage right. The Woman in Yellow begins]

when they arrive

they are specific

they want lens to see

eagle or ant, bird’s eye or mouse

their hearts beat for voice

self-efficacy, change agentry,

they run to world-shape, despite the label of intimidate

hone their courage to create

pull town, gown, community, margins, worlds

into view

They work overtime, overload, and over

Joy. Hurting, working, resisting, working, healing, working. Sometimes recognized.

always baptized by their longing for

a just world order.

no two curricula are alike despite

the common thread weaving world views into canopy

covering ella’sFootnote 10 daughters’ daughters

with tools of resistance sealed in the canon of critical theory, “words of fireFootnote 11,” womanist/Black

feminist thought, critical race theory, anti-racism praxis , strategies to counter hegemony , to straddle borderlands, to queer theory, to trans-nationalism and global-ize feminisms

to heal the crack in the cosmic egg.

methodologies

stitched, knitted, crocheted, quilted, baked,

canned, plowed, milled, cotton-picked, sugar-caned harvested, rice paddy worked, boogied, rapped, rocked, tapped, rhymed, stroked, stoked, turned, preached

and

teached.

timeless tenets passed down by our sojourners and harrietts, our anna julias and our amy jacques, our ida-bs, our pauli/s and our aileen/s, our rosa/s, coretta/s, and betty/s, our fannie lou/s, daisy/s, and diane/s, our ericka’s, angela/s and assata/s, our unbossedFootnote 12 shirley/s, our nikki/s, sonia/s, audre/s, alice/s, maya/s, delores/s, bell/s, patricia/s, june/s, sylvia/s and gloria/s and all the allomothersFootnote 13

and all the unseen,

unnamed,

stalwart ones

Workers of subju/gated knowledge under

ground

like how to turn in

toward the gaping wound

how with hands bound, to pull the introject out of one’s back

and what does compassion plus outrage squared look like in daily life?

[Woman in Purple leaves stage left as three women in white enter simultaneously stage right. The first Woman in White steps forward from the others and speaks]

With all, we raise the hymn of the salt eaters

“Sistah do you wanna be healed?”Footnote 14  [All three women say this line in unison]

the choice is theirs          [Woman in White # 1 resumes]

we rejoice

Sistah, do you own who you are     [All three women]

the choice is yours          [Woman in White # 1 resumes]

we anoint

They awaken in our arms

armed

anew with the tradition that cannot be namedFootnote 15

or taken.

on the next assault they rise more quickly [Woman in White # 2 steps forward]

easily carrying both food and arsenal

shielding their backs while facing forward

uncompromising warriors for peace

And now             [Woman in White # 3 steps forward]

they come to us in the days before battle

laying their plans across the kitchen table

seeking council

fire lights the shadows as we talk

help them to anticipate and side-step javelins of oppression

geared for those who feel the fire next timeFootnote 16 before it begins

who feed the bonfires of self-love

necessary for nationhood to survive

and give birth

and now they come on the dawn of victory/s [Woman in White # 1, steps forward]

regaling, hailing, querying modes of leadership

we listen, help to mend the fabric where the clarity of our resistance

wears thin

knowing still

“even their errors are correctFootnote 17”   [All three women say this line in unison]

When they come with a wounded sister [Woman in White # 2 steps forward]

slung across their back

staying only long enough for us to begin

the ritual , the bond, the long journey

we respond

begin

again

soon

these daughters

turn to humus

in our fertile soil

push up the young shoots

of a new day

carry us

into their time,

place, age

return to comm/unity         [All three women say these lines in unison]

return to nationstates

turn in to universes.

And we continue whispering the something [Woman in White # 1]

that has no name.

And we begin anew.        [Woman in White # 2]

And we begin an/old        [Woman in White # 3]

And we begin           [Woman in White # 1]

And we whisper the something    [Women in White #s 1 and 2]

that has no name         [Woman in White # 3]

And we whisper the something    [Woman in White #s 2 and 3]

this no name           [Woman in White # 1]

this non/a/me

this nana(me). that can only be breathed between us

and we hear the call of silence

in the rustling of the trees

and we hear the call of justice in the

falling of the leaves

and we transform the “silence into language and actionFootnote 18”

and we whisper          [All three women]

and we whisper

Shhhhhhhhhhhh.          [Woman in White # 1]

Shhhhhhhhhhhhh,

Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh,

whisper…           [All three women]

its name.            [Woman in White # 1]

Its name ...

     is holy.

Dedication:

Woman in Purple. This work is dedicated to ella’s daughters in the academy

Woman in Yellow. And to the women who mother their minds and their leadership.

Woman in Purple: AND THEIR F(L)IGHT!!!

dedicated to: ella’s daughters in the academy, and especially to j m. m Footnote 19

Epilogue

Written in a lyrical poetic style, this narrative invokes the historical memory of a people. It universalizes the archetypal story of how Black women respond to other Black women injured by the matrices of oppression. It is an ancient motif for peoples of African descent to participate in each other’s healing and resistance to all forms of oppression (hooks, 1989; Bambara, 1980). And so this narrative renders a gender-specific tale of this specialized support adapted for use in institutions of higher learning. The support offered in these settings—to those students who choose it—includes a tutelage for liberation of both self and others. In this way it assists in preparing young women students to enter the cycle of giving back to women of color peers who may need the same kind of race-gender-attuned healing and leadership development. Ultimately, these women students are more able to support others across identities and contribute to the entirety of educational institutions via whatever pockets of influence the students have access to as they learn to work their own change agentry.

The current academy faces a crisis of access, retention (National Center for Educational Statistics, 2013, 2014), and the provision of an environment that can accept, sustain, and support all students regardless of how they learn, their socio-economic needs, their generational status, the variations of prior educational preparation, and their socio-cultural (nationality, ethnicity, race, religion, gender/s and sexualities, or age) backgrounds (Butler, 2013). The spate of recent student protests across the nation relative to the climate of these institutions, the disproportionately few faculty of color, and the everyday racism and incidents of racial bias call for new levels of cultural responsiveness (Gay, 2010; Jabbar & Hardaker, 2013) in higher education. Such student activism also calls for holding environments where students across all identities can grow and thrive throughout their educational experience.

While institutions are making some progress toward institutionalization of concrete resources and support across social identities (e.g. inclusive bathrooms, clothes pantries for interview attire, food pantries for food-challenged students), the need for culturally relevant educational (Ladson-Billings, 1992) and leadership development among students across identities remains. Within communities of color and/or marginalized communities there may be invisible or underutilized models of teaching that address these students’ particular needs for academic and leadership development. For example, in Black communities, there is a rich history of educators from pre-K through post-secondary education drawing upon culturally relevant historical models of education and adapting them for use in higher education (Ladson-Billings, 1992; Walker, 1996). The ways in which Black women educators in higher education work with their Black women students is one such adaptive model.

This performance ritual portrays how such a model of Black-woman-to-Black-woman, educator-to-student culturally relevant pedagogy works beyond the classroom (Brown-Jeffy & Cooper, 2011; Ladson-Billings, 1992; Maparyan, 2012). In general, the workings of this “hidden curriculum ” (Henry, 1998) remain largely invisible to the mainstream academic community. One reason for this is that it includes but also transcends the traditional classroom. Rather it takes place within the context of a relationship, and the mutuality of discovery among the educator Motherline that some Black women actively seek a form of academic and leadership development. To conduct this underground-yet-in-plain-view work, Black women educators draw upon and apply what Barbara Omolade (1994) calls “the tradition that has no name.” Overall, this tradition springs from Motherline tutelage well-documented in sociological and anthropological literature as an existential experience among women across cultures (King & Ferguson, 2011; Lowinsky, 1992). Motherline tutelage refers to the gendered cultural transmission of knowledge that women pass on to (usually) younger generations of women so that they might survive oppression, thrive, and bring their talents, gifts, and leadership into the world. This is the tradition that derived from such iconic Civil Rights leaders as Ella Baker—known as the Fundi (Grant, 1986)—an esteemed teacher who passes on knowledge to help an entire people survive, progress, and transform the structures of hegemony .

Among Black communities this tradition has been variously referred to as mothering the mind (Brown, 1991), political motherwork (Collins, 2000), kitchen table deep talk (King & Ferguson, 2011), motherwit (Maparyan, 2012), and other signifiers of culturally honed knowledge and adult development transmission systems whose purpose is personal and political, individual and collective. Between Black women it takes on the added urgency of restoring their self-hood, especially those who are “committed to survival and wholeness of entire people” (Walker, 1983, p. xii). For it is their very exertion of agency in the service of a vision for collective uplift in a world often hostile to their presence that puts such women students at even greater risk. In the academy, this tradition becomes a “curriculum” that Black women engage for their Black women students. Here is where many Black women educators take up the mantle of leadership development. They engage in this work by choice, even though it stretches their own capacities to be retained in the academy. And they engage in this work intentionally—with a pedagogical agenda that is twofold. First, it attends to the restoration of self-hood infusing students with belief in their capacity for agency , and understanding of one’s self as a scholar despite various forms of epistemic violence that denote otherwise. Second, it supports students’ choice to apply their academic knowledge in ways that reflect womanist or Black Feminist goals such as collective uplift, social change, and social justice.

Gaining a mere “edimication” or becoming “an educated fool” is the way Black communities signify an education that does not express wisdom. Culturally, wisdom seeks to uplift the collective or promote justice—not at the expense of the individual, but as intertwined and inseparable (Hill Collins, 2000; Maparyan, 2012). The strategies of the curriculum that has no name require the Black woman educator to collaborate with others across the university to support the holistic development of students from the margins. In the present creative piece, the focus is Black women’s work with same race women students. However, the Black feminist/womanist agenda extends itself to many groups banished from authentic recognition, and validation. While the focus of this Motherline tutelage is Black women, this dialogical teaching and learning must be read diasporically and transculturally. Black includes the multiplicative heritages of the Diaspora (e.g. Afro-German, Afro-Caribbean, Afro-Latin). And transcultural means that some white women students and women of color who are not Black move into this dialogical learning motif in ways very similar to Black women. Some of the students come from majority Black or very diverse communities (e.g. attended predominately Black high schools, found homeplace in their lives with Black educators, coaches, mentors, teachers, or caretakers). Others find that their anti-racist core values and alignment with womanist philosophical tenets as the form of feminism they live out in their lives makes them seek connections with Black women faculty and find a place at the kitchen table. And so this dialogical curriculum is at once culturally focused and flexible. In terms of breadth its practices apply to the many ways systems of academic hegemony penalize or expel those without proper educational preparation and/or social capital to navigate the culture of the ivory tower. It also extends to those who may not be Black or women, but who pay the price of marginality in other ways and who seek the curriculum that has no name. Nevertheless, Black women have something special to offer to each other. They bring the potential for a deep and validating knowledge of each other’s experience. As Audre Lorde puts it: “I was not meant to be alone without you who understand” (Lorde, 1978, p. 34).

The curriculum that has no name reframes and redefines classroom teaching practices, just as it defines and makes visible alternative cultural spaces of education and learning. These are the kitchen tables or other “third spaces” that exist beyond the binaries of mainstream society. And so, a marker of Black women’s pedagogies is its mobility, as well as it transgressive and transformative capacity. That is, as the student recovers from cumulative injuries of continual disconfirmation about how they perform their identities, their academic work, the academy’s exclusion of their bodies, minds, and ways of knowing (e.g. how they think, speak, learn, produce knowledge), they begin to come to voice and find their own centering as a scholar. Their difficult experiences in finding their intellectual grounding often occur in combination with other systemic barriers such as financial issues at college or with their families back home, discriminatory treatment, lack of access to the college’s resources, and needs for employment that compete with academics, extra-curriculars, or taking full advantage of college life.

It may seem as if such culturally and individually customized teaching might only serve to drain Black women faculty members who already encounter the “extra burden” of service documented as occurring for educators of color (Williams June, 2015; King et al., 2002). However, the process of teaching the curriculum that has no name can be mutually rejuvenating. The mutuality that is possible occurs incrementally throughout the course of the relationship. And given their different positions as faculty and student, it may not be realized in what we consider a reciprocal relationship until well after the student graduates. Yet some level of mutuality begins when the Motherline faculty sees the transformation that is occurring within the student. This bearing witness to the student’s academic and leadership development may occur in myriad places such as the classroom, serving on a committee together, within a public forum or discussion, or even within the context of student activism on or off campus.

Finally, there is the gratification of spending time in the company of Black women students coming into their own. Students-in-tutelage may connect with another student in ways that help shed light on how to navigate some aspect of college life with that peer. Seeing the support and teachings shared is also gratifying. At the cultural level, mutuality exists in the long-term view of collective uplift itself. As Ella Baker best put it: “The struggle is eternal. The tribe increase[s]. Somebody else carries on.”Footnote 20 Working with those who will carry on is deeply gratifying to Black women whose cultural identities derive from the organizing principle “I am because we are, and because we are therefore I am” (Mbiti, 1970).

Within the context of the Black women’s curriculum that has no name, these women students begin to flourish, believe in their abilities despite external disconfirmation, and come into a critical consciousness that can critique the very institutions of higher learning themselves. Such Black women students also begin to turn their attention to making their campuses a better place. They begin to work with the Motherline to think through their own oppositional capacities, change agent strategic maneuvers, and apply humanizing action to counter institutionalized oppression within higher education and beyond. The kind of work Black women are doing with their students clearly falls within the spectrum of high-impact practices that institutions of higher learning now seek. High-impact practices are commonly known to offer students such things as purposeful learning, meaningful interaction with peers, and developmental relations with professors to engage in meaning-making, deep reflection and deconstruction of their experiences in the context of solving problems, and engaging in collective works of leadership and social change (Harper, 2009). Institutions sometimes recognize the inequitable distribution of such high-impact practices across the diversities of their student bodies (e.g. differences in who goes abroad, who obtains off campus internships, who obtains paid internships, who is selected for competitive funding for research or experiential opportunities). And so this narrative spells out how Black women help to apply high-impact practices in the margins of same race–gender relations.

This “story” is written as a performance, because in as much as it is situated within the deep cultural space of Black collective memory throughout the Diaspora, it is also a communal story. It expresses how Black women use their positionality within the academy to work with their colleagues across multiple identities. Together, we each work to bring the mission of our academic institutions to life. Most of our institutions espouse a purpose to reach all of the students we matriculate, yet the capacity for doing this varies greatly. Moreover, the institutionalization of the matrices of race, class, gender/s oppression can actively work against this stated mission. Ritualizing this deeply connected teaching allows readers of many other backgrounds to have a more enlivened encounter with the story being told. It enlarges the potential for shared experience and activation of our intersubjectivities. The choreo-poem is our invitation into the dance of culture. Cultural novice and insider share what Maparyan (2012) calls the “logic of womanism,” which she describes as “experiential, narrative, ecological, moral, emotional, communal, and mystical” (p. 40).

And what of action? We must eventually come to that. How is this choreo-pedagogy a call to action? And if it is such, what actions? First, ritualizing this narrative creates a site for connected knowing, for feelings, intuition, emotional intelligence, and the multiple ways in which art gives us an encounter that strikes a human chord. For it is the very absence of “getting it” emotionally, when cultural outsiders are seeking to understand, that keeps us from being able to reimagine and redefine the problems and solutions of the work we do across our social identities in the academy. This narrative portends future action by bringing alive the experiential. For it is first within the embodied knowledge of our intersectionality that we come to get a glimmer of what we are not. Embodied experience is the first signifier that something of cultural depth is occurring that is “not like us.” And in that borderland between our differences (Anzaldua, 1990) we may learn just enough to collaborate on solutions, and possibilities.

By implication, the knowledge of what Black women educators are doing is a call for action on the part of institutions. It asks how institutions can become intentional in providing an environment that does not engage in cultural taxation. The metaphor of cultural taxation points to the kinds of sanctions (intentional and unintentional) that Black women educators pay for their presence as “culturally different others” in higher education. One form of cultural difference is their insistence on “giving back” to students from their own cultural or social identity groups. The story of Black women engaged in helping the institution fulfill its mission of serving all students across identities poses an opportunity for institutions to engage in an equally ethical response. That is, how can institutions of higher learning recognize, respect, support, incentivize, and reward their Black women faculty and safeguard them from unnecessary overload? Can institutional understanding of Black women faculty members’ cultural pedagogy inform institutions in ways that reduce negative outcomes in tenure and/or promotion, or during the contract renewal process for visiting or part-time faculty/instructors? Often retention of faculty from marginalized groups fails for lack of institutional sight. That is, the capacity to see what and how faculty, such as Black women, contribute to the work of the institution. And all of these faculty who contribute in the spheres of the curriculum that has no name benefit the university at a deep level.

Crafting such solutions requires community across identities, and across positions within higher education (e.g. across administrations, faculty, staff, students). And so the style in which this piece is written is meant to create or at least invite community. The invitation calls us to participate in a temporary liminal space where we come together within and across cultures for acclamation of one culture’s approach. We come together in this imagined performative community to first shift the dialogue so that the voices of Black women faculty are at the center. And then we ritualize the voices so as to magnify them for communal engagement. Hence this narrative elevates the human experience of how one marginalized group builds bridges for their students to the center of things—all the while expanding, pluralizing, and democratizing what the center can now mean for these scholar-leaders in development. Seeing one group’s approach helps us reimagine cultural insider work for many groups in these contemporary times. Such a tale formed to create a collective liberatory experience for all participants regardless of identity is written in a “tongue of its own.” As bell hooks (1989) states:

The most important of our work—the work of liberation—demands of us that we make a new language, that we create the oppositional discourse, the liberatory voice. Fundamentally, the oppressed person who has moved from object to subject speaks to us in a new way. This speech, this liberatory voice, emerges only when the oppressed experience self-recovery. (p. 29)

Toward this end, the evocative language of performance ritual makes the unseen pedagogy of recovery from oppression seen. At the same time this voice destabilizes the dichotomies of cultural insider and cultural outsider. For in opening this space to create a ritual that mirrors the liminality of Black woman educators engaged in motherwork , a space is similarly opened to the reader. In this space (whether imagined or literally performed), we all participate in a collective holding environment where mutual understanding can surface. Here we have a portal to see our way more fully into each other’s lives. Here we have a communal foundation. Here we have an experiential assemblage, a third space of our own to celebrate Black women students’ educational journey from the margins to the center of their own empowered selves. A journey that takes place on the wings of Black women educators’ pedagogical methods honed for just such flight!