Dean’s Grant for Student Research (AY24-25)

#TestimonyThisWednesday

Today, I write this with tears in my eyes, joy in my chest, and ancestors at my back. In Helsinki! How did a girl from Southside Jamaica Queens go from London one month to Helsinki ?! God! This is a lonnnnnnng post. Those who want to and need to will read it <3. Thank you in advance.

A little over a month ago, I stood before a room of thinkers, educators, and visionaries to present my work on Radical Presence and Black Feminist Epistemologies,a deeply embodied offering born from a lifetime of navigating the margins, making meaning from pain, and refusing to separate scholarship from soul. Spiritual from the material and I got to do so with some sister friends. Black women from different areas of life, elevating them in that moment to an audience that both sides never thought about being in front of.

And today, I received official confirmation that I’ve been awarded the Dean’s Grant for Student Research at Teachers College, Columbia University for my project: “Knowledge from the Margins: Philosophy, Resistance, and the Education of Black Women Intellectuals.”

Y’all. They funded Black feminist philosophy. They funded resistance. They funded embodied truth. They funded me. IN A TIME like this. Existing and living in the spaces I've been have been relentlessly disembodied. At a time when universities like Columbia University, are retreating from their commitments to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion and when DEI statements are being removed, when protestors are being silenced, when radical thought is being criminalized. My body has been freezing left and right. This award means more than words can hold. It is not just funding; it is institutional witnessing. It is a divine affirmation. It is a reminder that even in the midst of backlash, erasure, and exhaustion, our knowledge matters.

It is a balm for all the personal fire I have been forged in the last few years. I’ve spent the last year balancing motherhood, full-time teaching, doctoral coursework, grief, and leadership. I’ve been writing through heartbreak, studying through fatigue, and building a future rooted in ancestral wisdom. I’ve had to fight to be heard, to be seen, to be supported and not just in the academy, but in this life. So many voices. So may narratives. Silencing it all to hear what's truly mine as ordained by God. This win isn’t about prestige. It’s about presence. Radical, unapologetic, Black woman presence. I know in my hearts of heart, that I'm not bragging, I am providing a model outside of the binaries.

And you know what maybe I am bragging because a Southside Jamaica Queens girl keep racking up wins and losses the shape me for love and legacy. The project I proposed is not abstractmit is raw and real. It is embodied research. It is my life’s work. It’s the story of how Black women intellectuals like bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Patricia Hill Collins, June Jordan, and my own Grandma Babe, Aunt Toots, Aunt Mildred have always theorized from lived experience, from skin and scar, from love and labor. My work centers the epistemology of the everyday, the knowing that comes from mothering, from mourning, from making do, from making way. Because I wouldn't be here without the work of my foremothers. And I thank them for telling me to sit my ass down. In Helsinki. 🤣❤

To be awarded this grant during a time of institutional retraction feels cosmically aligned and very scary. It feels like a whispered reminder from the Divine that says, "Keep going and Keep building, I'll provide. Keep trusting that the path you’re carving—though unconventional, though heavy, though tender—is leading somewhere revolutionary."

To my daughter, Sage Ali, a difficult, daring, dreaming and dynamic little Black girl, thank you for showing me freedom as a practice even when it's NOT convenient to my practice of mothering. 😩❤ This is for you.(and yes I will let you read this and ask 30 questions.)

To Victor: I carry you with every page I write. I can't believe you are an Ancestor. It is a never before felt shock of my life the more I think about it.

And to every Black girl who was told she was “too much” to be scholarly, too spiritual to be rigorous, too loud to be listened to, too opinionated: we are the blueprint. We are the future. We are the archive. Take it to the chin now and create and remember your own healing.

And to my community, my tribe, my spiritual circle: thank you for holding me. Thank you for believing in me. Thank you for reminding me that this work is not about accolades, it’s about liberation. Those of you who are no long a part of this story at present, God bless you and thank you for what was divinely scripted into my story, every lesson has blessed me, I hope you are always well and whole. Blessings upon blessings for you.

This is just the beginning.

The blessing is in the becoming.🙏🏾🧿💙