Interview with Ryann Garcia of @notsoivorytower

FEM Newmagazine’s Madilaine Venzon, Devika Shenoy, and Jhemari Quintana met up for an interview with Ryann Garcia, one of the creators of the social media activist account, @notsoivorytower. During the interview, Ryann discussed her background, the idea behind Not So Ivory Tower, and the importance of women of color in academia supporting one another.

Madilaine: Can you tell us about yourself? About your undergraduate career, where you got your master’s degree, and why you decided to come back to UCLA for law school.

Ryann: I was admitted [to UCLA] for the Fall of 2009, and I came straight out of high school. I knew I wanted to study religion since I was 14 or 15 — I just knew I wanted to be a professor, and I wanted to choose a job where I could be in school the longest, which was so naïve of me. I don’t come from a particularly religious background, but I took a world religions course in high school, and I remember being really interested in Hinduism and Buddhism. We watched the film “7 Years in Tibet,” and that’s when I learned about the Dalai Lama, and the Tibet situation, and I was like, “Whoa, this is a thing that exists? Actual genocide is happening in the world, right now?” So I came here [UCLA] knowing I wanted to do that. I double majored. Religious studies was my primary, and classical civilizations was my secondary.

My concentration was, I guess you could say, Asian religions. I did a lot of classes through the Asian Languages and Cultures Department, and then I ended up doing a senior honors thesis with someone in the department. I wrote about modern Tibetan self-immolation as political protest. My idea of studying religion was always from the view of studying social change. I never took sociology classes, but I guess, from that lens, I was looking at the political movements that were happening, the social movements that were happening. Senior year was a lot. I loved the research I did. My advisor was really harsh on the research I had done. I needed to be pushed. I needed to do the research. Once I did that, she was like, “You’re ready for grad school.”

I did end up going to Yale after my gap year. My concentration was Asian religions. I knew one other Latina student there — she’s actually my co-founder of Not So Ivory Tower, Barbara Sostaita. We met at orientation and kind of held each other down while we were there. That time was a very interesting time to be at Yale, because during the fall of 2014, the Ferguson protests were happening which hit me like a ton of bricks, being a graduate student, and going through this process of becoming “woke,” understanding and unlearning all of these toxic behaviors and things that I thought about myself, and things that I thought academia was and should be. There were times during that semester when I thought, “I’m going to fail out of my classes, I’m gonna fail.” That was so hard because the summer before moving to New Haven, I had so many nightmares, about showing up to class and them going like, “We made a mistake, you’re not supposed to be here,” or showing up without a pencil or paper, or showing up late to class. My imposter syndrome was off the rails during that time. As women of color who come from similar backgrounds, we’re always second-guessing ourselves. [The University is] where we really feel like we need to prove ourselves. I spoke to someone, and they mentioned how at the end of the two years I was no longer scared about speaking out in class. I officially became the “angry Brown girl” by the time I graduated.

I knew what I wanted to do, but that first semester was so heavy for me that I was starting to reconsider things. My advisor was the only one who taught Tibetan Buddhism at Yale, and he was what we think of as a “professor.” He was this privileged white man with all these years studying this one subject. He got to live in India for seven years because he had the privilege to do that. I would never have the privilege to do that. He was publishing and doing all these great things, and all the students loved him. And he ended up not getting tenure because someone in our department just didn’t like him. I had to watch that. “If he can’t do this, then, why can I? How can I?” It’s not that I thought I couldn’t do it. It was more like, should I do it? Should I put myself through this for that? Should I put myself through this for a seat at that table? It was really unsettling to move across the country, come to Yale, and be like: “I don’t know what I’m doing.”

During that time, I started to discover a lot of social media activism, and I was really intrigued by it. I didn’t want my own platform at that time, I really just listened to other people. I really learned to just listen to other people and be quiet when my voice just didn’t need to be out there. That was a big lesson in unlearning a lot of toxic behaviors. I was so motivated by all of these social movements that started happening, and that’s when the veil started lifting. I was like, “Oh my God, everything is racist! Everything is sexist!” You can’t ever look at anything the same way again.

The summer [between] those two years, I was able to get funding to study abroad. I ended up going to India, and I was in Dharamsala for about two months. I got to study with locals. They were not trained teachers. They were just Tibetans living in exile who needed money. It was really tough because they wouldn’t let me speak any English. It was a lot. I hate telling this story, because it sounds like such a cliché — “girl goes to India and finds herself” — but I really do think I learned so much about experiences that I was reading from academic texts all the time. It really brought my academia to life and made me feel so restricted and so comfortable in my ivory tower, just sitting there in these buildings with these portraits of white men staring down on me. You know, I can’t even eat lunch in peace without these white men staring down at me in the dining hall.

I was left with this: “What the hell am I doing? Why am I studying classical sutras? It’s not helping these people at all.” It’s not what my academia was ever about. It was never about the pursuit of taking other people’s information and putting it in a book. You cannot just extract someone’s whole experience and exploit it for yourself. And that’s what academia is. They asked, “Why aren’t you studying your own people? Why are you studying us?” And I was like, “I don’t know.” I didn’t have any answers to any of these questions. I just knew that I needed to do something more hands on.

When I was at Yale, I worked for two different families, babysitting the whole two years. One couple were immigrants, and they were both physics professors. The other couple were both Yale Law alumni. The mom in that couple was a professor at the law school, and the dad had a practice in the city. That summer I [told the mother that] “my dad wants me to go to law school, “Yeah, my dad wants me to go to law school. But I’ll never be a lawyer. I could never do that. I could never exploit people. I’m a good person.” She said, “You know there are other things you can do with a law degree, right?” And I was like, “What? I wish I could help immigrants, and I wish I could help the Tibetans, and I want to help the Natives!” She told me that she was an immigrant from Ireland. She was a big advocate for human rights. She told me to look into it and ask me questions. I think at this point I thought I wasn’t smart enough to go to law school. I had just gotten my degree from Yale? I graduated with honors and had gotten mostly straight A’s, and I was still second-guessing myself? All this work I did to unlearn these behaviors, and I still have [those feelings] now, in law school.

I think a few months before graduating, Barbie and I were sitting in the Div School cafeteria and we were just so sick of it all. She mentioned, “You know when we talked about having a social media platform for women of color?” I said, “Yeah.” And she said, “Do you want to do it?” And I said, “Okay.” And she said, “Okay, I was thinking Not So Ivory Tower.” And I said, “Yeah, that seems right. That definitely seems about right.” And in that moment, we made the Instagram, we made the Twitter, we made the Tumblr. We wondered what we wanted to post. Everything saved in my phone is from this life experience. So it just started like that. It’s so cool, because I could see the stats on that account, and we have followers in Canada, the UK. It’s obviously disproportionately women followers, but we still have the men there. We still have white women following us, but if they step out of line, we don’t deal with that. It’s really a space where we don’t have to educate people. I don’t want people to feel like they need to do that labor on the blog or on any of the posts, or anything like that. It’s community, and it’s about a space for us. I’m really open to other people viewing it, but being quiet. I had to go through that lesson of being quiet and listening and learning from other people, and I think other people should have that opportunity too. I really want people to connect, and we could all cry into our textbooks together and be miserable together, and laugh at our pain together. And that’s kind of what it’s about. It’s about this big network of all these women of color in academia.

People are connecting on social media. People will tell me, “Oh yeah, I send my stuff to my sister, or my best friend all the time.” And yes, this is what we wanted. Yes, we post ridiculous things all the time, and yes, I clown on white people all [the] time, but ... we like, need it? And it’s so fulfilling to hear people talk about it, and to hear [that] people were really affected by it. Barbie and I are so conflicted all the time because we actively expose how horrible academia is, but at the same time, we kinda agree on this view that you need to learn the colonizer’s language so you can learn to perfect it, so you can learn to outsmart them. You need it to take them down from the inside. And a lot of people don’t have that view – some are like, “Academia is BS, I don’t want to have anything to do with it. It’s elist. It’s classist.” And of course it is. But you need people like us to do heavy lifting to make way for bigger changes. There are people who totally do that work outside of academia. It’s really about learning this language and subverting it and repurposing and redistributing it. That’s what Barbie tells me all the time; you really gotta go in and subvert the white man’s language. Subvert their tools. Our platform is trying to redistribute these ideas of how we go through academia.

Devika: If you were to reflect on your experiences in higher education, what resources, support systems, and opportunities do you think you were provided as a woman of color, and how did those compare to what you saw being handed to white women or men in the field?

Ryann: I was so conflicted about this idea of affirmative action coming out of high school because everything I ever heard was, “Affirmative action is like reverse racism” – which doesn’t exist. I was so confused because my dad raised me with this whole ethic of “Work hard, work hard, work hard.” I work hard. I work hard, and I deserve to be here at UCLA. I’ve come a very, very long way.

At Yale, it was not so much about the institution reaching out to me and helping me — it was about the student groups and being involved in the student movements. Reaching out and being like: “You need to come be with us. What do you need?” It was that community. That was kind of the moment I realized I needed to seek out what I needed because the institutions don’t give a shit about people of color. They are not going to reach out to us and make sure we are getting what we need until we raise our voices and become angry. And they are like, “Woah, woah, woah. Calm down. You guys are protesting and getting crazy.” That is why there are so many student demands by students of color, and I think slowly we are making progress in the institution. I think [these] spaces do exist but they are not always visible to us. [Universities] admit students of color because they want to put us on their brochures, and they want to show the world how diverse they are. But when they get us here they do not want us to do anything else.

Jhemari: I think you actually touched on that earlier, when we were talking about learning the language of the colonizer. The theme for this FEM issue is life and death, so a question we want to ask you is: What is at stake for women of color attending grad school, attending an elite university institution, and learning the language of the colonizer in order to forward a better future for all of us?

Ryann: I have this attitude just walking around campus when I think about everything I have been through. I feel so grateful, and I feel that I am walking with so much on my shoulders, not a burden, but I feel so powerful now that I have reflected on so much in my life. Like where my ancestors came from, how could they even have ever imagined me being here? How could they have ever imagined me being in a place like this? These institutions were never made for us. We can acknowledge this now, but we are reminded constantly and it is very aggressive the way the universities do it. [In] every library and every building and even in the law school, there are pictures of white people staring down at you as you are studying in peace, and I feel the burden of this task, but I feel very powerful [knowing] that I am here.

I am constantly reminding myself to check myself, to remember that I am privileged to be here. I was raised with the idea of “Work hard, work hard, work hard,” and “You are in school because you work hard.” But no, I am here because I have the privilege and the opportunity to work hard and be here to decolonize the academy and institution, [breaking] down the ivory tower. This is hard work, but we were given a path led by our ancestors, and we get to do this sacred work of breaking down the institution. That’s something special I didn’t walk with when I was an undergrad, and now I do, and I remind myself that when I am crying over midterms. So many people need a break from academia, or decide never to come back, and I respect and get that, because everyone’s form of survival is different, and for me I think it is the work I need to be doing. I know it is something I have the ability to do, and it feels like an obligation for me — an obligation towards women who still can’t do it, who still can’t survive in academia and uphold their mental health, or who do not have the opportunity or privilege to work hard.

We are working for all these people, and as much as we are in the academic world, I think that people of color are constantly reminding themselves to be connected to the outside world. We are are working harder to bring this back to our communities in a way. I want to avoid the savior or condescending role that academic language brings, and I think there is ways we can transform what we take from the institution and bring it back to the community. How we become leaders, and learning when our voices are appropriate to be there and when not.

Devika: So, what are your favorite memes from your account?

Ryann: Oh my god. Right now I am really digging the Frodo memes. Barbie is good at pulling stuff from Twitter. I recently jumped on her account and I was like, “Wow, we follow so many amazing scholars and women of color.” [I read] their tweets and I want to repost all of them because they are amazing. So, I got more into the Twitter thing, but it is harder to keep up with the blogs. We would do “Women of Color in Academia Wednesdays” [posts], but we fell off the train with that just because it was kind of difficult. There are good Cardi B and Beyoncé memes that Barbie posts. She is really into the crying Kim Kardashian stuff and Kris Jenner ones. I like to poke fun and clown on white dudes a lot. The ones that are us crying through the pain are the most relatable, like struggling to wake up in the morning.

I feel like once people start me on these subjects I really cannot stop. I could really go forever and I have a lot of feelings about it. I feel like the work and the anger never ends, and we have to utilize our anger to do these types of things when we are constantly told to be respectful and polite since we are in academia. I was a different person back then. It takes a lot of struggle. A lot of tears and frustration, and I did not have a lot of close friends and I had to seek that out. I wish we did the blog when we were in school, but I needed the transformation. It really keeps me going and I love it.

INTERVIEW BY JHEMARI QUINTANA, MADILAINE VENZON, & DEVIKA SHENOY

PHOTOS BY MADDY PEASE & JOANNA ZHANG