Becoming Professional

[Music]

[Applause]

it was a summer afternoon

in the late 90s when my cousin kiki

pulled up to our house

in her old school beige car

and when she parked her brakes screeched

so loudly

that the whole neighborhood stopped and

in the back seat of her car

were my younger cousins jordan and

julius which meant

that we needed to put away everything in

our house that could potentially be

broken

but that wasn’t what i remembered on

that afternoon what i remember was the

music

the music and the lyrics that spewed

from kiki’s car

as she got out and she struggled to hold

her then two-year-old son

on her right hip she held a brand new

shiny cd

in her left hand kiki always introduced

us to music

it was like her thing whenever she would

come to our house she would bring new

music and

she would rearrange all of the furniture

in our living room

so that could she could teach us the

latest dance moves

and we would try to keep up with her me

and my sisters and whenever we couldn’t

we would just fall onto the floor and we

would laugh

and sometimes kiki would leave her music

behind which was good for me

because that meant that i could play her

music over and over again

and so when she got inside and got

settled and put her children down

she took the cd and she placed it in our

stereo system

and she said this is a new artist he

from new orleans

she looked for the volume button before

she increased it and said

they call him juvenile now this was

before the world had come to know

juvenile

for the party anthem that can change any

party at the drop of a dime before he

became known for his song

back that ass up and in true cousin form

big cousin form she had introduced us to

him

before the world had come to know him

for who he was

she even took us for a ride around

detroit city that day all around the

west side of detroit

windows down music up wind blowing in

our face

summer was in full effect and i love

that cd

so much that i didn’t wait for her to

accidentally leave it behind

actually asked if she could leave allow

me to borrow it

and she said yes and i played that album

over and over again especially over the

next few months while i was applying

to some of the top high schools in

detroit city and by the time i got to

high school

i continued playing music especially

while i did my homework assignments

especially jay-z and it was something

that really confused my mother and my

father because

they could never understand how i was

able to do both to play music

so loudly and to intently focus on my

homework assignments

my mother would tell her friends oh you

would think that she would get

distracted but the opposite was true

it was the familiarity of the music and

the lyrics that allowed me to solve

unfamiliar problems in my homework

assignments

and as i continued to venture throughout

my educational journey

as i would leave detroit and venture

into higher ed and in professional

spaces

it was my music that would anchor me it

was the familiarity in the songs

that would keep me close to home when i

was away from home

by the time i got to undergrad i quickly

became aware

of how my music and my identities didn’t

particularly

fit within the space of higher education

and professional spaces

professional development workshops

sessions and all these mandated events

slowly

turned me and molded me into someone

that i didn’t really recognize anymore

i remember one of my instructors in

particular during my senior year she

told us all me and my classmates

make sure that you clean up your

facebook make sure that there’s nothing

on your website or your pages that will

cause an employer

not to hire you for some people that

simply meant just

removing your pictures at parties or

playing beer pong but for me

that meant something a little deeper it

was a little different

that meant kind of visually

disassociating myself with anything that

connected me to my home in my urban

community

because as we were collecting or

thinking about where we wanted to do our

student teaching internships

detroit was at the bottom of the list

very few of my peers

wanted to do their student teaching in

detroit because though it wasn’t

explicitly stated the idea of detroit

was not particularly connected to

something that was safe

let alone professional and so

i did i deleted the images i deleted the

instances of anything that would

associate me with that community

and i can be honest i was lucky enough

to have tons of advisors and mentors

who constantly reminded me that because

of my identity and because of where i

grew up

that that positioned me in a very unique

way to connect to the students and the

communities where i wanted to teach

i’ll never forget my academic advisor

jennifer watson who constantly reminded

me

that i didn’t just have head knowledge

but because i lived it it was embodied

knowledge and it was in my heart and

that was something that i could carry

with me

throughout my educational journey still

those hidden messages about what it

meant to be professional continued to

war with the affirming words that i got

from lots of people in my corner

how vulnerable our first generation

college students and young professionals

who venture out into new worlds

for many of us becoming professional

means

going into unfamiliar places that do not

understand our languages that

do not understand our styles of dress

and not even the highly seasoned lunches

that we bring to our workspaces and it’s

true

i get it there does need to be training

and things about

preparing people to become professional

how else is a software engineer

is supposed to learn how to become a

software engineer without being trained

but it’s not training that i’m talking

about it’s not merely training

i’m talking about the values the belief

systems and the structures

that uphold professionalism that do not

take into account

multiple ways that people exist in the

world

and that is because i think in the

united states in particular

there are very westernized static

notions

of what it means to be competent of what

it means to be eligible

of what it means to show up as qualified

and so as i ventured into these more

professional spaces

the music the volume of my music lowered

and when we think about professionalism

it just isn’t professionalism in a sense

if we really think about it

it is an identity construct that is

steeped in whiteness

it is racialized it is gendered it is so

many other things

and unfortunately it does not take into

account the diverse ways of being

instead it marginalizes it

as i continued in my educational journey

and i moved to new york city to start my

masters

when people would ask me where i was

from actually replace detroit

with michigan i’d finally come to a

place where i was

at peace rather with feeling like my

identity as a nigerian and an

african-american was something that i

finally wrapped my head around

story for another day but still this

professional

tension was still continuing to war with

me

over and over again colleagues would

constantly ask me

how is it that you grew up in a city

where people get shot and robbed every

day but you’re so smart

you’re so different i even had one

colleague ask me or tell me rather

that she would have never guessed that i

was from detroit she considered it a

compliment

i didn’t when i really unpacked her

statement

what i found and really heard was this

whole idea that like

someone who came from a place like mine

should not have been

or how did you end up in an ivy league

institution

because people who frequent those spaces

only go to safe schools where

there’s a safe neighborhood with lots of

money and my background and my identity

didn’t particularly fit

within the walls of the cherry oaked

institution

and that was true for one of my classes

too i was in a masters writing course

with a world

renowned professor who was known

globally for the work that she done on

reading and writing

across the globe in classrooms all over

and she asked us to bring in an

assignment to bring in a sample of our

students writing and i could not wait

i already had my student picked out ali

i’d worked so closely with him on his

memoir

he had visited his family and i ran and

he really wanted to write about it

and i was equally excited to bring that

piece of writing

into my class that evening and once the

semester got to an end we got all of our

feedback

and i turned to the last page and i read

her feedback

and i would never forget one line that

stuck out to me

it doesn’t look like any quality and

professional teaching has taken place in

your classroom

professional the word jumped off to the

page

into my heart and even caused it to skip

a beat

i was baffled how is it that i was

trained

at one of the nations at the nation’s

top elementary education training

program yet my

question or yet she questioned the

quality and the professionalism of my

teaching

was it because he had written a too

short of a memoir

was it because he had written in two

languages was it because of his

misspelled words i couldn’t figure it

out

what should i have done differently

i decided not to email her or send the

email that i drafted to figure out why

she’d given me that feedback

instead i actually called my father

vented with him on the phone

and kind of moved on kinda sorta instead

i leaned on schools of thought

that took into account multilingual

racial ethnically and linguistically

diverse students identities

that allow students to bring all of that

to their writing

ones that are not necessarily steeped in

very eurocentric ways

of thinking about the teaching of

writing and that comforted me

once i finished my master’s program i

moved 1748 miles

to austin texas from harlem new york

unlike detroit unlike harlem

austin texas would be the least diverse

city that i’d ever

lived in not only was i living

in an unfamiliar city but i was also

in an unfamiliar world of academia with

ways of thoughts and ways of doing

things that were so

foreign and by the time i got to the

second year of my phd program

i crashed it happened so suddenly my

friend had come down to visit me

for winter break and in the middle of us

talking and laughing

one second we were laughing and the next

minute i bursted into tears

all of the years of trying to uphold

this professional identity and

trying to keep it all together and

trying to

be acclimated into this new world had

finally like weighed me down

it was heavy and there was nothing

explicitly that

told me that i needed to be different

while you know becoming a part of the

academic world

but it was the ways that i was learning

to think the ways that i was learning to

write

the ways that i was learning to

conceptualize ideas

that actually put a wedge between me and

the people and the communities that i

loved most

as we were being trained to write

articles and put them in top tier

journals and things of that nature all i

could think about was what about my

cousin kiki

she could never access this work because

she’s not connected to a university or

what about

ali the manuscript that we just sent off

will he ever see it

and so that got me thinking what does it

mean for me

to bring all of myself to the work that

i do

and i’m very lucky to have a lovely

dissertation chair dr allison skirt who

reminds me that i can and that i

should but looking back

i’m really happy that i had that

breakdown and i’m really happy that i

cried those tears

because it was those tears that brought

me back to the very thing that

always made me feel as though i was at

home

and that’s my music i rekindled my love

with music

i was still listening to music and my

taste for music had evolved over the

years

but i went back to the music that i

listened to as an adolescent while i was

in high school

it was the familiarity of those lyrics

that helped me while i was

immersed in this very unfamiliar world

going through these articles and reading

all these different types of ideas that

were new to me that were foreign to me

it was the familiarity that would keep

me grounded

and so as i’ve thought about how do i

bring

all of the parts of me to my new world

i’ve done it in two ways as i mentioned

my music but i’ve also done it through

images in particular

because as we know the professional

world and the idea of what it means to

be professional is very much

communicated through words and images

and so for me i started to ask myself

well as i do in my dissertation research

what does it mean to author and to

narrate ourselves in ways that feel

authentic to us

and i began to think about ways that i

can show up across digital spaces

across different spaces like linkedin or

twitter or

instagram which is one of my favorite

because it does privilege

images in a world that really much

relies on words

and i started asking myself how can i

show up not just as a professional but

as a human

and how can i use my image in different

things that people see to humanize

and to diversify what it means to be

professional

and it kind of saved me not all the way

but i’m getting there

and so it’s true the way that we think

about professionalism

needs to be reconceptualized it needs to

be redefined

and not just in terms of our

professional identities but our

professional

and racial identities our professional

and gender identities

professional and and and

and that’s a question that a lot of

organizations and institutions are going

to have to ask

what does it mean for us to create a

professional space an institution

so that people can feel like they can

bring the multiplicity

of their identities and yes there’s been

work

there’s been policies that have been

changed non-discriminatory policies that

have been changed over time

but we still have so much work ahead

what does it mean for

us to show up as ourselves as young

professionals as interns

across the spaces where we have autonomy

where we have control

so that we don’t feel like as we acquire

our education and as we acquire

these professional experiences that we

don’t have to shed

who we are that we can hold on to our

most authentic selves

and so i’m a few months away from adding

phd

after my name i’m a few months away of

becoming dr lakia omagan

and it’s so funny because as i sit at my

desk or wherever i am coffee shop

the music that i’m listening to is the

same music

that i listen to while i was younger it

keeps me grounded

it makes me feel at home and as i’m

typing and as i’m writing

and as i’m interviewing and as i’m

updating my cv an inch and going on

different talks i’m reminding myself

that me

all of me gets to and should deserve to

show up

in the totality of who i am no more

hiding

no more shedding this is me

[Music]

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