In the fall of 2017, Maxine Waters, U.S. Representative for California’s 43rd congressional district, had an exchange with Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin at a House Committee on Financial Services hearing regarding letters sent to him during a Trump Administration hearing to which he did not respond.
When Mnuchin was given the floor to respond, he stated that he had in fact received the letters and continued to compliment Waters. As he strayed from the question, Waters responded: “Reclaiming my time, reclaiming my time.” Mnuchin asked the chairman to not be interrupted, and Waters stated, “What [the chairman] failed to tell was when you are on my time, I can reclaim it. He left that out, so I am reclaiming it. Please respond to the question…”
#ReclaimingMyTime went viral on Twitter and has become popular among teens and young adults. It has also been words of power embraced by women of color who, like Waters, are often misinterpreted and/or seen as inferior.
Lately, I have found myself exhausted – not due to the nature of my career, but rather the constant battle of learning how to say “no.” Several times a week, I will get demands regarding my time, not asks. I recently read Shonda Rhimes’ book Year of Yes: How to Dance it Out, Stand in the Sun and Be Your Own Person, which discusses her personal growth of embracing “yes” when she is most scared. While I admire Rhimes’ tenacity, I could only think, “What about the ‘no’s?’”
I am hopeful that I will write Years of No: How Latinas Can Protect Their Time on the Tenure Track that answers the question of how do Latinas say “no” in academia when there are so few of us.
Waters provides us a language to do so. I am #ReclaimingMyTime and saying “no” as a Latina academic for several reasons.
I am left to revisit the first piece I wrote for Diverse with statistics from the National Center for Education Statistics for 2015. Less than 1 percent of Chicana and Puerto Rican women attain a PhD. More startling, Hispanic women make up 1 percent or less of full-time professors in the U.S. When I wrote that I had yet to secure a tenure-track position, now that I have I am reminded about the complex realities of these statistics.
