Cameron’s first chapter in The Artist’s Way frames creative identity as a matter of safety. Do we feel safe to be creative?
It sounds like a simple question. But many of us are afraid to claim our creative identity, perhaps without even realizing it. If that is true, then the first step toward claiming our inner artist is confronting the fear that keeps us from doing so.
The academic version of that fear, however, is not what you’d expect.
Academics are not afraid of writing badly.
We are trained to produce work that can survive hostile peer review, and we do so effectively, year after year. What we are more afraid of is being caught claiming something we have not yet been qualified to claim, to be deemed an imposter rather than the so-called expert everyone believes us to be.
And yet, there is another question underneath that one, which I spent the entire week thinking about:
What does it mean to be safe as a Black man in the academy?
Not safe from criticism or rebuke.
Safe enough to create from the place where so much art begins—from the heart. Safe enough to laugh at the joys and sorrows of being beautifully Black in a country that has so often hated Blackness, and to testify to the love that endures within that contradiction.
To sing of the blues, and do it all with a smile.
That was the question I carried into my first week of daily journaling.
And by Friday, I found myself answering a very different one.
From the Pages
Week one of daily journaling produced almost nothing I expected.
I thought I would write about time management and work productivity, or perhaps reflect on the perennial academic delusion that a course release will fix everything, and then conclude with a smile that my systems were working.
Instead, twice in five days, I wrote about not finishing projects I had started. Articles abandoned. Practices dropped. Both times, I used the same word: shame.
And then on Friday, around midnight, I finally understood what the shame was actually about.
I have spent a decade writing about race through a critical lens as a legal scholar. I have testified before a state legislature against a bill designed to suppress critical race theory and the study of Black history.
And yet, I have never once called myself a critical race theorist.
I don’t have a good reason.
Instead, I have an accommodation.
Cameron’s first chapter is about recovering a sense of safety. And the precocious part of me naively assumed that meant reparenting the wounded childhood ego and making it safe enough to write badly again.
But it turns out my safety problem is much older and far more nuanced than that.
I somehow made it safe to do the work of the critical race theorist without ever directly claiming it as an identity for myself.
I read Audre Lorde’s essay four days later, and she helped me understand why.
The Shelf
A self-described “Black, lesbian, feminist, socialist, mother, warrior, and poet,” Audre Lorde does not treat poetry as a hobby, or as decoration to adorn serious work.
She locates it as the place where experience is felt before it is named, where what we do not yet have words to describe becomes legible to ourselves and eventually available for intellectual exchange. That is also a claim about how knowledge is made.
Feeling comes before knowing.
Therefore, any account of how knowledge is produced that ignores how it emerges in the body has skipped the very beginning.
That is a hard thing for a scholar to hear.
Our training typically runs the other way. We are taught that rigorous data collection precedes heartfelt expression, that feeling is what you strip out in revision and editing to make the argument clean and defensible.
Reading Audre Lorde against my own journal entries, I started to consider that the stripping out is not a step in the creative process.
It is the injury.
Because there are two different questions a scholar can be asked, and we tend to collapse them into one.
The first is whether the work is any good, whether it holds up against the evidence, or whether the argument will survive contact with the critical reader who seemingly wants it to fail. That question is hard, but it is the one we are trained for, and it has a technical answer.
The second question is whether the work is legitimate.
Whether it belongs in the conversation at all. Whether the experience it draws upon counts as evidence or merely serves as an interesting anecdote. Whether the person who wrote it has any standing at all to have written it, to be a part of the dialogue in the first place.
You can write something excellent and feel entirely safe publishing it because it holds up to peer review. And yet, you can still not feel safe claiming the ideas buried within that work as your own position, claiming what the work says about who you are and what tradition you write from.
The first question is about the work.
The second is about you.
And only one of them can be answered by revision.
This is where Lorde’s essay becomes a critique of accommodation and not simply an argument about the value of poetry. To write scholarship that carries a bold idea while refusing to bear witness to the feelings where that idea came from can become a kind of lie told to the self. It produces work that is technically sound yet estranged from human experience.
I have produced that work.
And I have even been praised for it.
Lorde’s claim about what poetry is for clarifies the stakes of making that choice. The ideas that will actually shift our worldviews are unlikely to emerge in rooms that make no space for feeling, for poetry. Not simply because such rooms are often unwelcoming, but because that is not where meaningful ideas come from.
Poetry gives us access to something conventional scholarly method can too easily strip away: the felt urgency that makes an idea matter in the first place.
Perhaps this is why I keep wanting to say that poetry is the one few genuinely safe space available to the Black scholar. Not safe in the sense of comfort. Safe in the sense that it is the only room where nobody asks whether you have standing to be in it, where the second question, the legitimacy question, doesn’t check your freedom papers at the door.
But I also am not sure I fully believe that.
I believe it some mornings. Other mornings it sounds like something I made up to give this essay a neat ending.
Because the same week I was writing that revelation down, I also wrote that safety is the wrong thing to reach for. Both of those are in my journal, four days apart, in the same handwriting.
I have not reconciled them, and yet I notice that I want to. There is already a version of me reaching for the sentence that would make them fit neatly together and erase the tension.
I recognize that instinct.
It is the same one that kept me from saying “critical race theorist” out loud for ten years: the sense that a contradiction must be resolved before it can be admitted.
Instead of resolving that tension, I’m going to leave it sitting right there.
What I Can Say
What I can say is where Audre Lorde parts ways with Cameron.
Cameron’s censor is internal. It is a voice you inherited during childhood, and with enough permission and enough play, it can become quieter. And once it is quiet, you are safe to be an artist, I suppose.
But Lorde’s constraint does not work that way.
It is not a voice in your head. It is the very structure of the studio, and it does not care whether you have made peace with it or not.
You can silence every internal critic you have, and the second question will still be waiting for you when you finally submit the piece: Should I be here?
So if safety means the absence of that, I am not going to get there any time soon, and neither is any scholar who looks like me.
Derrick Bell said as much in his acclaimed book, the title of which he took from Jeremiah 8:20:
“The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved.”
We are not saved.
But we might be free.
Freedom is a different aim than safety, with a different set of demands. Free to feel on the page. Free to allow the joys and sorrows of the mundane to bleed into the argument instead of editing them out for the review.
Free to name where the ideas came from.
Free to be a Black scholar who challenges the dominant frame.
Free to interpret what our racialized experience has taught us about a capitalist, patriarchal society.
Free, finally, to say “critical race theorist” and mean me.
Becoming Full,
Note to Reader: Chapter Two of The Artist’s Way is about identity. In my syllabus, I’m reading it alongside Zora Neale Hurston’s “How It Feels to Be Colored Me.” See you on October 3rd.
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