Dread Knots and Shifting Desire

This fellowship year has provided me the unique privilege reflect on the types of change I'd like to see in the world. Whether through attending the PolicyLink Equity Summit in Detroit in early November or exclusive Princeton sponsored networking events, I've met a vast array of people who are offering interesting solutions to very real challenges.

I've struggled, however, with the question of whether these privileges and opportunities actually work to eradicate the types of structural inequalities I'm working against, or simply reify them.

One of my job responsibilities is to help teach people of color from Chicago's West Side how to navigate corporate - and often white - work environments. While I'm offering a real service to people who otherwise might be passed over, I often feel as if I'm normalizing the clients to the white supremacist patriarchy. For example, many clients come to class with hair styles which are quite common in North Lawndale such as dreads, afro's or braids on men. All of those hairstyles, however, prove to be barriers to employment. So we typically advise people to cut their hair in a way that white people will find less threatening.

But I feel my time would be better spent educating prejudiced employers that every black man with dreads is not Lil Wayne. Instead, when I meet people of power and privilege I have to perform an exaggerated congeniality to ensure that they don't find me (a lilliputian, Princeton educated man of color) threatening.

Oscillating between the militarized ghetto's of Chicago's West Side and garden parties in Lakeview is such a thoroughly disorienting experience that I struggle to imagine what a meaningful engagement between the two worlds might look like.