Writing Truth to Power: Complication 2

Many of my clients are writing about race, class, gender, disability, sexuality, power, privilege, and/or colonialism. One of the hardest things for them to do is figure out how they will negotiate their relationship to power. For some, this is the power of a tenure or promotion committee. For others, this is the power of a publisher. Since I edit with equity in mind, my task over the next few newsletters is to give some inkling about how you might write truth to power.

To be fair, this phrase – “truth to power” – embeds itself in my psyche from my days as an undergraduate, when my campus was transfixed by the professors working in Black Studies who consistently spoke truth to power or used the phrase to describe what they were doing. Currently, the phrase functions as an ethos of how to write and why, to whom and for whom.

Have you ever heard someone say “It’s complicated” with a whoosh of breath so heavy you worry for their mental health? I have. Sometimes, people are trying to untangle some knots in logic or help folks unlearn ideas. Other times, people are trying to catch a field up to where they are thinking. (I covered the former last week.)

Some of my clients are in the throes of a new project. They have spent much time reading, analyzing, and writing about the state of the field. As they are discussing their work, people keep asking the same question, a question which, for them, is a red herring. As they are discussing their work, people return to a set of ideas that they see themselves as moving past or diverging from. At each turn, they are encountering the power of field formation: the power of gatekeepers, reviewers, and intellectual history.

When I wrote an article on Octavia E. Butler’s Fledgling, one journal said my writing was too chipper. I moved on to another journal where one reviewer complained that I shouldn’t keep saying “Black Studies and Disability Studies have yet to include each other” I should “just do the work and get on with it.” The second reviewer was less abrasive but was concerned that I hadn’t adequately proven that Blackness and disability were not mutually constituted. For those of you familiar with my work, you’ll know my second book Black Madness :: Mad Blackness covers both of these topics extensively. The final draft of that article, published in Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, does not have anything in it about mutual constitution nor does it say Black Studies and Disability Studies have yet to include each other. Instead, it uses the literature review to borrow explicitly from both fields and make the larger point of the article: I don’t think you ready for this jelly.

Let me introduce you to a concept I like to call “professional scaffolding.” As the wisdom of Biggie’s “Ten Crack Commandments” goes, this is “strictly for live men [sic], not for freshmen [sic].” Professional scaffolding is similar to what people do for students with writing assignments: helping them build out a project so that they can create a finished project in stages. Within the profession, I have heard this referred to as a research pipeline. A common example is to use conference papers and presentations to introduce people to different concepts. This works moderately well when you yourself need assistance scaffolding.

However, when the field admits through mechanisms like feedback that it needs certain questions answered before it is ready to understand your work, then you need a bigger scaffold. You are, for all intents and purposes, building a bigger house (hopefully, without the master’s tools). In my case, I had two major professional scaffolds. The first was the article itself. I used it to introduce a way for Black Studies and Disability Studies to talk to one another.

The second scaffold was the special issue of African American Review on Blackness and Disability. You all know that I believe in edited collections and special issues for what they do for new and exciting work. This special issue created a set of ways that the work was already being done, but it also exposed the fissures of the burgeoning field. So, by the time I was publishing Black Madness :: Mad Blackness, I had all those authors to rely on.

There are, of course, other ways to professionally scaffold your work. You can do that inside a larger work. You can create a series of articles. You can do public writing. If the field has clammed up on you, sharpen your oyster knife.