I Don’t Need a Degree to Explain What I See, I Don’t Need a PhD to Validate Me

I don’t need another degree to explain what I see. I don’t need a PhD to validate who I am, what I know, what I’ve lived, or how I have led. I’ve spent years with a nagging feeling that I should always go back to school to prove myself because that is how power works in this country. It withholds legitimacy, then sells it back to us through institutions that were never built to value us fairly in the first place.

Education is supposed to be the “great equalizer.” Or so, that’s the story we’re told early and often. Work hard, get the degrees, earn the credentials, and the doors will open. My experience has proved that this promise is more of a trap than the truth. We do what we are told, invest the time, labor, money, and faith. Yet still, too often, what waits on the other side is not freedom. Instead, it’s financial debt, physical/mental/emotional depletion, and the daunting realization that the cycle of harm never ends. The great equalizer has never been equal.

When we tell young people it is possible to be “successful” navigating constructs in a country that was built on our back and not to have our back, I understand the sentiment. Because yes, there has been Black progress and success. For sure. But please, do not Oprah Winfrey, Michael Jackson, and LeBron James me to death. Yes, they are examples. But there should be far more. Furthermore, I struggle with financial wealth and fame as the only indicators of success. Some of us value impact over income, and that’s okay.

I’ve heard Black motivational speeches, and self-appointed coaches condemn people who name how overly hard Black people have to work to survive and “make it,” as if naming reality is the same thing as victimhood, weakness, or lack of discipline. Please, let’s stop doing this.

First and foremost, we cannot toxic positivity, coach, therapize, credential, or grind our way out of racism and oppression. We cannot discipline ourselves free from systems that were never designed with us in mind. Secondly, the truth is what sets us free. We must know it and name it as a non-negotiable. Facts over fallacy and false narratives. Clarity over comfort. Every time we get the opportunity.

It is never “complaining” when I state that we have to work three times harder and be four times smarter, and that it’s utterly exhausting! It takes a toll on our healing, our health, our wholeness, and our wellbeing. Not just individually, but collectively. Many would argue, in their attempts to be motivational and inspirational, that “anything is possible with hard work and dedication.” I hear that. I agree to a certain extent. But when you proclaim and promote that ideology without also acknowledging how we are socialized into racist, oppressive constructs of whiteness that dehumanize us, disconnect us, and demand our constant proving, it is dangerous. When you insist that “this is just the way things are” without recognizing and challenging how it came to be this way, it is misguided, unethical, and plain out unjust. I won’t stand for it. None of us should.

Yes, this is the way things are. But it’s not the way things should be, nor the way things would be if we were truly free. It is not natural order, and I will never accept it as such. It was created. Constructed on purpose for a purpose. And it's been working.

But if systems were designed to sort, stratify, and subordinate, they can also be suppressed and snuffed out. If it’s been built, it can be broken down and rebuilt. We can change.

My urgent question of the day is rooted in the path I chose to take, maybe a little later in the game than I would have liked, but here I am. What if we diverted the energy we poured into working hard and getting degrees, and all negative health and financial byproducts that come with it, and put that same energy toward changing the way things are done? What if, instead of stepping in line, we disrupted it, because there is more than one right way and certainly more than one white way? Is that not what our ancestors did for us? The reality is, their work was just the beginning. We are still in it because generations are coming behind us. We have not arrived. We still have assignments that have not been fulfilled.

And while I’m at it, some more truth. Our white counterparts are not grinding like we do to get to “success.” So, when we try to be like them to get where they are and to have what they have, the real question is, at what cost? We have to stop pretending it is acceptable to wear ourselves down to the ground to receive what the masses of melanin-less mediocrity obtain with ease. Their “hard work” will never compare to the layers of labor that come with the legacy of lockout we are looped into for a lifetime.

A. LIFE. TIME. From birth to burial. Marinate in that for a moment.

Education is not the “savior” we give it credit to be. It’s not the magic key to quality of life we want to believe it is. Personally, getting three degrees left me with debt, not deliverance. No promotions. No titleship. No security. Just a financial ball and chain that has impacted every area of my life. And even after you get them with a 4.0, degrees do not always “count” if they are not from the right school, the prestigious school, the school that proximity to power has decided matters more than the person carrying the knowledge.

Who decides that? Why do we keep following along? Who has historically held the power, the access, and the authority to shape curriculum, define rigor, and determine who gets to lead, teach, or inform the next generation?

I’ll wait while you look that up.

Because when you do, what you will find is that the gatekeepers have never been neutral. The people and institutions that have long defined academic curriculum, standards, scholarship, and legitimacy have been overwhelmingly white, historically male, and deeply shaped by Eurocentric traditions. Even as classrooms become more diverse, the structures that determine what counts as credible knowledge and who is an expert remain much of the same. For me, there’s no discussion about higher education that is merely about just learning. We must also consider power.

That matters because curriculum is an extension of power. “Rigor” has a hidden agenda when it’s soaked in socialization. Academia goes beyond teaching to include power-brokering around what gets taught, who gets cited, whose knowledge is treated as objective, whose language is acceptable, whose methods are respected, whose stories are centered, and whose brilliance is borrowed from but never fully believed. None of this is accidental. The hidden curriculum has always been teaching something more than what the syllabus says, and historically it’s embedded in the institution itself.

This is why the book, Mediocre by Ijeoma Oluo, is so real and relevant, and hit me so deeply. It gave language to what so many of us have lived. It names how American institutions have been built to preserve white male power and then disguise that power as merit. That is what makes the education myth of being the great equalizer so painful. It is not simply that school is expensive or that degrees demand so much from some of us. It is that we are sold an “America Dream” package that only comes to fruition if we navigate systems of harm that were never built to support us. On top of the burdens we already shoulder that make climbing the “success ladder” even harder due to the extra weight, when the return never comes, when the doors don’t fling open and the sacrifice doesn’t produce the promise, we are made to feel as though the failure is ours. That we didn’t work hard enough or make the right choices.

For so long, I’ve struggle-toggled with the feeling that I must get more letters behind my name. That I must keep proving what I already know and what I have already lived. I’ve spent years working two jobs while going to school full time, pouring my energy, money, my mind and body into degrees that were supposed to elevate me, create stability, and validate my leadership. Instead, too much of what I got in return was debt, strain, and the quiet violence of being told it still was not enough. I’m still not enough.

That pain is not only personal. It’s political and patterned. Practiced and perpetuated. Inside and outside of intuitional walls. We’re convinced to invest in systems that were never built to recognize our full humanity, let alone our guidance and strategies. We are told to be patient, stay polished, be “professional,” and constantly prove we belong, while not being fully trusted to do our jobs, even after getting those “papers.”

As a Black woman in America, this is a familiar commonality we share with each other. I know that it’s bigger than me. I am never speaking or standing for myself. I have heard too many stories and held far too many similar truths. I have seen so many brilliant Black women overeducated and under-recognized, over credentialed and undercompensated, overworked and overlooked. Over, under, too much, and not enough at the same time. What a conundrum. We are told to keep collecting credentials along with the debt and the damage caused by keeping quiet... keeping our composure. And maybe eventually we’ll be seen. Just maybe, if we get lucky, we will be believed and listened to, and finally be called leaders in the very lives and losses we have already survived.

I posed this question earlier and will restate it, so you know that it’s real. What if we diverted the energy we are already expending on what does not serve us and only wears us down, and redirected it?  What if all the labor, sacrifice, and resources we spend chasing validation through these institutions went toward dismantling and transforming the very systems that keep failing us? And by "us," I mean ALL OF US because we're all impacted. And truthfully, it's not the job of the oppressed to dismantle their political/physical oppression (that's a whole different post) but we also should not be assimilating and participating in it willingly, perpetuating harm upon each other, especially with no strategy to get free. We do have a choice to get mentally liberated. And it's a hard one because it comes with risk and loss.

In the same sentiment as "Black faces in high places are not going to save us," representation with a dissertation will not lead us to liberation. Certainly not without transformation.

And many of the people who hold the deepest wisdom, the sharpest analysis, the most necessary courage, and the clearest vision to transform do not also have the resources, access, desire, or capacity to survive academia and all of its byproducts. Nor should we have to. Our brilliance will never squeeze neatly into a box built by exclusion and maintained by hierarchy.

I know this is going to ruffle some feathers so as always, let me be clear in my honesty. As a lifelong learner I recognize many methods of education outside of top-down learning. I’m not arguing that it’s wrong to desire formal or “higher” education and I won’t take away from the many who have pursued it for whatever reasons they wanted or needed to. I congratulate and honor those who have forged that pathway through academia and made it through to the other side. Those letters have been earned two times over. I know the discipline it takes. I know the sacrifice it requires. I know so many have used those spaces strategically, beautifully, and with deep integrity because I know them or I’ve read their books and followed their research. I am forever grateful.

But I also know two other very critical things.

One, it is nearly impossible to come through these institutions unscathed, no matter how good we look and how big we smile, performing within constructs of conformity and constraints that capitalize from our coping mechanisms.

Two, and most important of all... I stand unmoved in my conviction (ten toes down if you will) that I don't need a degree to explain what I feel and see. I don't need a PhD to validate me.

In honor of ten years of my "tees that talk," of course I have some merch to make a statement for the movement. If this piece resonated with you don't just declare it, wear it!

Check out my merch page to learn more about Finally PHREEE...

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