Miona Short – Peaches: Dear Professor [Video]

By Button Poetry

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Miona Short, performing at Rustbelt 2018 in Detroit, MI.

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Transcript provided by YouTube (unedited)

0:04
– Dear Professor… White,
0:08
you could have saved your “I don’t see color.”
0:12
You could have saved your
0:14
“I could relate to the Civil Rights Movement.”
0:17
I just wanted to know,
0:19
what is the potential well in quantum mechanics?
0:23
You actually just could’ve given me an answer.
0:27
The potential well in quantum mechanics
0:29
is just a state of minimum potential energy.
0:33
Instead, the potential well
0:35
was a place I still left your office drowning in.
0:39
Dear Professor Helpful,
0:42
when I told you that I could not find a tutor
0:45
or other students to study with,
0:47
you told me that sometimes I’ll just be given a textbook
0:50
and expected to learn it,
0:52
that nobody was going to hold my hand,
0:55
and somehow, I know you don’t believe that,
0:58
considering how you and all your collaborators
1:01
have the whole universe as a textbook,
1:04
and nobody jacks that funding
1:06
when you’ve been working on the same question for decades.
1:10
(audience claps)
1:11
But, for you, it’s community. For me, it’s a handout.
1:16
Dear Professor, when you failed me that semester,
1:21
I was okay.
1:23
Until I met the boy who told me he told you
1:27
that he didn’t know the exam was that day,
1:29
so you allowed him to take it days later,
1:33
and that taught me everything I needed to know about power.
1:37
How credibility is money in this field,
1:40
and I’m walking around with some wrong currency.
1:44
(audience exclaims)
1:47
I walk to your office, a quantum conundrum of four women,
1:51
wondering who you will see me as today.
1:54
You open the door and I collapse into an Aunt Sarah,
1:58
silent, back, bombarded by all your racial musings.
2:02
You open the door and I collapse into a saffron, yeah.
2:05
You were openly wondering about my two worlds.
2:08
How am I really from Chicago or, uh, “the suburbs?”
2:12
You open the door and I collapse into a sweet thing.
2:16
I wonder how many of your students
2:18
you ever emailed about a sex toy business?
2:22
Dear Professor,
2:25
(Miona Short sighs)
2:28
what really is it that I have left to lose?
2:32
(Miona Short claps)
2:34
This is all you wanted, anyway.
2:36
(audience exclaims)
2:37
For being the white man who attended black conferences.
2:40
Like you told me, I could just be a model physicist
2:44
my people could learn from, but like I told you,
2:47
I couldn’t ignore them being slaughtered in the street.
2:50
Dear Professor Condescending Asshole,
2:53
what else do I have to lose?
2:55
I already spent three years hiding from you.
2:58
Attending no talks, not walking on your floor.
3:01
I became a ghost in this department.
3:05
And now,
3:07
your silence.
3:09
My last time seeing you taught me everything
3:11
I needed to know about the potential well.
3:13
Hanging by it.
3:15
(audience cheers)

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This post was previously published on YouTube.

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