Senior Gabrielle Powell on Why Anthropology Makes Her Question Everything
Jan. 29, 2018
As part of an ongoing series spotlighting our students, we spoke to senior and anthropology major Gabrielle Powell. At a December town hall meeting to discuss the latest draft of the Brooklyn College Strategic Plan 2018–2023, Powell was outspoken about the continued importance of departments such as Africana, Women and Gender, and Puerto Rican and Latino Studies. A third-generation Brooklyn College student—her mother and grandmother were English education majors, and her mother taught at the college—Powell is looking to improve the quality of education for people of color and people often considered “other,” and believes that the sharing of knowledge outside of conventional classrooms is a necessary part of a well-rounded education.
Q: What does an education outside of the conventional classroom look like to you?
GP: There are different ways for people to gain knowledge and they are perfectly valid in their own right. Oral history is important. Experience is important. For me, the most important thing has been trying to validate a person’s experiences. I don’t feel you need my standard or anyone else’s standards in order for you to know something, or have knowledge. One thing I’ve been doing is working with my community garden, the Imani Community Garden located in Crown Heights. I really love that space. The thing I’m looking forward to is developing a list of events around sharing what people already know about agriculture, or what they already know about healing, which they’ve learned through their own cultures, over their lifetimes. They should be able to just come in and learn something or contribute. They have stuff to say. It’s really important that we have a space that we can contribute our knowledge and be validated and that also we’re sharing it for free. Even be able to grow their own food and be able to support themselves to some degree and maybe supplement their income here and there—one community garden can’t feed everyone, it’s a small space, but it’s a beginning.
Q: You come from a family of educators, it seems a natural move to become one yourself.
GP: My original plan was to become an English teacher like my mom and my grandma . . . but from a lot of experiences I’ve had with my family who are in education—because most of my family are principals, or teachers, or professors, and I also have friends who go into the field—I’ve seen that there are a lot of things you have to do and teach that you might not agree with. . .when it comes to empowering black and brown students through their education so that they become adults of color with power in the world, I don’t see that in the main curricula. I became and am becoming more and more confident in my abilities, and using my voice because I’ve been exposed to, mostly through BLMI (Black and Latino Male Initiative), my own history, and learning where I come from, and learning about all these great things that people of color are doing outside of sports.
Q: How has anthropology played a role in your life and in imagining a future world?
GP: I was always a baby anthropologist. I was always a baby feminist, I was always thinking about how our experiences shape our world collectively and individually. And how people experience the world, live through the world. How does your body and presentation change your experiences, and I was already thinking about them, and thinking about culture, but I think the courses and the readings and the ways of asking questions, I gained a lot through the anthropology department. Who I really appreciate are some of the professors in that department; they’ve got some really great professors. What I’ve learned, read, and seen I’ve used outside of class. . . . Right now I am working on my senior thesis where I am looking at the exclusivity of public spaces, specifically our community garden, and gate-keeping—the ways that dominant cultures are performative in terms of diversity and inclusion, but in reality are committed to hegemonic power and exclusionary practices.
Anthropology has completely changed the kinds of questions I’m asking and how I’m critical of what I’m seeing and hearing and doing in the world. I think it’s helped me to grow as a person. It’s to a point that everything I see I say, “Who did this? Why did they do this? What were their experiences? What are they trying to tell me? There is so much going on the world right now, why is this relevant? Why did I say that? What am I doing? What does it mean?" Really breaking that down has helped me to be open to other kinds of people and their experiences. People of all different types of identities, and not in the Kumbayah let’s all hold hands, but really sitting down and saying, okay, what is my world view, and how can I expand it, and how can I give, and how can I make room at the table I’m sitting at, and make sure I’m inviting all the people I should be inviting. And asking, whose table is it?
Anthropology doesn’t get all the credit, though. My experience as a black queer woman in Brooklyn, and then going through this anthropology department and especially BLMI has produced an anti-capitalist feminist pan-African pro-black anthropologist. I’m really here to break down what has already been created, and create something new.
