Leveraging A Critical Consciousness to Thrive in Graduate School

I am nearing the end of my first semester as a doctoral student at a land-grant university in the Midwest. With every challenge I encounter in this predominantly white institution and city, I find myself proactively engaging in strategies to ease the transition and support my mental health. In engaging in proactive strategies, I realize the role the city of Chicago has had on shifting my life; I went from my undergraduate studies in the Pacific Northwest where 85 percent of the city population is white, moved to Chicago for five years (where the white population represents less than half the city), and currently live in a smaller Midwestern city with a 75 percent white population (USCB 2019). I attribute the ideological, physical, and personal strategies I am using to navigate my doctoral education now to the lessons I collected from my two years of graduate school and five years of professional work in the city of Chicago.

When I arrived in Chicago five years ago, I brought with me spiritual and mental scars from surviving four years at a historically white, Catholic institution surrounded by a predominantly white city in eastern Washington state. A place of refuge for Rachel Dolezal. A place so lacking in critical race consciousness that it sheltered a white woman as she engaged in severe racial appropriation and destructive community leadership. I survived a mostly white city in Washington state, a place where a white woman unabashedly claimed Blackness. Context matters. Context silences, outpours, disrupts, suffocates, embraces, engages, and sets the foundation for existence or maltreatment of individuals who end up being the few witnesses to the white, colonial logic of appropriation and erasure in white cities across the United States. In Chicago, I would later learn through a critical social-theory course and, specifically, through Jacob P. K. Gross's analysis of Antonio Gramsci's work on education and hegemony, that I navigated my undergraduate studies with contradictory consciousness. Gross (2011, 60–67) explains contradictory consciousness as the process in which an individual begins to recognize hegemonic norms and beliefs, unlike critical consciousness, where these belief systems and values are actively questioned and disrupted through thought and action. In other words, contradictory consciousness is the process whereby one begins to encounter hegemony and a common sense that disrupt one's core, raises questions of dissonance, and may be most visible in moments when one's body, mind, and spirit fall out of alignment around exclusionary words and actions or, worse, fall silent in the face of oppression. In Spokane, I was not versed on social justice or equity-driven language, as my undergraduate courses lacked the critical pedagogical choices that would allow me to question my positionality and corroboration in systems of power and, in turn, would give me the tools to address forms of intersecting exclusion from individual, cultural, and institutional domains. I only knew that the moments and spaces I found myself in did not sit right with my core. My contradictory consciousness alerted me that something was missing, but I didn't have the language, curricula, or critical tools to understand and disrupt my dissonance.

Thus, my four years of undergraduate studies at a white, Jesuit Catholic institution were rich with contradictions. One example of a contradiction I experienced took place during my first fall family weekend at the university. I was introduced to the rowing team's tradition of dressing up in costumes for a practice that visiting parents and families attend. In front of parents, coaches, alumni, and guests, the men's rowing team dressed up as border patrol officers and made the first-year men's rowers dress up as immigrants. The only Black individual on the women's team reported this incident. At the time, I knew this was problematic, but I was unwilling to say anything. I chose to be complicit. I was furious that the women's team also had to attend a mandatory diversity training, which was required after the report was submitted to the multicultural office on campus. I internalized contradictions, I perpetuated them, I left...