Transcript

I’m Major Jackson and this is The Slowdown.

Years ago, at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, a fiction writer from East Harlem asked me, “Where is your anger?” I said, “Excuse me.” He repeated himself, “Where is your anger?” We were playing basketball, both there on scholarship. “How can you easily move about these people?” He meant the predominantly white environment of a summer writers’ conference in northern New England. This was the late 90s. I was startled, as it suddenly brought to mind all the suppressed rage I had, owed to racial slights and affronts.

My assumption is that any person of color who has ascended in their field, say a law partner, cardiologist, tax attorney, or presidential candidate, has had to weather their fair share of microaggressions, if not outright racial harassment. Mine included being told in graduate school that a presumed Black speaker in my poem would not use multisyllabic words, racial profiling in multiple department stores, a student evaluation of all zeros with the word “black turd” written at the top — clearly, she was upset with her final grade. And, of course, a colleague who made a joking remark about a diversity hire. I never told my colleagues; these were nothing compared to the abuses previous generations of Black folk endured.

After I gave my reading at Bread Loaf, my novelist friend from East Harlem said, “Oh, your anger is in your poems.” I get it. He did not know that I once reacted violently to being called a racial slur during a week in which I held afternoon writing workshops for teens in Columbus, Ohio. I was deeply ashamed when a police car arrived to take me into the station for questioning. I will never forget the look on their faces. I promised myself I would never lose control of my emotions again. There have been endless slights since then, a few demeaning, yet most laughable. I have found other ways to fight back and make my voice heard, mostly through my poetry.

There is much talk about harm and generational responses in academia and beyond. Just know, resilience comes at a psychological cost. I applaud efforts to uphold people to greater standards of regard and to protect students from having to suffer meanness in the world.

Today’s brilliant poem speaks to the ordeal of enduring racial abuse and microaggressions in educational institutions. It slyly appropriates an academic assessment tool to point out that we are clearly failing in treating each other like whole humans.

Grading Rubric
by Antonio de Jesús López

Trauma is weighted as follows:

Formal Essays (55-65%)

	Write “Children of Immigrants” – 10% (double if undocumented)
	Write “first generation” – 15%
	Mention the color of the coyote’s van – 10%
	Keep family in the past tense – 5%
	Write birthplace next to its murder per capita rate – 20%

In-Class (35%)
	Don’t correct them when they say your name wrong – 5%
	Go by Tony starting sophomore year – 10%
	Stay quiet when they make fun of Keisha – 5%
	Believe Tim when he says, “You just got in because you’re” – 10%
	When it’s your turn to read, pronounce it like they do, gwa-da-mala – 5%

Participation (10%)
	Turn to the person next to you:
	debate your belonging

“Grading Rubric” by Antonio de Jesús López from GENTEFICATION © 2021 Antonio de Jesús López. Used by permission of the Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Four Way Books.