Angela D. Mack
First and foremost, I am a product of the 76104 zip code. I was born and raised in the West Morningside neighborhood of Fort Worth, Texas with my mom and my grandfather. I was only blocks away from Jessamine Street, I was across the freeway from Morningside Elementary, and I grew up with The T City bus passing on my street, the 36B Evans Avenue West Loop route. As a hybrid scholar, one who navigates in and around the academy, my community advocacy is grounded in archival practices to resist cultural erasure, to contribute displaced narratives, and to reflect more holistic views of African Americans and other minority communities in Fort Worth.
I am currently a PhD student in rhetoric and composition at TCU, the private university that is a 5-10-minute drive from 76104. I earned my undergraduate degree from Texas Wesleyan University and my MA in American literature from Texas Woman’s University in Denton, Texas. To attend TCU means that, through my personal embodied experience, I become the bridge for more African American scholars and scholars of color to attend a predominately White institution (PWI) and be successful not just to drive diversity initiatives, but to represent the always already presence of Black and minority knowledge that is ever present in Funky Town. Attending TCU is my embodied counternarrative to the institution’s and the city’s history as it relates to African American and minority contributions. A specific area of research for me is the materiality of Black/minority social life and visibility through African American and Black diasporic rhetorical traditions and aesthetics. More pointedly, this interest comes from my endeavors in popular culture, cultural rhetorics, creative writing, and critical race and ethnic studies. I am a writer and a poet, a wife and a mother, and in a previous life, I was a spoken word artist.
This project is one of bias and subjectivity for me. This is the community I was built from. My joy, my trauma, my survival, and my success come from the streets and neighborhoods that are more than data sets and new reports. I am particularly affected by the death of Atatiana Jefferson, a young woman who I did not know in life, but I am drawn to her and to the honor of her family to keep her name known. Her story resonates with me because it was more than the house, more than the block she was on the night she was murdered, it was her character that compelled me. Atatiana looks no different than I did when I was her age. She was a daughter to a mother who was ill like I have been. She was what everyone would consider to be a model young woman, and yet she was murdered inside her home because the narratives of 76104 fueled a white FWPD to respond to a wellness check ready for a killshot. My commitment to this project is to co-labor with my colleague, Cody Jackson, to occupy a small space of digital resistance to remember that Atatiana’s life matters, that 76104 is a peopled and complex community and not just constellation of data, and that local and national voices, particularly women’s voices, should be heard in the age of Black lives and death.
Writings