I have been a doctoral student for a while now. In fact, when I introduce myself at writing groups, I usually say that it is my “100th year” of being a doctoral student and I say it with all the emotion I carry in my body, mind, and soul. There are plenty of stories of what happens to doctoral students of color and our experiences. While I want to acknowledge the harrowing journey, I also want to focus on what I have been learning as I focus on completing my dissertation and becoming Dr. Seeley.
There is no doubt in my mind that I have been treated differently throughout my doctoral studies and my professional practice because of my Brownness, being a woman, also born in India, who is a non-traditional student (older than most students and some of the professors too), etc., to name a few ways of how I am different. Because of my experiences as a disaster practitioner, I decided to pursue a PhD in disaster studies to increase equity for disaster survivors. Unfortunately, when I became the practitioner pursuing a doctoral degree, I was also subjected to a level of scrutiny and discrimination that came with a heavy mental, physical, and emotional toll.
My first lesson about understanding why I was treated a certain way by my white colleagues came from a paper from Dr. Derald Wing Sue and colleagues titled, “Racial Microaggressions in Everyday Life”. One of closest friends handed me this article after hearing about a particularly harrowing multi-day discrimination experience I had the week before with some colleagues. As she handed me the paper copy, she told me that everything I experienced was real and it had a name: microaggressions.
After reading this article, I had two competing emotions:
I was dumfounded – There is an entire body of knowledge around race and racism and how it affects people. Consequently, this means there is an entire body of knowledge on how people are racist and how they can avoid being racist.
How are so many of us so ignorant about racism?
Why are some of us more afraid to be called racist than to be racist?
I was elated –This paper was evidence that I didn’t imagine how my colleagues treated me. As I look back now, reading that paper made me realize how woefully unprepared I was to deal with how pervasive racism actually is.
My experiences and realizations forced me to learn how to defend myself. Like a good doctoral student, I educated myself on the relevant concepts like race, racism, equity, intersectionality, microaggression, British colonialism, American imperialism, settler colonialism, white feminism, and white supremacy. Of course, this is just a partial list of concepts but this preliminary research offered structure, definition, and validity to my experiences as a Brown woman. The more I read, the more I understood about how I could validate my lived experience especially as I complete my dissertation. I had the language to define and validate my experience as well as describe what was happening around me.
I am going to skip the part about making people better or convincing others to read and learn about racism. If you really want to learn to be a better human being (a less racist human being), you can do that for yourself.
In this space, I will elevate the non-white, non-Christian, and LGBQTIA+ scholars, educators, and thinkers whose work is not traditionally shared, seen, or cited in disaster studies or adjacent topics.
Susamma Speaks LLC 