Author:
(1) Tiffany N. Younger, The Graduate Center, City University of New York, New York, NY 10016, USA ([email protected]).
Table of Links
3. Whiteness as an Institution
5. The Academic Plantation Field
8. Imagination through Research
10. Collaboration as Imagination
11. Conclusions and References
9. Imagination through Play
Somehow, in the United States, an individual’s career becomes their identity. I know this because I have traveled and worked in other parts of the world, such as South Africa, Brazil, Ghana, Kenya, and the Dominican Republic, and work rarely comes up outside of the work environment. Gray et al. (2023) note, “Black women are more than mules of white supremacy”. It is essential to have hobbies and passions that spiritually sustain you and can be poured into you outside of work. I have recently been intentional about defining myself and exploring who I am outside of academia and my career as a research scientist and professor, as Black women have been conditioned to labor and serve through capitalism. Laboring and serving are not natural, despite what we may think. This is the conditioning we inherited from our ancestors, who were conditioned by white colonizers to labor excessively without rest or payment, which is another tenet in the savagery of whiteness. We must disrupt this conditioning and engage in nonpayment/production hobbies. Our imagination can be activated by drawing, playing mystery games with friends, singing karaoke, and playing solo solitaire. This summer, I plan to teach my daughter and niece how to jump double Dutch and hopscotch to reclaim my inner child. It was through play and engaging in joy that my imagination allowed me to BE.
This paper is available on arxiv under CC BY 4.0 DEED license.
