Where She Entered:
Remembering Dr. Aaronette White and Doing the Work of Feminism
by Stephanie Troutman | special to NewBlackMan (in Exile)
It was with great disbelief, followed by sadness that I encountered the news of the untimely passing of scholar and activist, Dr. Aaronette White. Her scholarship focusing on feminism, critical psychology of race, trauma, and masculinity(ies) is her legacy to the academic community.
Upon entering The Pennsylvania State University in Fall 2006, I registered for Dr. White’s WMNST 501: Feminist Pedagogy and Research course. While I was impressed with her audacious brilliance, I cannot say that the road with Dr. White was an easy one. When I reflect upon my time spent in her graduate seminars, I think of the many challenges, gauntlets, and outright confrontations encountered in that space. However, older now—and hopefully wiser—I now recognize the deeper issues that drove Aaronette’s (as she insisted on being called by her students) passion and commitment to feminism and social justice. Myself, now struggling to make a life in the academy as what some consider to an ‘outspoken Black woman’, I look back on the times I spent with Aaronette with compassion, empathy and a greater sense of appreciation for all that she was striving to do with her feminism, her scholarship and her pedagogical practice.
Hers was what we might characterize as a ‘tough love’ approach to the realities of navigating the terrain of often hostile, institutional environments. However, in spite of departmental drama (as she held multiple appointments and line structures) she was steadfast in producing critical, groundbreaking work. She remained committed to activism. She shared boldly, generously—and controversially, from her own personal experiences, demonstrating that the personal is indeed political. She made it clear early in the course (a 6-person graduate seminar) that she was a stickler for timeliness and deadlines: no exceptions. She openly spoke of her decision not to have children, and of her unwillingness to change the rules for those who did. At the time, as a single-parent graduate student and mother of two—a toddler and a newborn—I experienced this information as an affront to my own choice of motherhood.
In spite of this, she went on to professionalize me in other ways, proving that feminism is not about being all things to all people, but that Black female scholars can support each other with other resources. Recognizing the dearth of Black female graduate students in the Women’s Studies program at Penn State, she helped me prepare materials for application to the Dual Doctoral program. She spent time showing me how to do more efficient research on areas that interested me. In fact, the research skills she helped me to cultivate lead to a successful final paper in her class, which would later become the basis and material of my first peer-reviewed journal publication. Dr. White also made recommendations for coursework with other professors who became instrumental in my development as a feminist scholar.
Dr. Aaronette White’s work was always stellar and her uncompromising nature, I now understand to be the culmination of the treatment Black women are too often subject to when we dare to talk back and refuse to retreat. In reminiscing with a few from my Penn State cohort who were in Dr. White’s class, upon the news of her death, I was reminded of how her model of difficulty met with varying degrees of classroom success: sometimes her methods, intended to encourage a healthy stretching of boundaries, left those boundaries shattered instead. She not only assigned the text Teaching to Transgress (bell hooks, 1994) but insisted upon transgressive behavior through praxis: a lifelong commitment to the interrogation of the psychological possibilities of feminism toward changing interpersonal relationships and social institutions. Intellectually excellent, her course curriculum was demanding, achieving both depth and breadth—leaving no stone unturned, no argument unexamined.
Dr. White’s research spanned the disciplines of Psychology, African-American Studies, and Women and Gender Studies. She was beyond well versed in each of these fields and their subfields. Her commitment to the publication of her book, Ain’t I A Feminist?, was her primary concern during the time I was student at Penn State. Published by SUNY Press in 2008, Ain’t I a Feminist?: African American men Speak Out on fatherhood, Friendship, Forgiveness, and Freedomis a one of a kind book that explores masculine identity work across a variety of sexual orientations through the lens of critical feminist psychology. Ambitious in scope, the book also queries and exposes the multiple social and interpersonal ways in which Black men understand and practice forms of feminism. While Dr. White published numerous articles across the fields of African-American Studies, Women’s Studies, and Psychology, Ain’t I a Feminist? is, definitively, her academic swan song. It is a contemporary classic with relevant ongoing implications for studies in Black masculinity and Gender and Feminist Studies.
I remember when the book was released; I pre-ordered it in spite of some of the difficult moments I’d had with Aaronette…why? Because of her scholarly acumen; because of my own commitment to finding solidarity on the other side of conflict and disagreement; because as a feminist scholar I was beginning to understand that when she had spoken in class of the challenges associated with securing a book contract, it was for my future benefit- so I would know what the road ahead might hold for me. I thought a lot about the tense moments in class; in retrospect I realize that Dr. White’s transparency about her own personal/professional (the line often blurred) struggles was her way of showing vulnerability. So much of her life at that time was dictated by institutional drama, the demands of going up for tenure, and finishing the book. Ultimately, Dr. White was unable to resolve issues at Penn State, and in 2008 she accepted a position at UC Santa Cruz.
On some days, like for most scholars, the professor-grind was clearly weighing on her and weighing her down. But at her best (which is how I prefer to remember her) she was an energetic, unyielding feminist scholar unlike any other I have met. She encouraged her students to “not wait to start speaking up and speaking out,” warning us that as women (and women of color) the academy is all too prepared to silence us as graduate students, then again while waiting for tenure, and again while waiting for the next promotion or for the move into administration, etc. She also acknowledged that fierce dedication to speaking one’s truth has consequences: that liberation comes with a price. I will never forget how she defined herself on her own terms. She shared once in class, that when one of her doctoral committee members asked her whether she intended to be an activist or a scholar, she boldly stated, “I didn’t know the two were mutually exclusive.” True to form, she remained dedicated achieving feminist praxis through her anti-rape, activist work on sexual violence against women and through her research and scholarship.
From what I can ascertain, Dr. Aaronette White shares one of her most significant and abiding truths with us in the in the conclusion of Ain’t I Feminist?, stating that “…a feminist is not just someone you are automatically; it is a type of person one must continuously become.”
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Stephanie Troutman is Assistant Professor of Women & Gender and African-American Studies at Berea College, Berea, KY.
