As Indigenous Oklahoman Joy Harjo writes, “in a sense, we never leave Oklahoma, or maybe it would be better said that Oklahoma never leaves us.” Even though I now attend college over 1,000 miles away, it doesn’t change this fact: Oklahoma is an intrinsic part of me and directly alters how I view the world.
My perspectives and assertions in the classroom are all shaped by this state. Often, I find myself turning to how I spent my summers in a sundown town or my grandfather’s stories as a sharecropper to back up my points in lectures about race dynamics in America. But in an academic world, this human perspective is often sidelined in favor of abstract fact and scientific theory, creating an environment where lived experiences are regarded as second-class when in fact they are everything.
Personal anecdotes, experiences and opinions do not make an argument weaker. In fact, they give them strength. Academia and universities like Brown pride themselves on evoking theory, jargon, and universal claims in academic inquiry. But what is a theory if not an explanation of what happens in our daily lives?
Knowledge does not have to be what academics call objective. Opinions and personal feelings also give meaning to history and the world around us, and without them, the theory we spout is nothing more than a distant abstract. Indigenous knowledge systems, for example, have relied for a millennium on stories and memory as legitimate epistemology.
When I encounter texts about racial dynamics in U.S. cities, I can’t help but carry with me the weight of the Tulsa Race Massacre, an event intrinsically tied to my position as a Black man living in the historic Greenwood neighborhood. When writing papers about the bureaucratic and legal state of tribal nations, I do so with the history of Indian removal and the stories of my Muscogee ancestors etched into my understanding, shaping how I read the present.
These are not simply historical or legal moments to be theorized and explained. Instead, they are inherent to my being and the place that shaped me. Without this human contextualization, it is impossible to truly understand the phenomena we are taught in class. This personal grounding doesn’t detract from learning. It deepens and enriches it.
And while this may seem to be a problem for academia alone, as we have been shown from the last few weeks, higher education and the current political climate are inextricably linked. Brown and every other university in this country discuss issues of gender, race, climate and more that are playing out in people’s lives — not just in the classroom. To have genuine conversations about these issues, we must consider personal narratives.
As Trumpism and far-right ideology begin to take hold in the American political machine and anti-intellectualism starts to rise, championing personal stories and narratives offers a compelling alternative that may appeal to a national population more skeptical of higher education institutions and the work they produce. In an emerging reality where Americans don’t believe in institutionalized forms of knowledge, personal narrative as political testimony is a more effective communication method.
Christian Davis ’27 can be reached at christian_davis@brown.edu. Please send responses to this column to letters@browndailyherald.com and other columns to opinions@browndailyherald.com.
