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11 2 WelcometotheSouthSide At a recent reception held in a faculty member’s home, tucked into the quietly prosperous university neighborhood, I found myself standing among a group of other professors lamenting the difficult academic life while eating catered Indian food. I am just so busy. It’s hard for me to find time to write. Grading is so time-consuming. I joined in for a while. I was busy and I wasn’t able to write as much as I thought I would after my life as a graduate student . And, yes, grading during midterms and finals can cause one’s eyes to water. But really, was my life particularly tough? During this classic faculty whining session, I felt a cosmic kick to my temple. I had an involuntary physical response to the idea that in the middle of a workday afternoon, I had the privilege of standing around in someone’s home, eating catered food, and complaining about how difficult things were for me. I was suddenly aware of how spoiled I sounded. Later, I recalled that moment as an epiphany around the memory of Nana, my grandmother, who passed away in 2000. Nana, or Louise Pettus, came into the world on August 16, 1930. She was the fifth of eight children born to Earline Smith from Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Like many African American families during the early twentieth century, the Smiths escaped Southern poverty in search of better economic opportunity in the North. The family first arrived in Harlem, New York, where Louise and two of her younger siblings were born. They eventually settled in the southeast section of the highly segregated city of Washington, DC. Nana graduated from high school, had three children, and spent the majority of her life raising them as a single mom. She earned a living by working in a uniform cleaning plant for nearly thirty years. For decades, Nana spent each day taking laundered uniforms out of a chemical 12 | A Place We Call Home bath and steaming them until they were fresh and crisp. I think of that back-breaking labor in awe: thirty years of standing up and ironing. I was Nana’s first grandchild, and now I was lamenting about how tough I had it? That afternoon I took stock and acknowledged how far I had come from my grandmother’s life. She was an undereducated domestic worker, and I am a professor at a private university. Years of education have catapulted me from that very same house where Nana lived in Southeast DC into the cushy confines of a university neighborhood. The transition from that space that I used to occupy into the one I currently find myself is quite an amazing journey. I thought of Nana again when I stood before a group of Black women in the summer of 2007. I had just begun a series of workshops to explore how Black women navigate in oppressive spaces. That same quiet dignity that Nana had in the face of the harsh realities of structural oppression—racial segregation, economic deprivation, and limited resources—was echoed in the faces of the women in my research project. It was Saturday morning, June 9, 2007, and I was in the multipurpose room of the local health clinic awaiting women who signed up to participate in the Syracuse Community Mapping and Health Photovoice Project . My colleague and I were the recipients of a Ford Foundation grant, and the project was research supported by those funds. I was quite nervous , despite the fact that I have been organizing community workshops for years. Three months after graduating from Tulane University in New Orleans in 1993, I took a job as a campaigner for Greenpeace, an international environmental organization, at its headquarters in Washington, D.C. Less than a month later, I was sent to help organize a protest at the Masters Golf Invitational in Augusta, Georgia. Residents of Hyde Park and Aragon Park in Augusta vowed to fight against the environmental contamination in their neighborhoods. Years of processing at a wood treatment plant and a scrap metal facility left soil and air contaminants like lead, arsenic, and PCBs. After that beginning in Augusta, I spent the next four years mobilizing similar community groups, primarily in California and Louisiana. But that day in June 2007, I was more nervous than I’d ever been as a Greenpeace campaigner. My new role was as a scholar, not just as an [18.217.67.225...

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