Sponsors:

Annenberg Center for Collaborative Communication https://www.asc.upenn.edu/research/centers/annenberg-center-for-collaborative-communication

If you enjoyed this episode and want to learn more, here are some materials to check out:

Read more on the history of the interrobang.

Hear more about the history of the interrobang.

More from our hosts:

Deen Freelon

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, United States

citap.unc.edu

github.com/dfreelon

Twitter: @dfreelon

Charlton McIlwain

New York University, United States

charltonmcilwain.com

Twitter: @cmcilwain @centeerforcrds

Meredith Clark

Northeastern University, United States

meredithdclark.com

Twitter: @MeredithDClark @NU_CAMD @mediastudies

Transcript:

Noshir Contractor 0:02
ICA presents

The noise you just heard is the sound of the interrobang, a nonstandard punctuation mark. The interrobang’s appearance is its explanation. An exclamation mark superimposed directly on a question mark. The theme for the 2022 International Communication Association Annual Conference. One World one network ends with an Interrobang. The symbol simultaneously celebrates and problematizes the oneness in the modern age of global communication. This podcast series features episodes hosted by the six co chairs of the conference theme. In this episode, co chaired professor Dean Freelon hosts a discussion with a panel of hand selected guests about their experiences as black scholars in the field of communication. Here’s Dean.

Deen Freelon 1:03
My name is Dean Freelon, I am an associate professor at the Hussman School of Journalism and Media at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. Here with my colleagues, Meredith Clark.

Meredith Clark 1:13
I am an associate professor and center, Director of the Center for communication media innovation and social change at Northeastern

Deen Freelon 1:22
love to hear it, I love to hear words like that. Of course, it was Charlton McElwain, who is at NYU in

Charlton McIlwain 1:30
its department of media culture and communication, and also vice provost for faculty engagement and development here at NYU.

Deen Freelon 1:37
Okay, great. Excellent. Well, thank you very much. This is somewhat of a reunion, we’ve co authored a couple of pieces together, and I really admire your work. And I wanted to just get this conversation started about being black in communication. Because I feel like it’s something that we don’t really talk about enough, possibly, because there aren’t enough of us to talk about it, and that we don’t get into a room, the same room is often enough to talk about it. So I don’t think anybody needs you know, regardless of our ratio, I don’t think anybody needs us to tell them that communication is overwhelmingly white field. Right? The theme of this podcast series is one world one networks, I think there is some sense of which we are one network, you know, we’re all in the field of communication, right? We’re all this discipline, but like, there’s different neighborhoods have it, right. So we’re kind of like in the hood of the network, okay. There’s a little bit of separation might be like that one street that like runs is like, you got like the whole big rest of the neighborhood over there. And you got us over here. The first question I want to ask, and I’m gonna let Charlton start with this one is, could you talk a little bit about your grad school experience, and just how it was for you, you know, being a black dude in the Communication Department, whenever you went?

Charlton McIlwain 2:54
Yeah, well, I went to grad school at the University of Oklahoma. I actually went there for my master’s degree first, and then separately to communication for the, for the PhD. My transition from was a master’s in human relations to a Department of Communications. I spent my first year not funded. And I had to pay on my own got loans, and thought it was, you know, a blessing and, and so forth that I just got in. So I was grateful and didn’t look around, really, at the inequities in which everybody else in the doctoral program that was white was getting fellowship funding. I was not, you know, I was reading all this black studies, taking courses over the English Literature Department. But I was doing all that kind of on my own right, I’m reading I didn’t have a professor to bounce things off to, to have that language. So it wasn’t I wouldn’t say it was a hostile place. But it wasn’t a place and program where I felt like I was really getting sort of nurtured and developed in the way that other folks were.

Deen Freelon 4:05
Oh, my goodness. Wow. Okay. I have a lot to react to that. But I want to hear about Meredith’s experience first.

Meredith Clark 4:12
Yeah, there are a lot of parallels, actually to Charlton’s experience. I came from an HBCU. I am a two time graduate of Florida A&M University in Tallahassee, Florida. And that’s a historically black college or university for anyone unfamiliar with that acronym. And my master’s was in journalism, but I worked in the field for a few years. And it was because of decisions that I saw that were being made without real research behind them, that I decided I wanted to go and get a PhD. And so this was 2010. So I went to UNC Chapel Hill, and I was kind of an oddball in my program. There were two black women who were admitted in my cohort and my friend and I remain friends to this day. But we often joke that they decided they would never do that again, because in the years following, there was like one black person admitted in each cohort. And I didn’t come from a program, where I’d had a lot of research training, I wrote a thesis. But that’s because I insisted on doing it. And so I show up at this PhD program, I’m trained as a professional journalist. But I don’t have the same sort of academic grounding that everyone else has, I wound up writing my dissertation on Black Twitter, but I was there with a committee with for whom, with the exception of one person, no one really knew what Twitter was, they had no idea what Black Twitter was. And so I was in this position to sort of be the expert long before we consider PhD students experts, right. But I had to essentially teach my committee about the dynamics of social media, and about the dynamics of black community in this way, it was still very an isolating a very isolating experience. I felt like I was failing, because I wasn’t achieving things as quickly or seemingly as easily as other people.

Deen Freelon 6:16
I’ll speak a little bit to my experience, I think in many ways, it mirrors what I’ve heard from from you two. So I went to graduate school, I got my masters and PhD from the University of Washington. Now, I’m in North Carolina native, North Carolina is 22% Black, I go to Washington, Washington is 5%, black. And the entire time I was in the program, I was the only black male student there, my thought is, if this is what I have, what if this is what I really want to study, this is what I have to go through. And so it’s really only been recently that I’ve really been able to look up and be like, wow, you know, kind of jacked up there weren’t more of us back there, right. And so it’s really only been in the last few years that I’ve been able to kind of like step outside of that a little bit and say, what are some ways that we can integrate some, you know, like, blackness into this very, like white thing? Right? So the next question I want to get into here, and I’ll start with you here, Meredith is currently what are some of your biggest challenges, being black in the field of communication research today?

Meredith Clark 7:20
Being black in anything is is a challenge, right? When you think about a world that is so defined by anti blackness by the creation of blackness as negation, getting up and deciding to be something and to do something, and to affirm yourself and others is a challenge every day, having to make the case for the kind of work that we want to do is also difficult. And that is everything from educating reviewers about the importance of the work that we’re doing with it centering on blackness and black people, to having to talk to funders who are somewhat interested in our projects, but tend to see us through sort of an anthropological or sociological lens where we’re pathologized.

Charlton McIlwain 8:12
And I remember very specifically, I think it was either in my first year, maybe my second but I remember a colleague by department, saying right to my face these words, you are an inferior scholar, right at a time that I enter a department with very little direction, very little mentorship, I’m prepared in the ways that I know that, you know, I got to put my head down, I got to work, I got to research I got to write, I got to do all these things. But in a place that’s basically like, glad you’re here glad you’re here see you in a few years hope you make it. But to know that I’m walking into a place that not only does that but where other colleagues are saying things like that, you know, is then made for several years of, you know, the profound imposter syndrome, you know, fortunate to have been successful and much of that part of the career of a full professor, a Vice Provost at my institution. In many ways, one would say, I’ve made it, but the struggle is still there. And sometimes you get pushback when you talk about you know, what counts as academic excellence, what counts as research excellence, when you’ve got people saying, look, your your qualitative research work about race, is it the kind of stuff that we do or is valuable?

Deen Freelon 9:44
Yeah, it’s tough. And, you know, it’s, I gotta be honest with the Charlton, like, it’s incredibly upsetting to hear that somebody said that to you, to your face, in terms of contrasting with my experience, like when I came to grad school, like, I knew how to code but like almost nobody knew how to do it. And so like, I feel very fortunate in that, like my academic credentials have ever been challenged. But I think part of the reason for that is because I came into a situation where I knew how to do something that like most white people didn’t know how to do. I think it’s in that ways, in some ways, at least, that maybe like backstage, my blackness a little bit for some people. They were like, oh, he’s the data science guy. Oh, but he’s black, too, which is also great, you know. But some of the challenges for me, specifically, have been things that you all have talked about, which is like getting people to take race seriously. You know, one of the ways that I dealt with that, in my early work, was doing work that did not center race. And my thought was, well, okay, I’m going to do this for a little bit. And then I’m going to pivot. And that’s basically what happened. And I think that that has, you know, that’s not a strategy, that strategy that would necessarily recommend to everybody. But I think it actually worked well for me, because by the time I started talking about it, people couldn’t backtrack on all the nice things that already said about me. So but another big challenge for me is attracting black grad students. I found that to be a challenge, I’m still trying to figure out what, you know, what is going through the mind of the black grad student when they’re trying to apply to various places? Is it do I want to go someplace where my people are, am I looking specifically at the department seeing what the racial makeup of that is. And so, so attracting grad students has been a real a real challenge for me, because I feel like this field, at least potentially has a lot to offer black students, especially when you’ve got, you know, culturally sensitive professors do the teaching and the instruction. Next question, I have just a couple more here. What changes in our discipline would you like to see to make the field more hospitable to black people and perspectives

Charlton McIlwain 11:51
Hmm. Wow. We could spend however a many time on this I’m sure. It’s hard to even pinpoint where change has to start. Because really, it’s got to start at everywhere simultaneously, I would probably say I’ve gotten 20 to 25. I’m sure both of you the same way. Emails this year, black graduate students want to work with me want to get advice? And the reality is, I can’t answer all of them. I can’t answer very many of them, I certainly can’t work with many of them. And my sense is that that phenomenon happening across different registers is probably discouraging some folks from pursuing their degrees, all of it, I think, having the effect of keeping the representation of folks, black folks in the pipeline, headed to where we are, then in a way is that’s not sustainable. I think that, you know, people are still getting to departments that are inhospitable. So we have to be in bigger numbers, we have to be represented, we have to be in a place where we have communities that are built into departments that help to push graduate students that come in on a path towards success, or at least success in a shorter timeframe and a much more healthy way of going about it.

Deen Freelon 13:24
Excellent. No, I love it. I’ve had this idea to stick in my head. I’m just gonna, what if at ICA, we had a black caucus, right? Across all disciplines, right? Anybody can do it. Room doesn’t have to be all black people it should be mostly black. But if you can get with it, you can be in there. If you’re okay, being in a room full of black people, you can do it. If you’re okay centering blackness, right. Yeah, exactly. That’s exactly what I mean. Yeah.

Meredith Clark 13:47
I love it, that everyone is looking for some sense of safety and security and community. And I think the more places and ways that we can find to create that, the better. I’m all in.

Charlton McIlwain 14:00
Yeah, same same here. And I think, but as Meredith just alluded to having that centralized, so not just having the caucus, but that the caucus has some way of structure, structuring the conference for a given year, rather than just being sort of, you know, off to the side.

Deen Freelon 14:22
So good to get your endorsement now, I guess I got to do it since I said it. Meredith, changes you’d like to see?

Meredith Clark 14:30
Oh, changes I’d like to see are so wide ranging. I want more people to check themselves. Take seriously the books and the readings and the reflections that they are doing and examine their practices for signs of anti blackness, I think something that is so small, like who are you? You know, when we’re making these relationships among faculty members and students, who are you seeking out for those relationships? Who gets invited to your house? Black students see and know, when we are being excluded. In between, I would like to see more support for students to collaborate, not only with other faculty members, but with other students across universities. And that requires money. It requires time, it requires resources. But what that does is it allows students to build the networks that they may not be able to have at their home institution, you can bring in pairs of black students, you can bring in small clusters of folks. But that’s still not enough to supplant the structures that we are up against. And then finally, I really want us to examine the practices of anti blackness that we have enshrined in the academy, the peer review process itself, how many peers can you have when the percentages of black faculty of faculty of color of faculty from marginalized backgrounds of any race, ethnicity, socio economic status are so low, we’re kidding ourselves to say that it’s some sort of peer review, we are not the same, we don’t have the same experiences. And we need to admit that these are very flawed systems, there may be other ways to do things, and be more open to that.

Deen Freelon 16:28
My grandmother, you know, God bless her soul. I mean, like, she was all about the positivity. So I gotta honor that right now. And the question, the question is, what are some positive experiences you have had, that are rooted in your blackness? And I will start this one, I’m sure that you both, and many folks in the listening audience will know about the, you know, Nicole Hannah Jones incident that happened over the summer where the Board of Trustees it was, you know, folks saying, Oh, well, we bought her up for vote, but then we didn’t. And then, you know, stories conflicting, and all of this, culminating in them finally offering her tenure in at the very end of May, and then her declining and decided to go and go to Howard. But one thing that happened in the wake of that incident was being able to look at how the faculty in my department reacted was incredibly illuminating, eye opening, and gratifying for me, because there were some faculty members who I’m talking about non black faculty members, who were incredibly supportive, and who said all the things that I wish that they could say, and that was great. So just just that sense of knowing who your allies are, who was willing to stick up for you, who’s willing to lay their credibility on the line to expose themselves to harassment and attacks for you was incredibly gratifying.

Charlton McIlwain 17:42
Who am I think that thing that have been around for so long, number one, and saying some of the changes, even though it’s not enough, is being able to have that community and able to being able to work with folks like you, and being able to be at a point in time where we can look around and say there are black folks that are in senior positions of scholarship, that are doing things that are connected to the things that we always said we would do, if we got to where we are there, it’s great to be in a place where you can have a conversation that centers, blackness, that you can center black ways of thinking and knowing and doing and, and cultural ways of interacting. And that being the normal, you know, we’re not hiding, we’re not putting on the performance when we’re in this space,

Meredith Clark 18:38
Really just seeing the work received by people outside of academia. That is one of the most affirming things that I can imagine, I feel the great privilege of being able to read and write and think for a living. When I see quotes from some of my written work on Instagram and on Tik Tok and being used in people’s social media posts. I like I’m just overjoyed. You know, my, my dad, when I was getting a PhD, he’s like, What do you mean you’re studying the internet? Like, you better be able to get a job. And it’s just great to be able to say, you know, God rest my dad’s soul. But yeah, Dad, I was able to do it, and it’s having an impact.

Deen Freelon 19:27
Thank you very much. I really appreciate it. It’s been a really, really great conversation. My hope is that this reaches all kinds of people who have any interest in blackness and as far as it goes in communication. And so I really look forward to exploring that idea of how to forge connections, but also how to build strength both between and within. Right. So consolidating that within a caucus are other types of processes that bring people together with only ones in their departments across disciplines across methodological approaches, but also figuring out where your allies are. I mean, for me when I think about what One World One Network that’s kind of how I think about it, I think about, you know, within and between, and that’s kind of how I want to move forward. So that’s it for me.

Charlton McIlwain 20:10
Thank you. Thank you, Deen, for bringing us the bringing us together. It’s been a great conversation. Thank you. So thank you so much. I really appreciate it.

Noshir Contractor 20:20
This podcast series is presented by the International Communication Association in the lead up to the 2022 annual conference in May. One World One Network is sponsored by the Annenberg Center for Collaborative communication at both the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California. This episode was produced by Kristian Elliott, our executive producer, is Aldo Diaz Caballero. The theme music is by John Preston. For more information about our participants on this episode, as well as our sponsor, please see the show notes. Be sure to listen to other episodes in the series, where we continue exploring the conferences theme. One World one network from the perspectives of the conference teams are the co chairs. Thanks for listening.