If it looks like a movement,
If it hopes and dreams like a movement,
If it speaks like a movement,
It must be UMOJA.3

In this article, I would like to share some thoughts as to why UMOJA4 is so important and necessary. In “Teaching to Transgress”5 bell hooks has argued that as educators our purpose in teaching is to liberate. Our work, she insists, “is not merely to share information but to share in the intellectual and spiritual growth of our students. hooks refuses dualistic separations and a “mind/body split…that promotes and supports compartmentalization”6 urging us towards an “intellectual questing for a union of mind, body, and spirit.”7 My reading of hooks suggests that students come to us as ahistorical beings and that dualistic/compartmentalized thinking - the separation of mind/body, public and private - impedes a genuine call to teach to transgress and to liberate. Educational institutions must do the work of complicating the category student by overcoming dualistic separations and the splitting apart of mind/body. Educational institutions need to account for their histories, to make students whole-beings, to make their humanity and differentiated stories accessible and imaginable from before they enter our institutions. To suggest students come to us as ahistorical beings is to suggest students become real and plausible only at the moment they enter the institutional gaze. No wonder many of our students come to and through our doors feeling invisible and dis-oriented.

In accounting for the histories of our students, in making them whole beings, in refusing fragments, it is relevant, suggests hooks, to “formulate theory from lived experience;”8 to name and theorize from the location of our pain.9 Quoting Patricia Williams essay “on being the Object of Property” bell writes:

“There are moments in my life when I feel as though a part of me is missing. There are days when I feel so invisible that I can’t remember what day of the week it is, when I feel so manipulated that I can’t remember my own name, when I feel so lost and angry that I can’t speak a civil word to the people who love me best. These are the times when I catch sight of my reflection in store windows and am surprised to see a whole person looking back…I have to close my eyes at such times and remember myself, draw an internal pattern that is smooth and whole.10”

In this brief but potent excerpt, reminiscent of Ralph Ellison’s “I am an invisible man,”11 hooks argues that “[i]t is not easy to name our pain, to theorize from that location.”12 A personal example brings into focus hooks notion of naming and theorizing from lived experience and from the location of pain.

I am a mentor for Chaffey College’s AMAN/AWOMAN program, a program designed to promote the retention, persistence and academic success of African American students.
One of my mentees is “old.” “I’m old.” He says. “OLD.” I don’t have a job. I don’t know why I am in college. My mother tells me I’m old: “Go get a job. Do something with your life.” “My friends are doing something with their lives” he laments, though his friends are not attending college but do have jobs. My mentee is 24. He feels and believes he’s old. Comparing himself to younger friends – not in college – he sees himself failing. What does it tell us when a black man feels, imagines, thinks and dreams OLD - at 24! As if being in school contributes to falling behind – in life! My mentee and I hang on to each other. The reed that connects us is thin. We both know that at any moment he can walk. Not out of my office but out of the campus. So he can be a man. We work to keep each other HERE! Just one more day. One more course. One more paper. One more test. One more phone call.

My mentee writes poetry. He writes about pain, loss, longing, disappointment, drugs, anger, and his love for his mother. Poetry is sovereign space. Home and homeland. Poetry is one more thin reed that keeps us connected and talking. We talk about pain, loss, walking the line, straddling the fence. We talk about never feeling quite right. Out of Place. Out of time. OLD. Here at college; there at home. In the streets. Among peers. Riffing off of Homi Bhabha, there is a burdensome, persistent, sometimes exhausting sense of “Not Quite; Not Right; Not White!”13

Hard truths is what Audre Lorde had in mind when she insisted “[t]he fact that we are here and that I speak these words is an attempt to break that silence and bridge some of those differences between us, for it is not difference which immobilizes us, but silence. And there are so many silences to be broken.”14

Feminists of color seem particularly attuned to an “impulse toward wholeness”15 and the integration of mind/body. Black feminist Alice Walker, in conversation with hooks, subverts dualities and dichotomies by introducing us to the term womanism defined as “[c]ommitted to survival and wholeness of entire people, male and female. Not a separatist [movement]…” Chicana feminist Gloria Anzaldua subverts and refuses binaries and the mind/body split by suggesting: “You say my name is Ambivalence: Not so. Only your labels split me”16 pointing us towards embracing a ‘mestiza consciousness’17 intent on “…break[ing] down dualities.”18

bell hooks is right. Sometimes it is necessary to theorize from within the locations of our pain. Our students do come to us with histories that must be accounted for if we are to teach to liberate. Our work as educators must account not only for the humanity of our students but also for the integration of mind-body-soul. Not just for the sake of our students but more importantly for the sake of our institutions. What is being suggested is a transformation of institutional paradigms that confine innovative approaches to student retention and persistence within narrow contexts and narratives that are dualistic to the core. Contexts and narratives that separate the public from the private, promote mind/body splits, and support compartmentalization. What results is a fragmented, disembodied student attending a fragmented, disembodied educational system, proposing fragmented and a-historical solutions to complex realities. It is this duality, this mind/body split that needs to be challenged and overhauled.

As a Vice-President who supports the radical transformation of institutional paradigms, this conference is important for another reason. As individuals working within our own institutions we may not always have equal access to enunciating – or speaking - in our own name. Put another way: sometimes speaking from the margins to the center about what we need and why we need it can be an exhausting project; particularly when money, time, resources, and facilities are involved. Put in more descriptive terms: talking about African American19 – or for that matter Latino - student retention and persistence without money, staff and resources is, in the words of Jessie Jackson Jr., entertainment!

UMOJA represents a grass roots effort by activists and educators urgently focused on enrollment, retention, academic success and transfer of African American students. UMOJA can and does operate, in Stuart Hall’s potent phrase, from a “position of enunciation20, “in its own name”21 from within the African American experience and from within a black diasporic context and consciousness.

What I am suggesting is that sometimes it is preferable to identify educational/intellectual spaces outside our institutional boundaries by claiming new sites and locations from which to enunciate and speak. An alternative site – such as UMOJA – provides pathways
for claiming authorship and meaning-making outside the constricted landscapes of any single institution. Call it the civil society of the educational enterprise. The conference was after all UMOJA II. And its very name implies the resolve to speak and enunciate in collective voice – in unity – and with unity of purpose. May the destination and the journey continue – not just for today – but for decades to come! UMOJA!

Bibliography

1 UMOJA is a statewide movement dedicated to the enrollment, retention, academic success and transfer of African American students in California Community Colleges. This talk was given on the occasion of UMOJA II, a statewide conference held on the campus of Chaffey College in which 52 colleges and over 200 educators participated in a day long conference.

2 UMOJA is a statewide movement dedicated to the enrollment, retention, academic success and transfer of African American students in California Community Colleges. This talk was given on the occasion of UMOJA II, a statewide conference held on the campus of Chaffey College in which 52 colleges and over 200 educators participated in a day long conference.

3 To learn more about UMOJA please visit http://www.chabotcollege.edu/umojaIII/; or contact UMOJA co-chairs Tom deWit, English Professor, Chabot College; or Donna Colondres, Professor/Counselor, Chaffey College.

4 UMOJA is a Swahili word meaning collective voice; unity of purpose.

5 hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge.

6 hooks 1994: 16

7 hooks 1994: 16

8 hooks 1994: 75

9 hooks 1994: 74

10 hooks 1994: 74

11 Ellison 1980:3 Ellison, R. (1980). Invisible Man. New York: Vintage Books

12 hooks 1994: 74

13 This is a modification to Homi Bhabha’s descriptor “not quite/not white” from his book The Location of Culture (1994). For the purposes of this talk and for aesthetics reasons the phrase “not right” is added to Bhabha’s original phrase, hence: “not quite, not right, not white.” Bhabha’s notion of “not quite/not white” can be found in pages 85-92; and is specifically referenced on page 89 in The Location of Culture (1994). New York: Routledge. For more on this as well as his meditations on “mimicry” consult the following two web sites: http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/bhabha/excerpts.html

http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/bhabha/mimicry.html

14 Lorde 1984: 44

15 Lorde 1984:8

16Sandoval 2000: 193,4. In Methodology of the Oppressed.

17 Anzaldua 1999: 5. Sonia Saldivar-Hull in “Introduction to the Second Edition of Borderlands/La Frontera.

18 This paper was presented at a conference dedicated to the enrollment, retention, academic success and transfer of African American students

19See Stuart Hall’s “Cultural Identity and Cinematic Representation” pages 704-714 in Film and Theory: An Anthology edited by Robert Stam and Toby Miller. Blackwell Publishers.

20 Ibid.

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About the Author

Dr. Ali M. Rahmani is Vice President of Student Services at Chaffey College. He has 29 years of experience in higher education and has held leadership roles in the Californian State University and Community College systems. He holds a doctorate in educational leadership; has taught Ethnic & Gender Studies (Cal Poly Pomona) and Business and Global Studies (University of La Verne). Dr. Rahmani recently completed course work towards a second doctorate in Cultural Studies from Claremont Graduate University.

His research interests include critical race theories; exile and Diaspora theory, U.S. third world feminism; Islamic feminism; and gender and sexual politics in the Middle East. He has presented numerous papers at academic, higher education, and social justice conferences. Most recently, as an invited keynote at Orange Coast College’s Cultural Awareness Day, he presented a talk titled “Courageous Conversations or Constricted Imaginary: From Margin to center.” Last fall, as one of three invited keynotes at the UMOJA III conference, a state wide initiative to promote the academic success of African American students in community colleges, he presented a talk titled “Roots, Routes and Double Consciousness: Agency and Activism in the Educational Contact Zone.” Dr. Rahmani can be reached at ali.rahmani@chaffey.edu