Response: Talking Back

Responding to any work that interrogates the lived experiences of Black women at predominantly White institutions (PWIs) requires “talking back” (hooks, 2004) to history with a discursive currency that captures past and present. Such a response inevitably assumes an individual stance relative to collective consciousness, the intersection of which frames the ways we author and/or are authored by the world. Though there is no singular Black woman consciousness, there are experiences as Black women that give rise to predictable pivot points in our lives. These pivot points are what make us laugh and cry together across time, space, and multilayered otherness. They are what make possible a sense of collective solidarity in this particular “imagined community” (Anderson, 2006). Perhaps most important, the pivot points that mark boundaries, that return us from whence we came, that pull us away from the unseen, are those that resurrect collective memories from our foremothers. In this resurrection, we witness their complicated resiliency and historical trauma (Danzer, 2012; Wiechelt, Grycznski, Johnson, & Caldwell, 2012). My response to Njoku and Rogers thus embraces the specificity with which they speak in their counterstory and the larger interior struggle faced by Black women in academia.