Mountain milestone: Henderson becomes first black woman to earn tenure at MC

Melanie Tucker| (melt@thedailytimes.com)

After moving to Maryville six years ago from St. Louis to teach political science, Dr. Frances Henderson has landed herself in the record books as the first African-American woman to receive tenure at Maryville College.

Henderson was awarded tenure recently at the college and it will take effect in August. College officials believe Dr. John Perry was probably the first African-American professor who received tenure at MC. He was hired in 1985 to teach in the college’s physical education/health/recreation department. He was tenured in 1989 and was promoted to associate professor in 1996. He retired in 2003. Currently, Henderson is the only African-American professor on the faculty. There are some on staff.

… Macc E-Money references Drake’s “Young East African Girl” lyric, presenting black beauty in a limited way and privileging East Africans over other Africans while passing it off as an appreciation of African beauty.

The lines between acceptance, fetishism and exoticism are blurry. It would seem that the primary distinction between black (North American) men, East African men and white men exoticizing East African Girls is that for many white men and even some East African men, the exoticism is firmly rooted in a belief in the racial categories—a belief that race is biological when it is in fact social, and a fetishization and romanticism of our Arab World ties and colonial past. For a lot of black men like Drake, it’s way less insidious. At best, it’s a misguided reinscription of the white standard of beauty through acceptably black women. At worst it’s intra-racial discrimination. Usually, it’s a combination of all these things but if representing, hyping and esteeming women with acceptable blackness is good for all girls—Trickle Down Acceptability, if you will— then we’d probably live in a post-racial world where fairies and dragons and Tupac populated the earth. Sadly, we live in a racist, sexist world where black men and white people can hurt black women in the same ways. Black women hurt black women, too, but differently: we don’t have each other’s back. Those that see themselves represented in the lyrics and the videos, accept it without questioning it. And those who lament the overrepresentation of East African Girls, frequently fail to realize that the “Young East African Girl(s)” of Drake’s lyrics are like all women of color; they are objectified and male-gazed upon in hip-hop. These women are mythic, “exotic” generalized by rappers as the ambASSadors of their ethnicity or nationality. We are an idea rooted in a scant and skewed example— a token— from Drake’s own lived experience, mixed in with a little bit of mainstream imagery and a history that isn’t even our own.