From the Back of the Bus to the Front of the Classroom: My Thirty-Year Journey as a Black and Blind Professor

by J.W. Smith

After 30 years as a professor in the field of Communication Studies, Dr. Smith reminisces about some of his experiences and how his race and differently abled intersectionality have influenced documented encounters. As a black and totally blind individual, he muses about how this distinction has both colored and shed light on what might have been innocuous or unremarkable encounters otherwise. This narrative charts his journey from leaving for graduate school to his present position as a tenured professor at a Midwest institution of higher learning. The memoir is riveting because of its vulnerability, candid honesty, and fresh transparency, as well as its conversational tone and quality. It is simultaneously an easy read but one that can also cause reflection and soul-searching without much warning. While the challenges of race and differently-abled issues are documented (and sometimes painfully so), Dr. Smith ultimately concludes that for the most part, these unique foci resulted in more positive outcomes than negative ones. It seems that only in America, is this story possible and the ultimate success of this memoir is clearly due to a strong faith in God, consistent and contagious family support, and hard work and perseverance.

120 pages, Paperback

Published September 22, 2019

Reviews

[Nicole Eugene · Rating 5 out of 5]

Cornel West points out that being black in academia means a self-imposed life of marginality because of how it disconnects you from much of the African American experience while also exposing you to a world where there are few people who are Black. Add to this a life-long disability, and you can appreciate the unique bravery that Dr. jw Smith has demonstrated throughout his career as a Black faculty member who is blind. He delights in introducing students to the world of Black vernacular culture and to the world of communicating with people who have disabilities.

jw’s memoir recounts his time in academia in a form that reflects the constant upward motion of many African American biographies and memoirs and yet there are still many moments where he is clearly had moments where he was not the whistling pleasant faculty member so many people have come to expect. While I wrote “sadness” in my notes, it is not the right word to characterize his belated discovery that saying “yes” to the predominately white institution he belongs to currently and for the last 20 years also means that his daughters grew-up in a world where they are somewhat uncomfortable with the black culture he loves and teaches about in classes. As someone who received my PhD from this same institution, Ohio University, the insights into how the Communication department changed and evolved over the years is both charming and affirming. I also appreciate the effort they put into making sure faculty and graduate students had opportunities for substantial conversations where relationships could be seeded and nurtured. As a grad student who took jw’s classes and sat-in on other classes, I enjoyed hearing about the familiar stories in this new context of a book. Early on, I realized that you can, if you let yourself, actually hear him through the words written on the page. An insight into his world that stood out to me was the description of how his dissertation and this book both were penned by dictation which explains why it retains his oral patterns. Additionally, the memoir highlighted his commitment to service, which is an aspect of jw that was somewhat out of view, from my perspective while I was a PhD student. The book walks us through JW’s embrace of service as an essential aspect of how he contributes to the many communities that he belongs to.