Grace Wojcik, M.A.
Coordinator
Gender and Sexuality Center
Who are the people who have most influenced your life?
How have they affected you?
I would say the people who had most influenced my life are my parents and the LGBT resource center director of my undergraduate institution. My parents are both deaf and that really shaped my experiences growing up.
Having to, at a very young age, be their advocate and oftentimes having to interpret for them, make phone calls for them was challenging. I was dealing with a lot of adult stuff, at a very young age, which is very unique and can be a lot for a child to experience. Growing up in that household, being a child of deaf adults, taught me to see oppression in society and how things were not equal, especially for those in the disability community. This was obvious even in our family structure. I remember when I was young that it was normal for my parents to be left out entirely at holiday dinners. My mom's side of the family never learned how to sign; it was forbidden by my grandfather. This was present on my dad's side as well. They were a little bit better as they had more home signs but they didn't learn formal ASL. However, they did at least attempt to learn the language to communicate with her child.
My grandmother, my dad's mother, really advocated hard for him to be able to have access to education. This was before the ADA and it was really difficult to secure public school education for my dad. Even then it wasn't the greatest because they were focused on forbidding sign language in education. So hearing those kinds of stories of my parents getting corporately punished for signing in school, really taught me about difference, inequity, inequality, oppression, bigotry, all of those constructs and isms. This really shaped my identity as a younger person.
Brent Bilodeau
Going away to school, I went to Michigan State University and the LGBT resource center director there, Dr. Brent Bilodeau, is someone who really influenced my life. He was someone to lean on as a positive role model. He completed his doctorate when I was in undergrad and he built up the center to what it is now, as he was the center's first director. To have someone who was an adult, openly gay, that I could trust and was willing to help me along during my awkward baby gay identity development years, that was really powerful for me.
Penny Gardner (center in yellow)
Another person I would add is Dr. Penny Gardner, who was my Women and Gender Studies professor in undergrad. She is someone who really encouraged me to get more involved in activism. Between the formative years of growing up in a household with parents that were deaf and then going to college and being immersed in the LGBTQ community, different student organizations, as well as the activism side that Penny helped kind of shed light, deeply influenced where I am now and what I do for a living. I never thought I would work in higher education. I had a lot of friends that went into higher education but thought that I never would. So it's a bit ironic that I'm here now, but I can't really imagine working in a job that is not based on creating some kind of a change for marginalized people. Some days, I fantasize about how nice it would be to not care so much. Some days just for stress, let work just be work, but I'm not one of those people.
Where have you lived?
How have those places affected your life?
I was born in Pontiac and lived there until I was in first grade, when my parents decided that we would move to Lapeer, Michigan. I went to a private school in Pontiac that was very diverse and we left in the middle my first grade year to move to Lapeer. I remember being really scared of my new school because it was all white. I had a lot of friends of color in first grade and kindergarten; there were many people of different races at my school and very few white people.
Moving to Lapeer really freaked me out. It was a combination of homesickness, confusion, and the fact that I didn't understand why the people in my new school didn't look like those from my old school. Lapeer is very conservative, deep red, and rural. It is more built up now, but it's still very rural and a very different from Pontiac.
I remember that my sister and I got called the N word when we were kids because we looked very tan and are Italian. I was so stunned by that because, one, we don't say that word, two, I'm not black, you're confused just because someone's not pale white. So that was a confusing and challenging time. My sister and I talk now about how being considered racially ambiguous in a very prominently white town really shaped our viewpoint on things.
I didn't really know I was gay when I was in high school, but I started to become active in LGBTQ issues in high school. I remember that there was a moment where I knew I couldn't stay there. I just knew that I had to go. It was probably around the time that I was looking for colleges. I knew I wanted to go to MSU but I knew, in my soul, somehow, that I had to leave this town so I could actually myself. I don't think it was a conscious decision in some ways.
Thank God I did, because I moved to East Lansing. East Lansing is my favorite place on the planet! I love the campus so much and it was awesome to be in a walkable and "real" city. Michigan State's campus, at the time when I went there, was much bigger than Lapeer. I tell my students now that I had lecture hall classes in my freshman year that were bigger than my entire high school population. Going to that environment, I met new people and people from different backgrounds. This sounds really cliché to say, but it really did open my eyes. I took some of my general education courses that I had to take and that basically broke my brain open. It was awesome, though, in the best way possible.
At the end of my college career, I lived in D.C. for three months as part of a study away program. My second favorite city is Washington, D.C. and I appreciated the opportunity to work for a national LGBTQ organization. Again, the diversity of the place made me so happy because of all the vibrant cultures. Not to mention that I love the public transit!
After I graduated, I moved to Minneapolis and I did not care for it. It was nice, diversity wise, but there's an interesting element in Minnesota culture, called "Minnesota Nice". And it's not really nice at all, just passive aggressive. I did live in an area that was somewhat diverse, we had a large Somali population, but overall it was not as diverse as I would have liked. Additionally, I just didn't care for the overall culture.
So I decided I wanted to come home. I lived in Lapeer again, which was awful.
Then I started graduate school here at Oakland, and I knew I could not and did not want to live at home anymore. I lived in Shelby Township and then I moved to Farmington Hills to be with my wife because she had already purchased a home when I met her.
So Farmington Hills, I love it. Very diverse. Suburban, I would like it to be a little less suburban at times. But it’s nice to have multiple races, multiple religions in the same area, instead of it just being very homogenous.
The places where Grace has lived
If you could change or improve one thing about the world,
or OU, what would it be?
One thing I would change at OU is our commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion. It’s a great motto, a great mantra, but I do think sometimes it is just lip service. There was an article in Inside Higher Ed, an opinion piece, and it said if you say you care about diversity, equity, and inclusion, your budget needs to back it up. I really fully believe that because DEI impacts all areas of the institution.
We know it has an impact on retention, student success, all of those things, but beyond those metrics, it's just the right thing to do. I think it's okay to say those things. We don't necessarily need to say, “we need to show that this program has a 1,000,000% retention rate or is attracting these diverse students”. If people don't feel safe here, it doesn't matter really, when they graduate because they probably won't and you will not retain them. You're not going to bring them here, if they know OU says that they're really diverse, but they don't have X, Y or Z in place.
Additionally, what’s the staffing level of that office? What's their program budget for the year? That goes across the many diversity offices on campus and diversity initiatives. The idea that you have people of marginalized identities, putting on the events to help educate the majority, instead of programming for the marginalized identified people. I would like to see it move past the slogans, mottos, and mantras to strategic well-funded programs. I've heard so many times in my work here that you have to prove it otherwise we cannot get more funding. It's really actually the opposite; if some of these programs had more money, the changes that could be created would be astounding. You would see major impacts, but no one is willing to experiment.
Some offices don't get asked that. They don't have to justify their existence in that way, which I think is interesting. So that's one thing I would change is the commitment to lip service to actual change and real commitment.
The GSC office
What important experiences has your family shared?
How did each person feel about these experience?
With my parents being deaf, my sister and I were the first in our family to go to college. When we talk about it now, we have the benefit of hindsight, but our parents really were not very helpful when we went to school. We didn't understand student loans and my parents didn't have any money saved up for us to go to college. I wish I would have been a little bit more strategic with some of those loan decisions now.
My sister and I remember trying to ask our parents for help with college stuff. I was the first to go because I'm oldest and I remember my dad and mom telling us they didn’t know and that we needed to figure it out. I didn't understand, probably because I went to such a big school, that there were offices with free resources available. Now, I think about how we push them out to students and think, wow, that really would have benefited me if I had better understanding of how "to do college". My sister and I talk about this still, how we wish we would have really understood that. But if you don’t know and you're in survival mode, you think “I have to make it through somehow. I can't possibly access these things, since I don't have money. I'm taking out loans to pay for this so that must cost money.” Someone could have just said “no, actually these are free.” And it wasn't that I was a disconnected student - I was involved with the resource center but I just never connected that to be related in that way.
My dad was paid by General Motors to go to trade school, where he worked on his journeyman’s license. He is a license mechanic who went to school, but he would say “I went to school, but that was 30 years ago. It's not the same as what you're dealing with. I didn't have to take out loans. I didn't have to do X, Y, or Z thing”. But he also didn't know that I could have utilized the writing center, the tutoring center or even career services. I just think I didn’t realize that because you are not only trying to live your life, but also figure out this brand new environment. You often just don't have people around you that can relate.
There's times where my sister and I can remember trying to ask our parents for help and they would say “I really didn't know and I’m really sorry. I can't help you with this, because I never went to college. I don't understand this.” My parents’ education level isn't as high as a lot of other parents. They have difficulties with reading and writing, because English is not the same as ASL. So sometimes the comprehension isn't quite there. We often would have to interpret documents for them and many had very advanced English that they weren’t really going to understand.
It was almost like being in an English as a second language home because we were an English as a second language home, since our first language was American Sign Language. I signed before I could talk. So it's an interesting experience to grow up in an ESL home, essentially, and be a first generation college student. My sister has an advanced degree. I have advanced degrees. I wonder, how did we get here sometimes? You're mesmerized by being able to do that. My sister I also joke that maybe it's a compensation sort of thing where I'm just going to keep going to school because clearly I can do this. I figured it out. I'm not going stop. So who knows?