This month, the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program at UF features excerpts from a 2020 interview with Dr. Christopher Busey, who at the time was a professor at the UF College of Education. Dr. Busey talks about his early life, his time as an undergrad and as a professor at UF. He was interviewed by Maria Espinoza [E] and Omar Sanchez [S]. Excerpt edited by Beth Grobman. For the full interview go to tinyurl.com/tinyurl.com/Iguana2215
S: So, can I ask you a little about your family and your family’s history?
B: My grandparents were born during the height of racial terror in the south. You’re talking lynchings. You’re talking racial violence, and that left an indelible mark on them and also influenced a lot of the conversations they had with us.
I come from a background where my grandfather did sharecropping work. He would go work on the white man’s farm in exchange for food, as well as a small payment. My grandparents were part of the migration north. This was to escape racial violence and racial terror, to escape lynching. So, my grandfather moved up to Rochester, the day after King was shot in [19]68. He said for him that was kind of like the turning point and it’s not so much that they were influenced by King’s speeches or his practices, as it was just a moment. A moment of crystallization where “Yeah, enough was enough,” with the racial violence and racial terror.
I don’t know my father so there’s not much to offer you there. I know that he was locked up at multiple points throughout my lifetime growing up, so I don’t have much of a relationship with him. My mother had me at nineteen and joined the military. She was stationed in Korea and Germany, so she left me in New York with my aunt and my grandparents.
S: Can you go more in depth about what it meant for you and your family for you to get into higher education?
B: I’m not sure it meant anything to me at the time other than “This is what I’m supposed to do: go to school, do well, go to college,” right? It wasn’t put out there that I had any other option. Thankfully I had always performed well in school. I’m the first in my family to graduate from college … this was the family’s expectation for any sort of uplift. My grandparents and my mom would say, “I don’t want you to struggle like I had to do.”
S: What organizations were you involved with as a student at UF?
B: I was involved in the Black Political Science Student Association. I was a founding board member of the Virgil Hawkins Pre-Law Society—I was a Pre-Law student, Poli-Sci major with a Mass Comm and Af-Am minor. A lot of the Pre-Law associations were like your white frat boy groups. The good old boy system, so it’s hard for people who look like me to break in. Myself and a multiracial group of individuals actually, Black, White, Latinx, Caribbean, Trinidadian—we founded the Virgil Hawkins Pre-Law Society to be more inclusive for students who didn’t fit into the good old boys’ system. So, it wasn’t even just about race, it was about class, it was about the type of work that you wanted to do. I was involved with the Minority Admissions Office. I received a financial scholarship to help pay for my tuition from them, in exchange for leading tours on campus.
S: What was the difference between how you learned about your community in primary school compared to college?
B: So I’m going to speak about my community in kind of a diasporic sense, in terms of Black folk who were in college. That’s where I started to engage more in the connections with Black folk across the diaspora. That’s when my connections with the Black Caribbean community became stronger. My godmother Alicia was Afro-Boricua so, I was aware of this but like learning that about that broader diasporic community came with college. [Before that], if it didn’t happen through the church or just through conversations in the neighborhood and stuff, it didn’t happen at all.
S: Why did you decide to pursue a Ph.D. after college?
B: So, I knew nothing about graduate school. Dr. Sharon Austin Wright — a full professor in political science — was really foundational in mentoring me throughout the latter half of my undergraduate career into graduate school. I had written a paper in her class on Black conservative’s ideals and she called me into her office to talk about the paper. She’s like, “Man you’re a good writer. You’re already thinking about some pretty complex stuff. I’m going to send you to a conference.” So, she sent me to a conference, a political science national conference, like the kind of [meetings] I go to now to disseminate my research.
She sent the student Black Political Science Association group up there. It was me and like four or five other students. She rented us a minivan on behalf of the university, and we go up to this conference and we have this transformative experience. Again, these are things that are all new to me and she started to talk to me about graduate school after I attended that conference. I was like, “Yo, what the heck is graduate school?” [Laughter] I literally had no idea. She’s like, “That’s where you’ll go get your Master’s degree.”
But man, as I was studying for the LSAT I freaked out. Twenty-one years old, about to graduate from UF, I tried to do everything possible to extend my stint at UF. ‘cause I just wasn’t ready for the world. And truthfully, man, who is at twenty-one, twenty-two years old?
So, I applied to a teaching position at Evans High School in Orlando; I moved there and started my Master’s degree in Education. I didn’t do it because I had a real interest in getting a Ph.D. in education, I did it because I wanted to be a better teacher to my students. Most of it was being paid for by the school district. So, I was like, “Man let me take advantage of this opportunity and get this Master’s degree while I’m teaching and I’ll have this teaching certification as well at the completion of my Master’s degree.” I started my Ph.D. at Columbia University in New York City in 2009 but when my wife lost her job—this was middle of that recession in Obama’s first year of the presidency—up in New York City we couldn’t afford that sixteen hundred dollars rent so I moved back to Florida and finished my Ph.D. at UCF.
S: How did you get into your research on Afro-Latinx [experiences]?
B: What cemented my current line of research was my experience teaching at Teachers College, Columbia. I was teaching full time in the Bronx [to a diverse group of students]. Even working in Orlando, a lot of my students were Afro-Dominican, Afro Boricua, and so that cemented everything for me. It was a wrap after teaching a significantly large number of students of Afro-Latinx heritage and seeing what they went through as well. Like having to navigate that ethnoracial dissonance of literally reading Black, right? Phenotypically but having the Latinx culture, the language, the food And so it positioned them in the margins in schools and I would talk to them. I’m thankful I had some sort of understanding of this, both from my upbringing as well as from my university education, to be able to say I’m observing a group of students being marginalized.
I’ll give you some concrete examples: My last couple years teaching, I was teaching at Stonewall Jackson Middle School. I hate the name of the school, obviously, Confederate general. This school was in southeast Orlando. The school is majority Latinx and my principal was like, “Yo Busey, you’re going to teach the eighth grade sheltered ESOL history classes,” and I had two sections, man. Nobody wanted to teach these kids! Nobody! Most of the students were from either Puerto Rico, DR, Colombia, Mexico, Honduras, and in my last year I had one kid from Vietnam and one girl from Iraq, so that was like [Laughter] an interesting mix, but man I had some Afro-Latinos students in those classes. They were literally like called kids “carbon, bono, cafre.” The language was overt, it was open, and it was racist, and they would consistently pick on the kids, nag on the kids.
This was eighth grade; you know middle schoolers are harsh, man. They’re harsher [Laughter] just because the developmental period they were going through, but man they would really make some racists comments to these kids that you could see was damaging. You know that racism was lived out every day and that especially really kind of did it for me in terms of I need to be dedicating my research towards it.
S: I feel like even now there’s not much talk about the Afro-Latinx experience or anything like that.
B: Yeah, yeah it is lacking, especially in education. We know very little about the Afro-Latinx experience in K-12 schools.
S: In your time here as a student and faculty member, have there been any pressing issues that directly impacted the minority community that you could think of? Whether it be at UF or the greater country?
B: Oh, the greater country? Where do we start [Laughter]? Again, when I was a student here man, it’s not to say these things weren’t happening, but we were just here at a different time. I’m not that old. We had cellphones but we didn’t have smartphones. We had the Motorola Razors or something [Laughter]. And so, the way that knowledge is now produced and disseminated, it just didn’t exist at the pace that it is now. I think one of the things that is facing our current group of students at UF in terms of race, it’s that the students here are left to process a lot of these things by themselves or in the smaller community.
So again, I’ll just reference, for example, when Donald Trump Jr. comes to campus, the Latinx students in my class were pissed! Rightfully so. I’m pissed and we’re dedicating class time to talk about it. Like a significant chunk of class time to talk about it, and when your white student colleagues are dismissive of your concerns—even your liberal white peers are dismissive of your concerns—and you don’t have the space to process that anger, to process those emotions and maybe in just thirty minutes just find a place to laugh with a friend. That stuff eats at you, man. It eats at you and I’m seeing it with our students when I sit down to talk with Black and Latinx undergraduate students.
They’re not only processing the daily microaggressions on campus, but they’re fed images and videos of Black death, of Latinx death, of dispossession, of removal, of displacement, on a daily basis. And so, processing that is harder to do, and when you don’t have the support systems on campus and you don’t have enough Black and Latinx faculty and staff to provide some sort of cushion for the students to fall on, it’s even unhealthier. This is what, at least from my view, I’m seeing impact our minoritized students at UF in terms of race. How do you process everything going on out here?
S: You said because there’s a lack of Black and Latinx professors, that students aren’t able to talk about these issues, but does that create a double duty for you and other Black and Latinx professors?
B: Oh yeah! So, there’s a phrase, they call it the color tax, right? [Laughter] That’s what they call it, whereas being a faculty or staff member of color you are always asked to do more and I always have to remind people, speaking for myself and the many Black and Latinx people that I’m close to, we don’t mind doing it. For many of us that’s what we’re here for. The issue becomes when the university fails to recognize this. When our department chairs and our deans fail to recognize the extra service we are asked to do. That might mean, you know, that for two years I don’t produce a million-dollar grant for the university because I’m consistently and constantly advising Black and Latinx students through the racial macro and microaggressions that they’re both seeing and experiencing. Universities fail to understand that and fully account for that time that we spend and that’s one of the ways in which we systemically get pushed out of the university.
S: What message could you give to future generation of minority students coming to UF?
B: My biggest piece of advice would be cultivate the community and space in your own when you see other Black and Latinx students. Set up the connection, exchange phone numbers. Don’t add on Facebook. Don’t add on Twitter or follow on Twitter. Literally exchange numbers and talk. Second piece of advice would be seek out the faculty and staff who could support you because a lot of the times for faculty and staff, if you’re not in our classes we just don’t know you’re here.