One lucky graduate student at Pennsylvania State University will have the opportunity to help conduct “research” on microaggressions facing black girls under a professor who preaches “Supreme Love” to combat the “White Supremacist Patriarchy.”
According to an email obtained by MRCTV, Jeanine Staples, associate professor of Literacy and Language, African American Studies, and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, is looking for a doctoral student fill a one-year appointment for the “Intersectionality Project.”
The email claims the “research position” is available for a student interested in “race and gender research, identity formation, and trauma theories.”
In the position, the student will “support efforts to secure external grant writing, manage the guest editorial process for two peer-reviewed journals, support logistics and data reviews for a pilot project in relation to microaggressions among black girls and women, and conduct literature reviews and chapter edits for a book project.”
Although the point of the Intersectionality Project is to presumably support intersectionality—the idea that multiple identities can be affected by a particular issue—the primary research part of the the research position is solely focused on microaggressions that only impact black women and black girls.
Despite the assistantship’s narrow focus, Staples has allegedly based her academic career on emphasizing intersectionality.
Staples’ “Courses On Intersectional Identities Studies” pamphlet claims her courses “focus on readings that privilege intersectionality.”
The pamphlet states Staples her taught classes such as “Identities, Power and Perceptual Pedagogies in Teaching and Learning” and “Endarkened Feminist Epistemologies and Ontologies: Exploring Race and Gender Consciousness Through NLS.”
In the “Endarkened Feminist Epistemologies and Ontologies: Exploring Race and Gender Consciousness Through NLS,” students are required to read Staples’ book, “The Revelations of Asher: Towards Supreme Love in Self.” The book allegedly “explores Black women’s terror in love.”
The book is based on Staples’ idea of “Supreme Love,” a “Supreme Lover Identity” and its “integral connection to social and emotional justice for and through Black women’s wisdom.”
Staples notes, in her courses:
We learn specifically about Supreme Love in these and other courses. This ontological concept combats White Supremacist Patriarchal (WSP) ideology and enactments by providing a way to think, feel, and behave radically differently from its prescriptions. Supreme Love was derived from endarkened feminist epistemology and bears the capacity to assist in the healing of terrors in the soul and body (brought on by WSP) and in so doing, heal the world.
“Supreme Love” appears to be just a fancy way of saying people should love themselves for who they are. A “Supreme Lover Identity,” however, is a “way of being” that replaces certain “REALITIES” of being a “Main Chick, Side Chick, Bonnie, Bitch, and Victim.”
According to Staples, “Supreme Love” can save people from “the spiritual, psychological, emotional, and physical t/Terrors associated with white supremacist patriarchies” by “sta[ving] off figurative deaths.”
Staples says her “future courses will continue to bear intersectionality underpinnings and advance knowledge and practice of interpretivist, analytic frameowkrs and constructivist pedagological frames to support the work of emotional and social justice for all.”
Staples did not respond to MRCTV’s request for comment about the Intersectionality Project.