The Sisyphean Sadness Beneath Every ‘Win’

For Black women scholars like me, democracy’s failures remain our burden to shoulder

This week, the Supreme Court began its term and appears poised to weaken, or strike down altogether, several key protections of marginalized Americans. The conservative-majority Court is scheduled to hear cases that challenge race-conscious affirmative action; safeguard against racially discriminatory gerrymandering and preserve voter rights; and prevent the removal of Indigenous American children from their communities in welfare proceedings.

These cases are of personal significance. I was born in Alabama, a place where American Indian removal coincided with the expansion of slavery. I am of the first generation in my family to have unfettered access to voting rights since age 18, a hard-fought-for right that is under threat by this year’s SCOTUS docket. And I am a proud beneficiary of affirmative action. Conversations I’ve had with friends and colleagues this week suggest that I am not alone in being fearful that affirmative action as we know it will soon end, thus dramatically transforming the student bodies at the institutions where we work.

Also this week, three Black women professors—a literary critic, a historian, and a scientist—were honored with Phi Beta Kappa Book Awards: Farah Jasmine Griffin for Read Until You Understand, Tiya Miles for All That She Carried, and Chanda Prescod-Weinstein for Disordered Cosmos. All three are multi-award-winning titles from multi-award-winning scholars. Phi Beta Kappa is the oldest and most prestigious academic honor society in the United States, with chapters housed at colleges and universities across the country. Students admitted to Phi Beta Kappa have the highest GPAs in their institution’s student body; membership continues beyond formal education. The annual book awards are therefore highly regarded and based upon excellence in research and writing.

My guess is that this Black-women sweep was a first for the Phi Beta Kappa Book Awards, and I couldn’t help but think about the origins of the honor society at the College of William & Mary in the year of this nation’s founding, 1776. Virginia, that place of Founding Fathers and inherited enslavement, that place of the nation’s beginning and its shame. In its early years, Phi Beta Kappa often met at Raleigh Tavern, a place where men gathered to drink, carouse, discuss ideas, and sometimes to buy people. Take for example this advertisement that was published in the Virginia Argus newspaper on January 23, 1804: “6 Likely young Negroes, to the highest bidder, for case - to make a distribution between Thomas Cowles & Others. January 27th, 1802.” (“Likely,” in this context, meant attractive in appearance and assumed to be capable of labor.)

Imagine the spirits of the original members of Phi Beta Kappa, then, hovering above the room when this year’s awards ceremony takes place. They would be shocked, I think, to see these far more than “likely” women onstage. These would hardly have been the people imagined for a place of honor, although, like Sethe in Toni Morrison’s Beloved (a woman described as having animal characteristics by the empiricist white-supremacist “school teacher”), they might have been the ones who mixed the ink used to write Phi Beta Kappa proclamations. Black women once undoubtedly served the platters at the celebratory dinners without ever taking a seat, much less garnering a second glance.

All three of these women have some relationship to Harvard University (as do I). Two were once undergraduates there; the third, Miles, is a member of its faculty and also a part of the Cherokee Nation. Like the newest member of the United States Supreme Court, Ketanji Brown Jackson, these women all add honor to the oldest university in the United States (the only one older than the College of William & Mary)—though it took that institution, like most elite universities, multiple generations to recognize that Black people, and women, belonged in its corridors. The first Black man to graduate from Harvard College was Richard Greener in 1870, 200-plus years after its founding. Alberta Virginia Scott was the first Black woman to graduate from Radcliffe, its sister school, in 1898. Though Scott died tragically young, Greener would go on to have a distinguished academic career, including serving as the first Black professor at the University of South Carolina.

The three Phi Beta Kappa winners, all professors themselves, tell their stories in their writing. They carry personal histories that attest to the long reach of the British imperial project into Barbados, colonial Virginia and Georgia, Indian Country, and of course, West Africa. They are also examples of excellence and distinction.

The myth of affirmative action is that it is a lowering of standards when, in fact, it has been an embarrassingly modest remediation of the violences and exclusions of empire. Before affirmative action, women like us were held outside the school gates, or inside only to serve. Pervasive educational inequality, documented over and over again, between neighborhoods and within schools and classrooms, means that affirmative action remains appropriate though insufficient.

When I congratulated Prescod-Weinstein on her win, we joked about how these awards are the only way Phi Beta Kappa had ever acknowledged us (I received an award from them in 2019). Meritocracy is a myth when race shapes outcomes so dramatically. And, after this Supreme Court term, it will likely be even more remote. The same can be said for the prospect of democracy. Promises of equal protection under the law made to Black Americans with the passage of the 14th constitutional amendment in 1868—as Justice Jackson poignantly reminded us this week—are poised to be broken yet again.

We, whose grandparents and parents were denied the rights of democratic representation, tell stories that we hope will make the collective “us” better as the society grows more cruel. While we celebrate these wins, there’s a Sisyphean sadness that persists. For how long will we shoulder the burden of democracy’s failures? If nothing else, for every celebratory moment of a panel of firsts, I beg of you: heed (and read) their words of wisdom. We need them more than ever.