Can a Person Keep His/Her Integrity and Earn a Living?
I do not own the copyright/license to any of the visual material below, and am using them as part of an educational demonstration — not solely for personal gain.
This post comes directly from my personal observations as a perpetual part-time professor. I salute Mo’Nique to the highest for trying to maintain integrity and earn a living. She is being punished for being valued as a comedian and not allowing herself to be valued as a commodity in a gig economy.
With the recent Steve Harvey/Mo’Nique conversation, I can’t help but wonder, “Can a person keep her integrity and a job simultaneously?” Sometimes, I do not think in this world where mob rules and mediocrity reigns, that one can do those two things at once.
As the grandchild of a World War II veteran, it has been instilled in me to keep my head down low, keep some integrity about myself, invest in my craft(s),treat folk how I would like to be treated, educate myself, and be honest. If I just followed that formula, I would be all right. Everything would be all right, my elders told me. I have taken that formula and boiled it down to my three Cs of employability: Capable, Competent, and Compassionate.
I never thought I’d live to see a day when those three things are just wrong. The values that my Depression survivor/World War II veteran grandfather instilled in me are just all wrong. Instead of helping me, they have hurt me. People around me have been enraged at me. They have been cruel. They have been hurtful, and some even wished me dead. My values, they tell me, are old-fashioned, out of sync for today’s world, and ultimately making me utterly unemployable. But why?
I SALUTE MO’NIQUE TO THE HIGHEST! I salute her when she said, “Before it was the money game, it was the integrity game. We have lost integrity.”
Mo’Nique’s statement seemed to trigger Steve. It almost seems like he was saying that it is okay to leave your integrity in your pocketbook or tucked in the trunk of the car in order to keep working and earn money. He may not have meant it that way, but that is the way it sounded to me.
As a perpetual adjunct professor, I can understand EXACTLY how she feels to be blackballed. As a Black woman who is talented, dedicated to my craft, and knows her value beyond any label that any man or woman can place over me, I understand how it feels to be punished for trying to do the right thing.
Over the past decade of my life, I have been labeled as a person who has an “attitude” by Black and white faculty members. It hurts to be labeled in such a way, because anyone who knows me personally laughs at this. I would not harm a flea! Literally. Okay, maybe I would smash it with my thumb for biting me, but I’d feel bad about taking its life immediately.
As a coworker, I am the one person in the office who brings teacakes, pound cakes, and cookies (all homemade) as a morale booster. I once worked at a school that did not serve real coffee, just decaf. I put a coffee maker and gourmet coffee, sugar, and creamer in my office with styrofoam cups. I somehow became the unofficial administrative assistant in my building, because I would print off everyone’s rosters. I came to work six days a week, advised students, and published. It still was not enough.
For a while, I internalized these things. Then one day, I woke up and realized that my 3 Cs were actually hurting me. I work in an area (the Memphis metropolitan area), where this is loathed. Employers here do not want that level of professionalism. Instead, they want the 3 Ds: desperate, defeated, and defenseless. Come to a job and show some real competence and capability, and one can almost feel the energy in the room change. I once heard a woman remark of me, “She must be trying to take our jobs.” Fortunately for me, this woman did not understand that acoustics in older buildings are awesome, and I was able to hear her and avoid her for my duration at that place.
It is best to show desperation and need in this area. In that way, they can simply use the purse strings to control and dominate employees, even in higher education. And since I am not a sycophant or desperate or defeated or defenseless, I am labeled with that old Black girl stereotypical standby: “She has an attitude.” One lady straight up called me “angry” to my face. My white colleagues were astounded. After all, they literally watched me doodle unicorns, rainbows, clouds, suns, and happy faces throughout this woman’s class. But in the end, I was blocked from teaching that year, because I was “too angry to be trusted around 18-year-olds.”
Explicitly discriminatory statements like this and subsequent blackballing hurt coming from white Americans -especially when they are a bald-face lie. But Mo’Nique. Lord, Mo’Nique. I sat and cried when she said that the hurt was particularly keen when people who look like you make them, too. Older, Black faculty members are the ones who taught the white ones to say, “attitude” rather than angry. And no matter how nice I am or dedicated I am to the students or even how much I publish, because I am not interested in being a sycophant for the sake of career advancement, I am labeled as one who is “difficult” or has an “attitude.”
Yes, I know exactly what she means by the private phone calls. I know exactly how she feels when a person who’d called her privately did not have the courage to speak out publicly, but joined in the bashing as well. I have received private phone calls. I have been told many, many times that I have done nothing wrong, that I am one of the most talented academics that anyone in these parts has seen for a long time, and that those in higher positions are simply insecure by my competence in English and compassion for the students. I have been told all of these things. Privately.
In public, people distanced themselves from me. In public, they silently agreed with the insecure that I was to blame. In public, one of my colleagues (who had reaped the benefits of my syllabuses) told me that she felt I would do better in academe if I just “toned it down some.” Since she studies feminism, I guess she just hasn’t made it around to reading how “tone it down some” is antifeminist. In public, people have told me that I have to learn how to “play the game.” I respond every time that I am “playing the game.” I am researching and publishing and conferencing and getting excellent student reviews. But I guess none of that matters in an era of mediocrity, title-grabbing, and tenure-chasing.
If Steve Harvey is correct and everything is just a “money game,” I am not sure why people like me try. We seem doomed to failure as soon as we step foot in a place of employment, regardless of where that place is. Academia likes to pat itself on the back and tell itself that is “above” frivolous things like Hollywood and corporate America. But is it? How can I say that it is when I am experiencing the same thing as Mo’Nique? We all want job security, but is getting tenure worth giving up my integrity, changing my identity completely, distancing myself from other Black academics, and only researching what I think will publish? Is it worth even sleeping with someone? I mean, I applaud the #metoo Movement, but some women have spent plenty of time on the casting couch in academia as well. And every time, it has been those women who were “easy” and promoted while me, who is happily married and lives in her brain rather than her body, am labeled as “difficult” and kept underemployed.
Sadly, it is my opinion that higher education in America is becoming Fortune 500. New academics, especially those of us who are not legacy academics (we did not grow up with parents who were professors) and no organization ties (I did not pledge a sorority), are expected to turn off our brains and become sycophants. Sometimes, more than twice per week, I get messages in my inbox that describe the new Vice President/Associate Dean/Special Assistant position that was created with a six-figure salary and assistant that makes at least $30,000, but am told that I must remain at adjunct pay, because there is just no room in the budget for hiring a full-time right now. Somehow, I am expected to believe that a new, nonessential administrator and assistant would serve the students better than a full-time instructor/professor.
Well, life has been difficult for me since I walked away from full-time at a Hellhole Black College/University. Adjunct-land is difficult for anybody. We do full-time work with a quarter of the pay. But, I lean toward what Mo’Nique is trying to do. I support her 100% We should not have to trade integrity to earn a steady living. And perhaps she triggered Steve Harvey to the point of a yelling rage on live television, because he knows Mo’Nique is right. Is giving up integrity worth it? I see that his show has been canceled, so maybe not. Many of the people who distanced themselves from me in order to gain tenure/brownie points with the boss have been fired anyway.
For many years of my life, I have wondered why Black people hate me so much. Their hatred, cruelty, and assistance in barring me has hurt to the core. But, when I saw how Steve Harvey behaved when Mo’Nique mentioned the word “integrity,” I got my answer — even as a struggling academic. This summer will be one of difficult decisions for me. Like Mo’Nique, I am hardworking, married, and a mother. But, for whatever I decide, I plan to keep my integrity. Trading who I am for a paycheck is just not worth it at all. I want my children to see a mother who is not only competent and capable, but bold enough to stand on her own, maintain a sense of dignity and pride, and walk away from wealth if it means lying to the world about who I am. I should hope that they would be proud of their mother. I sure am proud of Mo’Nique. She’s not old enough to be my mother, but she sure is that brave older sister who I cherish!
This post comes from the heart of a perpetual part-time professor who really cares about her craft and her students and is not a sycophant.
