Ramycia McGhee is a professor of English and Literature at Linn-Benton Community College and the CEO and founder of The Valencia Cooper Second Chance Scholarship Opportunity Award. While McGhee has lived in Albany for almost five years, she was born and raised on the west side of Chicago. In this interview she talks about how her upbringing, her family, and her faith has shaped her career and philosophy on life.
Ramycia McGhee, you are a graduate of three universities: University of Wisconsin-Whitewater for your bachelor's in Broadcast Journalism, Roosevelt University for your master’s in Journalism, and Capella University for your Doctor of Education. Given this, why did you decide to teach at a community college instead of a university?
Yes, I went to all universities. But in elementary school I took prep classes on Saturday at Truman College, which is a part of the Chicago Community College system. I went to elementary school near Malcolm X Community College. We would go over there for assemblies… African dance…field trips. When I was in high school I took college credits at Harold Washington College.
So if you think about it, community college was always playing in the background. It's always been a part of my life. It was part of my formative years, so it would make sense that I would teach at one.
And I think that what I really love about community college is that you get an opportunity to meet and interact with people, i.e. from the community...You get an opportunity to interact with everybody who makes up a community. When you are working at a university you can have those relationships but to me they don't seem as important or pertinent to the work you're doing.
I also know that community colleges play a role in people who cannot afford to go to a university at that time.
Imagine you are taking a gen ed class at a university and all you see are students who live on campus… and you are a 40-year-old woman or man, or you identify as non-binary, and maybe you have kids. Nobody in there looks like me. Nobody in there can relate. That's a problem because that's going to impede the learning process.
You go to a community college, you don’t know who the hell you’re going to get! You’re going to get somebody, maybe, who is fresh out of jail and this is their mandate. You’re going to get some students who come right out of high school. You're going to get the working mother, the working father, the working inmates, the job-poor person. You're going to get these people who can relate because they bring life experiences - which I love even more.
I feel and I know community colleges are the backbone of this country.
How did your mother feel about your decision to become a college professor?
When I first told my mother I was going to be a professor she was so pissed off. She said, “I took out that Parent PLUS Loan for you to be a journalist! Now you’re telling me you’re going to be a teacher?!”
But that was short-lived because before I knew it, my mother was saying, “My daughter is a professor!” and walking around with her chest all out, so happy and bragging and boasting.
One time my mom went to class with me (in Wilbur Wright College in Chicago). I had older people in my class and my mother saw two people that she knew growing up in my class because they were all in recovery (from substance abuse).
They hugged each other for so long. They went downstairs. They smoked cigarettes. They talked and laughed, reminiscing about good times. They came from this lifestyle (of substance abuse) and this is the fruit of the process (of change). It was just so fun because it was good to see my mother connect with people she grew up with in my class.
Since then the guy would say, “Your daughter is my favorite professor. She's so smart!” Every time they ran into my mother they would say that.
And, while I think she knew that I was good at what I do, I think seeing her friends made her think, “My daughter is really doing this and it's working, because people I know are telling me on the regular.”
Your mother clearly had a strong impact on you. What kind of person was she?
She was something. She was street. She was hardcore, but she had a heart of gold.
My mother had been through quite a bit as a younger woman. Both of my parents were recovering drug addicts, but my mother never let her addiction to drugs detour how she raised and protected me. My daddy didn’t either. I had a two-parent household growing up.
My mother worked. She was super funny. My mother was intelligent.
She was raw. She would tell you the truth, no matter how you felt about it.
But she would give you the clothes off her back. She always wanted to help people, and that's how she ended up in the industry that she did. She worked for women who were HIV positive and who were also recovering addicts. My mom loved her work and the women loved her. My mother never made them feel as though they were diseased. They were in recovery.
My mother was selfless.
Her younger sister, who's my favorite aunt, had a baby at 13. My mother dropped out of school and helped raise the baby. She told her sister, “You go on and you do school and you get that and do all that.”
My aunt went on to get a degree and worked in corporate America - really moved up the ladder.
My mother did not. My mother helped raise her son. And my mother went back to school later and got her GED. She was clean and sober 10 years when she passed away.
In the fall of 2020, you launched The Valencia Cooper Second Chance Opportunity Award, named after your mother. Please tell me about it.
During my mother's time of drug abuse she went to jail for three months. Every weekend I would go see my mother. I remember seeing my mother through that glass. My mother was distraught. She could not believe she was in jail. Three months may have felt like three years.
So when I was working over at the Oak Creek Youth Correctional Center (in Albany), I thought about some of the women my mother helped in her work.
I remember when my mother got out of jail, even though it was only three months, she's still on probation. There were still all these hoops and things you had to do to be in compliance. You had to see a probation officer. You had to take classes. It’s never ending. And then they want you to get you back into society! But you have a criminal record. You also have to pass a drug test. You have to have experience. You have to have all this sh*t.
But there's really not a lot out there for you. The resources are slim, or you have to go through all these different hoops to get through to the resources.
I thought I would love to do something in my mother’s name…I thought, I can do a scholarship and it would directly impact these young ladies (at Oak Creek), because it'll be for them, and they would have to take classes at LBCC. So I'm marrying what I do and where I work to the memory of my mother.
That's how I came up with the scholarship. I launched this Sept. 5, 2020, which is the day my mother died, but then there weren't a lot of young ladies matriculating out of Oak Creek. If they were, secondary education was really not their priority. They needed jobs, money, etc.
So in 2022, this year, I’m going to change the direction of the scholarship. I want to benefit any black student in the State of Oregon who wants to attend a community college because there's so few black folk here and sometimes resources are slim to none. Why not be able to be another resource on the educational ramp?
[The scholarship] has a very basic application. The reason why it's so basic is because I want to give the money away! I want to take away all the barriers! It's not a competition. Everybody's going to get money.
My friends and family were just really receptive about this when I first launched it. They just gave and gave and gave and and it's been going really well. I'm in the midst of making it a non-profit. … My vision for this is that it will become so big and so well known in the State of Oregon that I'll be able to launch it also in Chicago, where my mother and I grew up. So there will be one in the Midwest, one on the West Coast, and then who knows? In the next 20 years maybe we'll have one on the East Coast. It will be a nationwide scholarship which I would love to see happen.
You grew up in the west side of Chicago where you were surrounded by African-American role models in your family and schools. Now as a college professor in Oregon, you’re often the first African-American teacher that your students have ever had. How does that make you feel?
I think it makes me feel special because I'm able to impart some things on them that they probably haven't had and dispel myths that a lot of them probably have about black people, or black women and black educators, and etc…
Even at a church I was going to I was able to dispel what they stereotypically thought a black woman should be. I was highly educated. At the time I was married. No children out of wedlock -- no offense to people. These are just things that people think…I wasn't addicted to drugs. I wasn't beaten. I didn't come from a broken home.
All of that stuff was dispelled.
And I feel the same way about a classroom. What you've heard about black teachers. What you’ve heard about black women. What you’ve heard about inner city youth. What you’ve heard about children of recovering addicts. I'm going to take all of what you've heard and flip it on its head. I have the opportunity to do that. And that is so good because I don't want them to have these assumptions about us…because of what they’ve seen on TV, what they’ve read in books, what they’ve heard...
It's a way to change the narrative, so that they are aware. Like (when they are confronted with stereotypes) they can say, “No, I had a teacher, and that wasn't the case” and “I interacted with a person and that’s not how she acted.” They can speak about it.
I feel very blessed and lucky to be in that position.
February was Black History Month. This was the fifth year that you’ve organized events for this month at LBCC. What are some of the concerns that lead you to choose “Breaking the Cycle of Shame: Black Mental Health” as this year’s Black History Month theme?
[In] black mental health, particularly at this time, suicide rates are at the all-time high. It's a shame.
Black people do not talk about going to therapy. I think that narrative is changing now with recent events, but every time you look up somebody is dying or has died by suicide.
Did they not have someone to talk to? Maybe they did, but they were ashamed. People in a sense shame black folks from going to therapy.
Why do you think Black people feel shame about mental health therapy?
[Black people often say] “Pray it away!” You know we’re spiritual people. Yes, you can pray and I think that's one of the tools that God gives you, but He also gives you these other tools of therapy, and talking to people, etc.
I have two cousins who had contemplated suicide, and they're both young women. I had a boy cousin who contemplated suicide. When things hit home like that, it's like, “Oh, my God!”
[When I suggested] “Maybe you should talk to somebody…” to my one cousin, she said, “I don't want people to think I'm crazy.” Because [to her] therapy is only for people who are crazy or think that they're crazy.
I said, “No, I don't think people would think you’re crazy. I think you think you’re crazy because you're going to see someone. [Therapists] can talk to you about stuff that your family can't. Because we [your family] are in it with you so we're not objective. We want to be, but we're not.”
In addition to having speakers come to speak on the Black History Month theme each year, you also put together a Black History Essay writing contest. This year you asked essayists to reflect on how the stereotype of the “Strong Black Woman'' has affected black women. For context, you ask essayists to read the 2015 Cosmopolitan article, “Black Girls Don’t Get to Be Depressed” by Samantha Irby. The tagline for the article is “When I finally got help for my mental illness, I was sure I was letting Rosa Parks and Harriet Tubman down by talking about my silly little feelings.” How did this article and topic resonate with you?
When I read the article, I’m like, that’s so true because you feel like, “Damn! I'm going to let Harriet Tubman down!” And these (historical) people were dealing with conditions way worse than what I’m dealing with -- my little problems. So it really stuck with me because this is something that we carry around all the time.
…Black women have always been seen to be the pillars of the community. Even when we think about enslavement, black women slept with slave owners …so that the slave owners wouldn’t kill their husbands or their children. So we've sacrificed our bodies. We've sacrificed our minds. Like we have to play into the ego of our husbands or our kids and not say anything. We sacrificed our time. “Don't worry. I can take on this, you just do that.”
We've sacrificed so much of ourselves, and we still have to be a mother, be a wife, be a good friend, be intimate, however that intimacy is. Be very good at what you do, because you have to be 10 times better than your counterpart.
So you have all of that pressure. What do you have for yourself?
One of my aunts said, “You know we bend, but we don't break.” But sometimes, you really want to break!
Here's the thing (not long ago) -- my career was skyrocketing and my personal life was falling apart, but I still had to show up in this space and do what I had to do. No one knew I was going through a divorce…I remember that there were times that I would be up for more than 48 hours, just distraught…I was crying. But I would get up, put make-up on, get dressed, and go to LB, teach and smile, and do everything I needed to do. Then I would come back home, and I would cry for more hours.
Because I knew people were watching me. I'm new here. I'm black. I got to do my job. I got to do it really well. And I can't let these people know that my whole damn personal life is… in the toilet.
…There was a lot of shame for me. People were like “You excel in every part of your life, but you can't hold your marriage together?”
I think that's what happens with women anyway... but then here we go again, the Strong Black Woman...We deal with a lot as women in general but I think we deal with an immense amount of pressure as women of color. As a black woman to be told you're the least likely to marry, that you’re the last picked. You know, when you hear sh*t like that, you get depressed.
Then you start thinking “Oh my God, I need therapy!”
It's a culmination of stuff. But you still have to maintain this persona of a Strong Black Woman. “No matter what, I can take it!” when inside you are breaking into pieces and you aren't telling anyone.
I think the Strong Black Woman is a blessing and a curse, a burden and a blessing. That essay resonated with me, and I want people to understand that. Because some people feel that black women can take everything because historically we've had to. And there was never any objection.
And the time has come for us to really start healing from that.
At-a-GlanceWho: Dr. Ramycia McGhee
Occupation: LBCC Professor of English and Literature and Founder and CEO of The Valencia Cooper Second Chance Opportunity Scholarship Award
Hometown: West side of Chicago, Illinois
Years at LBCC: Almost five years
Passions: Getting dressed up and dancing, traveling solo to at least one place every year
Beloved Pet: A 10-year-old Shih Tzu named Cupcake
Mantra: “Things happen for me, not to me.”
