PREFACE

In their very first conversation, a college student’s new roommate shifts the conversation from pleasantries about home towns and class schedules to hair, first complementing her roommate’s “cool style,” and then moving closer, saying, “I just want to see what it feels like.” Just before her roommate’s hand grazes her locs, the student gently catches and removes it. She feels her stomach, her cheeks, and her hands constrict with indignation but she doesn’t slap her hand away; she doesn’t yell; she doesn’t lecture. She takes a breath, permits a tired smile, and says, with a measured tone, “please don’t touch my hair.” Later she will journal about this experience, describe it in her request letter to transfer into a single, and share it with faculty, students, staff, and community members at her campus’s #BlackLivesMatter protest.

The morning after another widely-televised murder of a Black man goes viral, the woman heads back to her job as a television writer. She takes a deep breath at the threshold of the writers’ room, pausing to re-balance her coffee, laptop, and script bursting with a rainbow of sticky notes. She hears raucous laughter and feels relieved at the promised distraction, but as soon as she walks in the conversation stops and her colleagues’ eyes dart to their phone screens. Busying herself with setting up her space, and giving herself a pep talk to pitch her first idea, she smiles and enthuses, “you all ready to start?” Later she will channel her emotions from this moment into her own spec script.

On the first day of classes, a lecture hall full of students wanting add codes for an oversubscribed course parade past the woman shuffling through papers and outfitted in a tweed blazer and slacks. They line up behind a bearded man in bike commuter attire, sitting on stage, legs dangling. The students address the man reverently as “professor,” and ask him for the honor of joining the class. The woman assesses the students in line in front of her flattered and smiling graduate student teaching assistant. She takes the podium and warmly addresses the crowd, “welcome to communication 389! I am your professor, and I will answer all questions about add codes after class.” Later she will narrate this experience for her students in her lecture on stereotyping.

In spaces of privilege such as a college dormitory, a writers’ room, or a lecture hall, twenty-first century racism and sexism rarely register as blatant or bald. Instead, gendered and racialized discrimination functions as a frequently ignored, allegedly well-intentioned, often-excused phenomenon. Such moments of racialized sexism are textbook examples of microaggressions, what psychologist Derald Wing Sue describes as “brief, everyday exchanges that send denigrating messages to certain individuals because of their group membership.”1 Microaggressions thrive in spaces where racism remains unacknowledged, and where people believe in the fallacy that our world is now postracial, or that we are beyond racialized inequality, and perhaps race itself. But racialized identity is better understood through the matrix of domination, to use sociologist Patricia Hill Collins’s famous phrase2—the imbricated connections of race, gender, sexuality, and class that construct intersectional identity. Postracial ideologies hide that matrix, denying that it even exists.

This book developed in part from my own everyday experience of negotiating resistance to microaggressions in a world where racism and sexism continue to be a given for some, and a fantasy for others. It emerged from my life as a professional (and privileged) woman of color. Within a month of being a new assistant professor, I learned a word that I would come to hear virtually every time I was given advice by a well-meaning colleague: strategic. I needed to be strategic. Being strategic meant not simply writing and publishing steadily as I climbed the tenure hill. It meant choosing my battles, meting out my words, and conducting myself in a quieter, less obtrusive, and less radical way. It meant not making people uncomfortable. While my White, male colleagues might have received the same advice, such words registered differently with me. I heard that my research, which pushed on the boundaries of communication scholarship, was dangerous and illegitimate; I learned that I myself, a woman of color faculty member, was dangerous and illegitimate.

So I held my nose, swallowed my pill, and learned how to become strategic. The words of my advisor Jane Rhodes rang clear in my head: if you don’t earn tenure, you don’t just lose your job, you lose your career. That wasn’t going to be me. As I became more deeply inculcated into the ways of a large research university, I learned how to hold on to my core critique and perform in the respectably calculated ways that the university demanded: I learned how to be strategically ambiguous. I learned how to foster my own communities; I learned how to bite my tongue in certain spaces, and sing freely in others. I learned how to think of my carefully controlled speech in particular places as an exercise in delayed gratification; I learned how to play the long game. This book emerged from my lived experience of strategic ambiguity. It began as a side project when I was finishing my first book, Transcending Blackness: From the New Millennium Mulatta to the Exceptional Multiracial (Duke University Press, 2013). As I shared pieces of it at conferences and in journal articles, the identity negotiations I came to understand as strategic ambiguity registered as something not exclusive to me, but emblematic of privileged minoritized subjects’ constraints and resistance in the so-called postracial era. This book is for all of my people who perform strategic ambiguity with a wink, a sigh, a nod, and a determination to not just exist, but resist.