Quaderno

“Leopard Bearing Lion’s Order to Fellow Judges”, Folio 51 recto from a Kalila wa Dimna, Islamic Art

Medium: Ink and opaque watercolor on paper

The Alice and Nasli Heeramaneck Collection, Gift of Alice Heeramaneck, 1981 Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY

Paul Klee (Swiss, 1879-1930)

Crucifers and Spiral Flowers, 1925

Rupert Bunny (Australian, 1864-1947)

Hmmmmmkay.

First of all, I get that this is supposed to be an inflammatory message, but I also see from your blog that you’re 17, and I’m in my mid-thirties (and INTJ, if you’re curious). If you were hoping to start a fight, it’s not really a fair one. Perhaps if I was younger and had fewer dependents, one could consider this “profitable”, but considering that I’m not only multiply disabled myself, but that my partner became physically disabled and unable to work in 2014, and I also seem to have acquired an additional minor dependent last year, I’m not even keeping my head above water.

I don’t really talk about it since it is irrelevant, but I am currently living in poverty. Although the medievalpoc tumblr page has literally millions of hits, I do not choose to put ads here because I find it ethically distasteful, and instead have a Patreon page and a donation button, with the idea that those who can offer to support this content can help keep it available for those who cannot. It’s basically the same idea behind having a funding institution supporting academic work by an individual, except it’s all of you instead of a college or university. The money from the Patreon and donation allows me to do this, instead of getting a full-time academic job which wouldn’t leave me with the time or ability to continue MPoC, because food, electricity, and internet costs money but a full time academic job costs time and energy. All of it that I currently have, for sure.

As for “how” one creates something like MPoC, well, I’ve written several articles and answered many questions on exactly how to create and curate your own collection, and several people have in fact done so. Everyone has different perspectives and backgrounds, and that is something I consider an invaluable asset, not a detriment, to educational endeavors.

I mean, I suppose you could start at community college because you’ve been on your own due to personal circumstances since 16, and spend more than ten years working on and off as a retail cashier, doing janitorial work, biomedical janitorial, and industrial maintenance whilst managing to take intermittent classes part time, go through three interstate (1000+ mile) moves and college transfers while bleeding credits across the country. You could end up taking 18 credits of Honors Interdisciplinary History of Western Civilization as an undergrad because you qualify for that program despite being unable to afford it, going to full-time classes and 35 hours/week of menial work and still be faced with homelessness, take out massive loans just to be able to pay your rent and still end up having to move out of state again to avoid being on the street.

You could do all of this while treating and maintaining a laundry list of comorbid disabling conditions, and have one of your best memories be a visit to a massive museum, remembering the breathtaking room full of Rubens instead of the physical problems that required carrying a pillow around with you the whole time to sit and rest every 15 minutes.

You could end up with a a degree and a drawer full of academic medals, now that you’ve finally gotten close to where you wanted to be, where you worked so hard you almost killed yourself to be, sick with the realization that if you’re to progress to your ultimate goal, you will be expected; no, required, to perpetuate the same racism, ableism, classism, sexism, and violence that you’ve been fighting so hard against since you began your journey. You might realize you’ve been told so many times that you don’t exist by people in authority, you’re trying to remember when you started to agree. To figure out when you became a theoretical idea to yourself. That if you want to squeeze through that last door into the ivory tower, you have to leave everything you are, and everything you came from behind because who you are is Outside, and you want In.

You might suddenly understand that all of the things you wanted so badly, that you had been conditioned to value so highly you’d do anything to achieve them, were really the same tools of violence that had made it so unnecessarily difficult, nearly impossible, to get ahead, or merely break even. That no matter what you achieved, and hoo boy, was it a lot, you’d never escape the onus of being one of Those People, the ones that “we should do something about”, the ones We (in the room) talk about when They (the ones outside it) can’t hear us. You can either buy into this system and support it in order to justify your hard work, or you can face your truth and do what you think is right, no matter what.

So instead, you might make a diagonal move, become staff instead of faculty, because too many of the latter view students as obstacles to learning, as adversaries to be overcome with intimidation and bluster. Because the entire system of what is learned, what is required, and who decides these things is beyond corrupt, and maybe this is a better way to actually help people with the skills you’ve acquired. Spend a few years fighting, working, and advocating for students in the Disability Services Office, the larger part of which involves creating accessible files of entire undergraduate curricula, including textbooks by the dozen, for disabled students just trying to get where they want to go.

Watch every single history professor skip the same chapters of World History, US History, six weeks on WW2, the entirety of pre-colonial everything “cut for time”, every time. The same cropped paintings of white men; women and people of color omitted from books, handouts, PowerPoints, and lecture notes. Anything non-European is disposable, and anything European and non-white is “irrelevant” and “anomalous”. No one takes the history classes that aren’t required, so they stop being offered. Skip the same two chapters of “Meanwhile, in Not-Europe” every semester. “Don’t bother processing those chapters, we won’t be needing them. We’re not covering that this year.”

From this position, continue the activist work and public speaking you’ve been doing since you were a student, since before you were a student. Take the opportunities to speak at educational seminars for professors, only five of which show up, because it’s not “required” by that college’s inclusion/accessibility policy.

Burn out from being surrounded by people who seem to hate the students they’re supposed to be helping. Watch the people you supervise in your department get let go one by one, two semesters of no new work-studies to hand-scan the books so you’re doing it yourself, page by page, hour after hour, trying to keep up with the workload. Email professors who think sending in a 500-page textbook for processing the day before the midterm is “ADA compliance”.

Get invited into someone’s office to be told that your department is “unnecessary”, according to the new college President. Much less necessary than the new stadium. You’re being laid off. Be told this a month before your partner of five years is going under for spinal surgery, which you don’t know will turn out to be permanently disabling.

Go home. Open your computer, go to the space where for the past year and a half you’ve been sharing and agitating on behalf of everything these professors keep leaving out of their classes. The skipped textbook chapters. The uncropped images. Bringing the marginal back to the center and shouting from the rooftops, hoping that someone will hear, that anyone will care. Making connections directly to those affected by this whitewashed history, making connections with critical theory and SFF and popular culture, with media and its crimes, its endless white spaces.

Think: you’re more than qualified for a similar position at another institution…if they weren’t mostly on hiring freezes. Think: You could always work for…Pearson. Fucking Pearson. Think: you could try and get funding for this research from an institution, apply for grants…which would then control the content, restrict access, charge $50-90 to rent a digital copy of a chapbook for 48 hours, control what you can and cannot say about what you find. Kiss your free time and energy to fight back goodbye, and see if you can find someone to take care of your partner for you while you search for and make a good impression at a new job helping half truths find unwilling ears.

Think: Or. You could keep this in the hands of those who need it, and who it belongs to, really. What if the people who love this content, who use it to enhance their classrooms and curricula, who show these works to their families, who create stories and lectures and media in a new way for a different audience with this information…what if they could also fund it? What if those who could support it financially could also keep it accessible for those who don’t have the means? And what if this plan might allow you time to take care of your bedridden partner while buying time to figure out what to do?

All in all though, I don’t recommend this path, but it was the one I took. It’s much less headache and much more “profitable” to start a page full of photos of kittens and cover it in ads. For one thing, you don’t really get many messages like the one you’ve sent me, and for another, it’s unlikely you’ll endure truly bizarre smear campaigns or having to make four separate police reports for stalking and harassment.

That being said, I know many people who expect that I should be marketing this concept, or doing more with it, or writing a book, or in general expanding this into something… more “profitable”. But at this time and in this position, I don’t have the means, I lack certain abilities, and I don’t know the “right people”. My mother’s been pushing at me about “the book” for quite a while (since she’s probably reading this, I’ll just try saying “soon? I hope?”) but it’s hard enough to create this much content across four sites, and be this disabled, and meet my personal obligations, AND write a book, AND survive when it’s this much of a struggle.