"Managed inequality."
At least two hours! I was warned I shouldn't leave. This was it! I was told I needed to go back where I came. I wasn't "fit," he declares, to teach. Suddenly after 13 years, I wasn't "fit" to teach!
Why, you don't even have a car! You have to speak with a psychologist.
And he dials a number and hands me the phone and leaves the room.
It's the summer of 2000, I have yet to sign the contract, but I've been hired. Just a month before the school year is to start, and this man has notified my building manager that I have a cat. The English department, in the meantime, has already seen to it that I am without an office among them. The only Black faculty in that department.
But I refused. I was crying, and I was shaking. This good-sized man stands between me and a livelihood. And I was in my late 40s. Had been a published writer since 1979, a college instructor since the late 1980s. I had my doctorate. But I was alone. Just the month or two before, I had come to the smaller town from a big city--alone.
And as a Black woman who had been an activist since the age of 14-years old and who refused to stay, as I had been told by the hiring chair, to "stay low key," I was to exit. Leave the campus! Two other Black women did the same, I was informed, as if it a matter to celebrate. One left before the contract started and the other after--and, warning--you don't want to wait until after you sign the contract to quit! You'll have to pay us back!
I sat there alone. Where was I to go? Back where? My parents had been died. My siblings much younger. Friends, too, were struggling with adjunct positions while trying to advocate for social justice. This was a full-time position.
I understood what was happening. This is what I told the white woman on the line. It wasn't me, I told her and, hanging up the phone, I left that room. I didn't know how things would end, but I left that room.
Two years later, a month or two after the dean of faculty stood over me and pointed his finger down and me, saying, I better not ask for tenure track, I receive a call from the affirmative action director at my home. "You better not tell anyone."
When I did tell a couple of women faculty, I received from them another message: self-interest trumps a fellow woman's experience of abuse of power. You have no children, Lenore! We do!
As for the chair, he let me know that whatever happened was between you and Mr.______! Good day! And don't "bother" me again!
Bill O'Reilly, Bill Cosby, Harvey Weinstein, Roy Moore, Al Franken, John Conyers, James Toback--and on and on and on--because abuse of power is just that deep-seated in this culture. Just so matter-of-fact. Former President Bill Clinton and the current one, DT/45, brag: "they let you do it."
It's not as if we are ignorant of this knowledge. Tyrants manage inequality--because, at best, it's our complicity gives them the power to do so, and thus, they appear to function so well as to be almost invisible.
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