The Looks vs. The Look: On performance, perception and power optics

What is a Date?

Today is May 19th. And what a day it is.

The Look vs The Looks: Style as Survival, Philosophy as Presence

A hundred years since the birth of Malcolm X—my North Star in intellect, integrity, and insurgent grace. I’ve always been enamored with Malcolm. But of course I was. I was raised by Grandma Babe and Uncle Abdul, both rooted in truth-telling, resistance, and the kind of love that doesn’t flinch. His presence was always in the air I breathed.

Twelve years ago today, I became a Spelman woman. May 19, 2013—I graduated with pearls around my neck, prayers under my feet, and a calling I couldn’t yet name. But now that thang is SCREAMING! Now, on May 19, 2025, I stand as a first-year PhD student in Philosophy & Education at Columbia, having just received my Spring semester grades. (A+, A, A-, P—because yes, I’m brilliant and I play saxophone now, lol Eric has been so kind to tell me I am not terrible..) I was also invited to the University Club for a cocktail reception honoring Teachers College’s 2025 Convocation Medalists.

But what is a date, really? A date becomes a portal. A moment of convergence. A reckoning.

This year, I served on the Student Senate as a DEI committee member, and eventually, its Chair—abruptly, uncomfortably, and with little infrastructure to support the work. The position felt like a glass ceiling disguised as a platform. It wasn't fear I felt. It was frustration. The climate around DEI has shifted nationally, and it shows. Sometimes, these roles feel performative. Not rooted in transformation, but in optics. And I’ve never been one for pretending.

Still, I stayed. I showed up. Even when it was hard to see what difference showing up made.

Lately, I’ve been meditating on radical presence—on what it means to truly be somewhere without shrinking, without shape-shifting. I often hear Spelman's motto ringing in my ear: “Enter to Learn, Exit to Serve.” But what does service look like when your Black, woman body is always already seen as a service object? How do I serve without becoming a trope? A tool, a commodity? How far can I stretch away from these traps—and still remain in service?

So there I was. In the University Club of New York. A place I’d never been. Never even imagined myself inside. Ornate. Imperial. Draped in colonial aesthetics. A space historically reserved for white, male, Ivy-League elite. It was not made for me. It was made to keep me out. But I walked in anyway. In plaid pants and heels. With my softness and my scholarship. With my ancestors and my questions.

What is inclusion when I already belong to myself? What is radical presence when I’m not asking permission to exist? So again, I ask: What’s a date?

A date is a convergence of the past, present, and future. A date is a spiritual receipt.A date is a reckoning with the distance traveled and the cost of the journey.A date is a lineage, stamped in time. It is a quantum leap if we pay attention.

May 19th. Malcolm’s birth. My Spelman graduation. My becoming. My witness.I don’t just enter to learn. I enter to unlearn, at this point, unlearn what they taught us about belonging. And when I exit, when I serve,it will be on my own terms. In the tradition of my people. Because thats What We Do.

The Space: Elite Academic and Social Gatekeeping

“We grind from the bottom just to make it to the bottom , at the very bottom of the map.”

Founded in the 19th century, University Clubs were never just spaces for camaraderie or casual gatherings, they were architectures of power. Designed explicitly for wealthy, white, male alumni of elite institutions, most notably the Ivy League. These clubs became symbols of who belonged in the upper echelons of academic, political, and social life.

Membership wasn’t about leisure alone but it was about legitimacy. To be admitted into these spaces was to be deemed worthy, not just of fine dining and mahogany libraries, but of influence. These were rooms where publishing deals were whispered over cocktails, where faculty appointments were informally decided, and where intellectual ideas were shaped and circulated among a small, insulated few.

The University Club, like many institutions of its kind, is less a social club and more a curated ecosystem of privilege, one that has historically policed the boundaries of scholarship, leadership, and belonging. It quietly but forcefully established norms around who gets to be seen as a thinker, as a leader, as a bearer of culture and truth. It’s a living archive of exclusion, a place where the aesthetic of prestige masks the deep inequities of academic gatekeeping. It reminds us that in American intellectual life, space has always been political: some rooms were built to welcome, and others were designed to deny.

To enter such a space as a Black woman scholar, first-generation doctoral student, and descendant of those never meant to cross its threshold is not simply to be included. It is to disrupt the legacy of who has historically mattered in academia.Their architecture and membership policies were designed to reflect and protect a specific hierarchy of value: white, male, elite, Protestant, and educated. In many ways, these spaces served as gateways into the myth of meritocracy, all while shielding their members from the very diversity and democratic exchange that intellectual life is supposed to nurture.

Unmapped, Unnamed, Unforgotten: Gilded Rooms with Buried HERstories

But while these rooms were being gilded with imported wood and adorned with European oil paintings, Black women were entirely absent from the membership rolls—though not absent from the labor that sustained the spaces. At the very moment of these clubs’ founding, Black women were cooking in the kitchens, cleaning the floors, pressing linens, and performing the domestic and bodily care work that allowed these elite spaces to function seamlessly. Their hands upheld the club, even as their minds and voices were systematically excluded from its conversations. They were there, but never centered. Present but unacknowledged. Their labor invisible, their intellect disqualified by design. Even though during this time we had figures like Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and Anna Julia Cooper who were prominent leaders who challenged the status quo. 

Shapel, Katherine and Conner, we all served on Student Senate for TC for the 2024-2025 Academic School Year. Congrats Katherine on Graduation and Congrats Conner on TC Student Senate Presidency

The University Club sits less than two miles from what was once Seneca Village, a thriving 19th-century Black community forcibly destroyed to make way for what we now call Central Park. The proximity is not incidental. It is cartographic irony, a cruel geography that reminds us how Black presence has long been displaced to beautify white leisure. Seneca Village was a place of Black land ownership, churches, and schools, evidence of Black autonomy and self-determination in a nation still deeply invested in Black erasure. Its destruction was not just about land; it was about remapping the city to exclude the possibility of Black futurity. And now, in the shadow of that loss, the University Club rises like a marble monument to that very erasure: an institution built to affirm white intellectual dominance, occupying prime city ground while tracing none of the labor, lives, or legacy it rests upon.

To enter the University Club today, as a Black woman, is to navigate a geography thick with memory and rupture. My body walks through a grid mapped against me. And yet, in my presence,in the press of my heel against its colonial floors, I imagine I remake the map, if only for a moment. I become a geopolitical disturbance in the very coordinates designed to exclude me.

This is a refusal, a hustle, a daily decision to be whole in a system that fragments.

The Look vs The Looks

What I wore to the University Club was not about fitting in. It was not a performance of professionalism, nor an attempt to be mistaken for one of them. I could never be but it was ritual. Rebellion. Reclamation. My look, chic, intentional, tailored—was curated with ancestral precision. Not to assimilate, but to subvert. This was not about aesthetics alone; this was about epistemology.

As Black women, our self-presentation is never neutral. Audre Lorde reminds us that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” (Lorde, 1984), yet she also insists that our erotic, our creative, our embodied power can remake the world. My style in that room, my plaid trousers, my heeled sandals, the softness of my locs, frizzy and long against colonial architecture—was not decorative. It was a theory of presence. I wore my body as text. My look as citation. My silence as critique. There is a long-standing misreading of Black women’s beauty as frivolous, excessive, or self-indulgent. But as bell hooks writes in Sisters of the Yam (1993), self-care, especially through beauty and adornment, can be a site of healing and resistance for Black women living under the pressure of systemic violence. My outfit was not a costume, it was armor, archive, and affirmation. It was my way of telling the room: I am not here to be digested. I am here to disrupt. In the academy, where whiteness masquerades as objectivity and intellectual rigor is often stripped of soul, I refuse the binary between mind and body. I do not shed my style to enter the classroom or the club. Instead, I style myself into the archive, I am going to look good and not like smoke has touched me(as much as possible).

Architectural Whiteness and Colonial Design

Walking into the University Club is like stepping into a still-life of empire. Every inch of the space is designed to exude power. You have columns that echo Roman conquest, oil portraits of solemn white men in powdered wigs, mahogany wood carved with the restraint of European order. I mean y'all they have red, bloodstain velvet walls with gold gilded moldings...Be for real. Like right off Fifth Avenue! These aesthetic choices are not neutral, they are architectural inscriptions of whiteness, designed to affirm a narrow lineage of intellectual and cultural supremacy.

The interiors are grounded in neoclassical and empire-style aesthetics, architectural movements which emerged alongside and helped justify the rise of colonial expansion, racial capitalism, and the Enlightenment. Thinkers like Immanuel Kant, who wrote in Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798) that “humanity is at its greatest perfection in the race of the whites,” or David Hume, who famously claimed “I am apt to suspect the Negroes to be naturally inferior to the whites” (Of National Characters, 1748). Even Voltaire, often cited as a champion of reason, supported the transatlantic slave trade through his financial investments in the Compagnie des Indes. These Enlightenment figures—whose busts may very well adorn the shelves of such clubs—crafted visions of man, reason, and progress that excluded Blackness at the level of ontology itself. Somebody call Sylvia Wynter and Hortense Spillers and Denise Ferreira da Silva !

Thus, the space becomes more than aesthetically white, it is epistemologically white, upholding an intellectual canon designed to erase, distort, or discredit anything outside its frame. It tells you who deserves to be remembered, who is presumed rational, and who is worthy of portraiture. It is a built environment that disciplines the body before a single word is spoken. To walk into such a space as a Black woman philosopher is to feel your body out-of-place by design. It is to bring into relief the dissonance between a canon that has historically denied your capacity to think and a present in which your very thinking threatens the foundations of that denial.

This is where the Black Aesthetic stands in direct tension.

The Black Aesthetic, defined by scholars such as Addison Gayle Jr. and Toni Morrison just to name two, refuses the disembodied, universalist pretensions of the white Enlightenment gaze. It affirms soul, community, improvisation, rhythm, flesh, and memory. It emerges not from marble but from movement—not from fixed busts but from fluid breath and improvisational brilliance. As Morrison (1992) writes in Playing in the Dark, whiteness has required Blackness as a foil for its own coherence. The Black Aesthetic rejects this hierarchy. It tells us: you were always thinking. You were always theorizing. They just refused to listen.

And so, to be a Black woman philosopher inside the University Club, inside a building constructed to exclude your body, your thought, and your very historical possibility, is to engage in a profound act of insurgency. It is not simply to “occupy” space. It is to recode it.

To reimagine what thought looks like, who gets to feel at ease while thinking, and which bodies are allowed to carry theory without explanation or apology. My body—Black, female, first-generation, spiritual, Spelman-polished—is not merely present. It is disruptive architecture. It bends the grid. My speech, my style, my saunter are not outside the canon, they are a new canon in motion. Maybe?

To step into the University Club is to enter a mausoleum of dead philosophers who once argued my people were not fully human. But to do so in a classic Black and White-inspired fit, fresh from writing a paper titled Speech is the Ceremony, is to remind the room:I am thinking. I am theory. I am alive. And Hey Babes, I am here!

That’s What We Do

To be seen in a place that was never meant for your reflection is not merely about presence; it’s about practice. A daily, deliberate, often exhausting practice of walking into the room, into the role, into the ritual, knowing it was designed without you in mind—and choosing to bring all of you anyway. That is what I did in the University Club. That is what Black women have always done. That is what we do.

Like Freeway, Beanie, and Jay, I know the rooms we enter often mistake our necessity for danger. The hustle may not look the same, but the stakes are still high. In the song, the hustle is life or death. In the academy, the hustle is belonging without erasure, thinking without fragmentation, surviving without submission.

This essay, this moment, this movement between the look I wore and the looks I received, between colonial architecture and Black futurity, between theory and body, between Malcolm’s birth and my own becoming, this is what it means to serve on your own terms.

Because in rooms like these, what we do is more than show up.We disrupt. We descend. We define and still, we look good doing it.