Shamefully, I was not familiar with Dr. Richardson’s important work in African American and Hiphop literacies until I read her memoir PHD to Ph.D. In fourteen powerful chapters, Richardson unfolds her resolute history. The memoir is not like Richardson’s other academic work, though it reveals an early engagement with language politics; it was her Mama’s mission that she use “Propah Henglish” (4), and she was forced to “code-switch” in her speech and writing so teachers did not consider her “illiterate . . . for sounding Black” (202–7). In other words, Richardson’s expertise on code-switching and language use is implicitly present as she illustrates how her past enveloped her, “in a struggle between what the rest of the world told me about myself, and the girl my family tried to raise” (163). It is also a strikingly raw piece of prose that vividly exposes her experiences and struggles moving from PHD (“po ho on dope: ex-prostitute, ex-drug addict, hood-dweller, baby mama of two ‘illegitimate’ children” (213)) to eventual English Ph.D. and tenured professor at The Ohio State University.
A Journal of Community-Engaged Writing and Rhetoric