My journey as a Black woman has traced an arc from hyper-sexualized object to invisible body. As a young woman walking to music lessons in Philadelphia on Germantown Avenue, I navigated catcalls and advances past three bars, feeling unsafe in a world not designed for black little girls to walk in. In Cuba after architecture school, wanting only to see the Hotel Nacional, I was propositioned over a dozen times along the esplanade, my long braids marking me as a prostitute, because only sex workers could afford hair extensions there. In Hollywood, security guards repeatedly directed me to extras parking and the extras food line unable to imagine I, a black woman, was the production designer.
Now, at 55, a graduate student at UC Davis, I have crossed into a different territory: invisibility, disrespect, and dismissal. My gray temples, once dyed, now mark me. I don't know where to get my hair done because I don't know where Black bodies gather in Davis. Is it time to go upstairs like Fellini suggested in the harem scene of "8-1/2". Women of a certain age are simply supposed to go upstairs and disappear.
I ask myself - Where are the spaces designed for women over 50? Where do Black women of a certain age gather in Davis? Where can I feel comfortable, be myself, kick back? Where can I have a hot flash?
I have worked in design for 30 years. I hold an MFA in Scenic Design I got in 1996 (when I was the appropriate age of 26). My résumé includes Emmy nominations, Art Directors Guild Award nominations, a Dramalogue Award, numerous residencies. Just last year...or was it the year before? I was interviewed by the LA Times, House Beautiful and Set Decor. I sat on an IATSE panel in Design, was in fellow for Women in Film, presented at UCLA, received residencies in Key West and Cornwall. What happened to that person? Does she still exist?
In my Introduction to Design Section, where I TA, every second is scripted on a "Road Map", as if I would have nothing to contribute myself after three decades in theater, opera, film, and television design and teaching design part time since 2000. I am told repeatedly that I'm "an artist, not a designer." Some say design "means many things." Others suggest I might look into other programs. I'm treated as a first-year MFA student, as if I am young and dumb and I am told "I will understand the design process better later."
When I was the right age for Grad School
What was all the work for? The MFA? The Ivy League degree? The magazine articles? The thirty years of working 60 to 80 hours a week? Do I just accept invisibility and shut my mouth? Should I leave the world for the young, accept that, as John Irving wrote, life is all downhill after 15?
Was I too uppity to think I could return to school and find a place for me there? That my experience would be valued? That what I have to say would matter?
I ask myself, where does the older student fit into the university? This program seems to be "one size fits all," but whose size? Whose body? Whose experience? Obviously not mine,
I feel myself wanting to hush. I feel myself being hushed before I can even speak. It reminds me of being a little girl when people asked if I had a middle name. I said no, and they asked, "Oh, could you not afford one?" After that, I learned to say it first, "I don't have a middle name, couldn't afford one", insulting myself before others could. Taking the power of explaining my name before it could be used against me.
I think of my grandfather, a Greek immigrant who fought for coal miners and steel workers. I think of my Black grandmother, who left South Carolina at 12, made her way to Philadelphia, supported herself as a washer girl. I'm almost embarrassed that micro-aggressions and discomfort would bother me at all, given what they endured.
But maybe that's the point. Maybe I shouldn't be embarrassed. Maybe the question isn't whether I'm too arrogant or need to embrace "beginner's mind." Maybe the question is: Why hasn't the university designed space for me? for us? For women who have lived full professional lives and return with knowledge, scars, and stories to tell? For Black women who have navigated worlds not built for them and still achieved? For bodies that don't fit the imagined default student identity?
And maybe you are asking me, If everything was so great before, why am I here? And I am not sure anymore. But if you had asked me a few months ago I would say because education should be lifelong. Because I have more to learn and more to give. Because I love textiles and wanted to learn as much as I could about them. Because I believed there would be room for me. But I should have known there wouldn't be.
Before I knew about intersectionality.