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The following is adapted from a talk given by Dr. Jennings during the 2024 Wabash Center’s BIPOC Faculty Luncheon at  the annual conference of the American Academy of Religion (AAR) and the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL). You sound   What do you sound like in the rain, Standing between claps of thunder and lighting strikes, untamed and terrifying?   Silence, though wise, is not an option given your task of directing toward shelter, while rain drops clean your face including your teeth, as if it were their right and duty.   Storm time covers your time, threatening to last as long as your will to communicate, your willing locked into battle against blowing wind, promising many episodes, several seasons.   But what do you sound like? Does your sound collapse under the weight of the elements, reduced to a shouting whisper, only inches from your inner voice?   Or   Have you found a bullhorn with fresh batteries that give your sound that familiar grabbled sound indistinguishable from anyone else seeking quick victory?   Choices must be made in the storm, since you are yet directing and eyes blurred with much wet are still watching, straining to hear.   But maybe the question to dis-cover the sound of your voice is what do you hear in it?   One of the most challenging tasks of life in the academy, especially for people of color, is cultivating one’s own voice—and within that cultivation, to know one’s own sound. Voice and sound here, as I am using them, are thick metaphors that bring together the one and the many, the self and the institution. Voice in this regard is your self-witness, the testimonies you give, big and small; the pieces, the fragments of yourself you present; your showing and telling, depending on what you need or want to communicate in this world—in this academic world. Your sound is your way with your voice. At one level, your sound is your style inside your drama to speak and to tell. It is your bend with your pen as you write your own story page after page. But at another level, your sound is how you hear others hearing you. Your sound is your awareness of other voices and the way you weave in and out of other sounds. My friends, in the academy being heard (having voice) and being able to hear (knowing your sound) is still frontier work for us. I named two things here, voice and sound—being heard and being able to hear. Being heard and finding our voice in the academy is a challenge in the best of times. As I have written about this, it is the struggle against white self-sufficient masculinist form—that suffocating form of self-presentation and self-articulation around which flows the evaluative ecology and reward systems of the academy. We struggle against the pull to mimic the voice of that man, the finished man, who shows he has mastery, control, and possession of his knowledge. That struggle comes at us from outside of us and from inside. Outside, from the forms of formal and informal evaluation layered across our bodies. Inside, from the often-severe voices that we have internalized; those voice which place on us a quest for unattainable excellence. Inside and outside, forces bound to our will to survive—for our own sake and for the sake of our peoples. We know, however, its possible to resist that voice and find your own voice. We stand in the legacy of people who have, and are, doing just that. There is a poem in my book, After Whiteness, that tells the true story of how one sister helped another sister begin her journey toward her voice in the academy. It begins with the elder sister’s recognition of the struggle: My voice trembles always at the sound of your voice, which began for me so long ago, gently guiding me to what was good, great, weak, strong, straight into the vise, tightening ever so slowly that I mistake the hurting for stability, constrictions for conscientiousness I learn labored breathing, tighter thinking until I make the sound for help with every sound I make. But I think, this will not be forever. I will break free even if I must tear skin from my flesh to loose your stability. Sara saved her, took Joan from the other voice and placed her inside. She knew how, having lost enough skin to form a womb outside her body – the mindbodywomb - where bathing light would cover Joan’s thinking, protecting her from glaring light – light against light – knitting truth into her inward being before it could be snatched away by the other voice, until she emerged from Sara’s wombbodymind intact, and hearing none, the i passed unharmed into Joan’s voice flowing like refreshing waters ready to heal torn skin and cracked voices.[i]   Finding voice is a constant work of abolition, of freeing your voice from his voice. But I have come to realize that the work of finding voice carries within it the task of learning to hear your sound. Over the years, I have met too many scholars, especially BIPOC folk, who do not know their sound. What do I mean by not knowing their sound? On the one hand, they have very little idea of what they sound like, they do not hear others hearing them. And on the other hand, they do not know how to move in sound and let the sounds of others flow through them. Let me tell you a story: There was this scholar who always spoke truth to power. He had made it up the rough side of the mountain. He knew what needed to be said in every setting, to every individual, every administrator, every colleague, and every student. Right, bright, brilliant, and insightful, he claimed his voice in white spaces, announced his present freedom to speak and his commitment to the struggle. His voice was and is urgent, vital, and necessary, but his colleagues have longed for his absence. They can’t stand him. Without knowing more details, you might say that he was simply being prophetic, marking the journey of so many BIPOC folks struggling against white hegemony. But in this case, the desire for his absence is unanimous among everyone, including BIPOC folk. He cannot hear himself which means he cannot hear others hearing him. He closed himself off from the sounds of others, and turned his own voice, aimed toward freedom, into his own prison. He is alone, bitter, and convinced he is too controversial and radical for the academy. He may be too controversial and radical for the academy. But, he is also bound to the voice of the white self-sufficient man even as he articulates freedom. What is missing from this scholar’s voice is the working with sound.   Allow me to return to the first poem and add a few words:   Choices must be made in the storm, since you are yet directing and eyes blurred with much wet are still watching, straining to hear.   So maybe the question to dis-cover the sound of your voice is what do you hear in it?   Do you hear others dreaming out here exposed to the elements, sharing in feeling fragile flesh, turning their bodies this way and that to negotiate with the wind?   Do you hear the thunder calling you to join its rhythms, the lighting awakening you to surprise, pulling toward oneness with flashing light, accepting the risk of free air? Do you sense the rain as your support, your pips to your Gladys Knight, moving when you move even at midnight.   The key here, my friends, is delight, delighting in the sounds, allowing the sounds to move through us, never seeking to possess them but to give witness to a hearing that is without end. Every musician knows, the character of your voice and the power of your sound depends on your ability to hear and keep hearing. What is critical in cultivating your voice is your ability to hear in ways that free you from being pulled toward mimicking the white self-sufficient masculinist voice even as you assert your freedom.   How do we sound freedom even amid despair? This is the urgent question we face as we navigate Trump 2.0. The temptation at this moment is to give into the despair and allow that despair to hollow out our voices. However, we will need to speak prophetically. We must speak powerfully and urgently, speak truth to power. Our speaking must show our hearing, or our voices will reveal that we have closed ourselves off to the sounds around us. For the sake of our students, our communities, and for the sake of our scholarly work, we need to attend to our sound and show both our delight and our freedom for others in, and through, our voices. The sounds of many need to flow through us, merging and weaving in slices and pieces inside our own speaking, thinking, and writing, inside our own self-testimony. If not, we run the great danger of our having our own voices turned against us, weaponized and made dismally predictable in how they do not show a lively hearing. Allow me to close with just another stanza from this poem:   If you hear, they will hear in your sound, glimpses of their sounds, then and there you will know your sound, directing toward shelter, announcing a free place.   Notes & Bibliography [i] After Whiteness: An Education in Belonging (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2020), 119.

For many of my students, voicing themselves is not the issue. Mostly, they are terrified of revealing their authentic voice. Although I empathize with them, my role as teacher obligates me to keep them faithful to its discovery, even if their authentic voice is not a fixed thing. Hence, I approach this pastoral work with the understanding that their respective voices are dynamic and ever-changing, not along a linear trajectory, but within the messy cycles of their precious lives. In this way, my role as teacher is to inspire them to discover a self-authenticated speech power that when activated they can proudly hear and see themselves. And yet despite my good efforts, I inevitably have students who have despairingly succumbed to the notion that their voice is not worth hearing. Achingly, such devaluing of self is often the result of a combination of adverse and even abusive social, political, and economic forces that they have encountered over the course of their lives. For other students, the issue is not worthlessness but often anxiety in hearing those facets of their voices that expose their privilege and cultural bubble. To cope with either one of these voice-silencing impulses, students usually opt for a masking scheme that I call, the plagiarized voice. Here, the goal is to disguise their authentic self, with all its flaws, foibles, and flavors, by appropriating other people’s authentic voice. Beyond simply quoting word for word from another author without giving proper credit, which is a dishonest academic practice resulting in dismissal, students assemble a composite voice using a default collection of words and phrases. There is also the habitual deployment of go-to concepts and argumentation that are indiscriminately plugged into their writing. The entire production points clearly to the concealment of their authentic voice. Another giveaway to this masking tactic is when students carelessly employ—whether in their writing assignments or class participation—trendy keywords, particularly the kind that they think would trigger a better grade from me. Knowing that my scholarly voice reveals an ethical commitment to the themes of “postcoloniality,” “migration,” “trauma,” “empire,” “violence,” “colonialism,” and “marginality,” students surmise that by sprinkling their writing with these words enough times a higher grade will magically appear. It is not that these themes are off-limits in students’ writing, for I teach that they are critical to understanding the cultural, social, and political instincts of the writers of the Hebrew Bible. Furthermore, these inscribed instincts belong to the sacred otherness of the biblical text, and hence we should resist colonizing their language and cultural points of view. At issue here, however, is when these themes and concepts do not cross-pollinate with a student’s authentic self in ways that show their close reading, creativity, and courage. Indeed, the lived experience with imperial violence that permeates much of the Hebrew Bible requires attentive and respectful listening, such that the felt pain behind the text is not diluted by sanitized scholarly jargon. If pain and suffering are common to all humans across time and space, then students should be able to hear themselves in the stories and poetry of the Hebrew Bible. Likewise, theorizing on ancient forms of colonization also requires a spectrum of diverse dialogue partners, some with expertise in literary analysis and others who write about imperial violence from first-hand experience. In my view, inviting a mixed range of reading partners (preferably in nonhierarchical fashion) is vital pedagogical practice that allows my students to fine-tune their authentic voice. In other words, the aim is not to harvest a new collection of catchy phrases but to hear oneself in relation to a rich variety of other voices. For example, when students encounter a rape scene in the biblical text—troublingly, there are many to choose from—how do they respond to the expert critics who gloss over this egregious form of violence? Or if students hear from authors who write about their first-hand experience with exile, does their testimony strike a chord in ways that could help students better exegete the biblical text? Notably, teaching future pastors the Hebrew Bible at a Protestant seminary is in many ways about authentic voice, specifically the divine voice. It is this pursuit of authenticity that my students are expecting—and frankly pay—to receive. The divine voice is not something that can be reproduced through Generative AI, for the authenticity of God is revealed through the realms of faith. And in the end, they will be practicing this pursuit each time they take the pulpit. For it is here that their congregants gather, expecting to receive from them an authentic word from God. As a teacher, when I think of this sacred moment, liberating students from the plagiarized voice becomes even more urgent.