It seems that for many corners of the American university, antiracist decolonial teaching and writing were merely a trend, especially in 2020 during the protests against the murder of George Floyd during the pandemic. That moment’s commitment to racial justice was tragically short-lived, leaving especially the white American political consciousness faster than it arrived. We have now witnessed so much backtracking on supposed anti-racist commitments that overall comfort, speed, and ease towards a default of whiteness should seem suspicious at this point, especially in light of the multiple historical moments where a severe and regressive Post-Reconstruction backlash immediately followed Black Freedom Movements. For some of us, the fight against white settler colonization and anti-black racism was never about trend-chasing or public performance and we have a long line of ancestors that we draw from to situate ourselves culturally, intellectually, and politically in that kind of elsewhere. That’s what makes this issue of the journal, especially right now, all the more special. So thank you for not stepping back or piping down.
My piece is called “In Honor of the Earthworm: Pockets of Air for ‘Decolonial Riders’ and Activist Literacies in White Settler Writing Programs and English Departments.” I begin this piece with an embarrassing confession: once upon a time, I often referred to compositionists, writing teachers, and rhetoric scholars as WORMS. Yes, worms. I probably even said it right to people’s faces. Just spineless, no backbone, just a buncha folx who stand for nothing and stand up for even less… just worms squirming along. I am still as disgusted with the lack of political courage, structural analysis, activist organizing skill, and ideological awareness in the discipline, but I no longer complement such folx by calling them earthworms. That language represented an ableist standpoint framed by a total lack of eco-consciousness. As I explain in my piece, I am a gardener and I take great care of the earthworms who cross my path now because they redistribute all kinds of organic matter as they open pockets of air for everything. They decompose and aerate everything in their pursuits of original pathways that, in turn, help everything that they touch. We would be blessed to be rhetoric-compositionists like that. Our discipline would be transformed and our universities seriously challenged if we all behaved like earthworms. Instead, I turn to students, “decolonial riders,” and the “pockets of air” that they create. So my JBW is all about a young Black woman who I call Haven.
A center of gravity in my thinking these days involves really taking stock of the enormous lifting that Black students do to design a deep Black intellectual life on campuses and in departments and writing programs that block and/or criminalize that kind of emotional and scholarly labor. I don’t offer the usual thick description of students, writing, pedagogy, and classrooms that academic research asks of us though. That feels more and more like an anthropological and exploitative othering at a time when American universities have spent the last years shutting out even more Brown and Black students than before, whether it’s PWI or MSI. If your praxis isn’t blazing open critical spaces for Brown and Black students, you shouldn’t be gazing scholarship on them either. So I turn my thick description onto the whiteness of university spaces where I meet students and place my gaze there and let me tell you, when it comes to anti-blackness and racism, the data is plentiful! When you juxtapose the intense Black sociality that Black students pursue in the context of the violence surrounding their education and every institution they must navigate, you really see the enormity of their literate, rhetorical, and political imaginations. That a student like Haven could graduate from an American university that critical, that consciousness-devoted, that-feminist/womanist-confident, and that aesthetically-emboldened, all rooted in Blackness, is, as my grandmother would say, mo’ than just a notion. That is the story that helps me think beyond the discipline’s suffocating political inertia and whiteness. Those students are the “pockets of air”… and the like-minded colleagues (like in this journal issue) who move in different pathways.
Editors’ Column, Chy Sprauve, Anna Zeemont, Conor Tomás Reed, and Sean Molloy
I pledged to read 125 books in 2025 and I did (more than that actually, but many were short novellas). Before January 1, 2025 dropped, I knew I needed an escape and otherwiseworld to sustain the chaos of the national political scene and these incessant Klan rallies that you find on every app, street corner, and government/campus meeting. Escapes are not a make-believe land though; they let you recharge and reimagine your current conditions with inspiration and creativity. I always read a lot of academic articles and non-fiction for the classes I teach every semester, so I don’t count that in my 125 goal. These 125 books were a mix of pure foolishness, pleasure, creativity, and divine inspiration. Yes, historical fiction (especially if it has a speculative twist) calls my name, but if BlackBookTok, BlackBookStagram, BlackAFReaders, ReadingAppCousins, or my BookClubFam started hyping any messy, dramatic, foolish, WTF-Did-I-Just-Read typa title in 2025, I MOST DEFINITELY read that book! What I didn’t get to, I stored in my TBR for 2026. My 2025 list is petty and hood and bougsie and triflin and edumacated all at the same time. Even though the rest of the U.S.A. might be out here struggling to read and comprehend basic words, BLACK WOMEN IS OUT HERE R.E.A.D.I.N.G. up a storm.
Quiet as it’s kept (for those not paying attention), reading has made a big comeback. The Black Romance Festival alone sold out its 2000 seats immediately when 7000 readers, mostly Black women, hopped online and tried to grab a ticket in the first fifteen minutes of sales, myself included. This culture of Black reading is all over BlackBookTok, BlackBookstagram, and the reading apps and I am here for it.
And it is a culture. There are TikTok/IG lives where folx just come to read as well as meet-ups in the park/bar/mall. I watch so many monthly reviews and monthly posts about books from Black content creators that I can’t keep up with it all. There are villains and bookbaes who I talk about as if I know them. I am on a first-name basis with every author I have read this year (the authors may not know me, but I’m their homegirl nonetheless). Young Black folx in school do deep-explaining on where they sneak time to read for pleasure. The book apps clock what I read, track my yearly targets, curate my faves, link me with dope book-friends, take stock of the genres and authors I’ve read most, and collect my reviews and fave quotes.
The BlackBookTokers I follow will read the same book across multiple modalities: hardcopy, audio, ebook, and then another hardcopy or paperback if a new version has a beautiful spray. You will get jealous of all them bookcases lining every wall with the most comfortable loungers and pillows nearby, all cozied up with an ebook page turner, ebook holder, and/or fabulous bookmarks. Issa LOT! Just extra to be extra… and so beautiful.
Spare Bedroom that I Turned into My Library
The posts— on every app— are hilarious. I fall out laughing everytime I see a sistah dogg out some dude tryna slide in her DMs when sistahgurl BEEN sayin this account is only ABOUT BOOKS. Some of these posts have entire playlists to match a book’s vibe. Some books got BlackBookTok out here dancing and I mean gettin real low too. The diss tracks on the ableist folx who say audiobooks are not real reading are priceless. The diss tracks on the unlovable folx who say romance books are trash, especially books showing Black love in a time of unmitigated anti-Black hate, are unrelenting. And you better not go on any corner of the internet and criticize smut or hood books; you gon mess around and get WHUPPED worser than the goofies and opps in urban fiction! Any BookToker who never read BIPOC but got online to commemorate the death of MAGA’s favorite 2025 white supremacist got dragged and dropped in grand ceremonial style. It ain’t about canceling; this is called CONSEQUENCES. Some call their kindle their plug and give them names. I just ordered my paperwhite for 2026. Her name is La’ Kindela (yes, the apostrophe is necessary), a title gifted to me by one of my book club members (who, despite being the sweetest person, stay reading and loving serial-killer-fiction!!! It’s wild out here!) Dope book suggestions, great book community, real good reading, and absolute outrageousness! Reading saved me from the doom of 2025.
My favorite read of 2025 was The Reformatory by Tananarive Due. If you are an educator and/or historian of Black education or if you just like Black speculative fiction, you must read this book! It will blow your mind. I will never forget it.
These were my other top favorites in 2025, books that deeply inspired me for their sociohistorical content, ancestral connections, and/or divine writing style: Black Girl Unlimited by Echo Brown; The Day God Saw Me As Black by Danyelle Thomas; Empire of AI by Karen Hao, Ring Shout by P. Djélí Clark, Son of the Morning by Akwaeke Emezi; and Zeal by Morgan Jerkins.
The King of Ashes by S.A. Cosby was another favorite. I read all of Cosby’s books in 2025, but I started with King so it will always be most memorable. I don’t really read crime-horror-thriller like that, but this one blew my mind. Sumbody go check on that man! How he got stories like this just in his head?? This is another author where I saw the hype on BlackTikTok and followed it.
And lest folx think I’m playin about my love of urban fiction, one title also made my all-time fave list: Demon’s Dream: An Expected Love by Elle Kayson. Elle did that– all 750 pages! So many people got unalived in this book, I don’t even know where to start, so I’ll just say: Damien and Smoke don’t play (if you are the pearl-clutching type, this book is not for you because the spice rack in this book is HOT AF!) Even for my old ass, these are my bookbaes for LIFE!
Here are all of the other books that I read, categorized according to my self-defined genres. This year’s reading categories for me are: A) “The People Could Fly” ; B) V.W.A.s, Haints, and All Our Hoodoo Cousins; C) A Black “Love Supreme”; D) D is for Drew Collins University; E) Poetics & Aesthetics; F) “Brickhouse”; G) WTF Did I Just Read? But… I Like It; H) “Baby, I’m a Doggggg, I’m a Mutt” Romantasy.
CATEGORY A: “The People Could Fly” | These are Speculative Black YA novels that intersect with schooling. I talked about these in a previous post (click here) related to my fall 2025 course, “Freedom School: Rhetorics and Histories of Black Education.” Because this category encompasses almost 50 titles (many of these books are series), this was almost 50% of my reading in 2025. I refer to these books as “The People Could Fly” to highlight the fact that the Black Speculative Imagination under white settler colonization begins with Black Diasporic Oral Traditions, often relayed to children, not with trendy academic theories in white university departments (click on the arrows below for the books I read).
CATEGORY B: V.W.A.s, Haints, and All Our Hoodoo Cousins| And just what is a V.W.A.? Vampires wit Attitude! BlackBookTok calls them viggas.Sinners ain’t show even half the stories that are out here. This was a big category for me this year, matching the speculative YA that fascinated me. There are so many BIPOC authors getting their lick back with BIPOC shapeshifters, haints, vampires, and conjurers that I give it is own category. For my 2025, these included: The Bewitching by Silvia Moreno-Garcia; Blood Slaves by Markus Redmond; The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones; Brothers Unholy* by Nastee (yes, that’s the authors name! hey, may as well be true to you!); Chosen by a Vampire* by Wynta Tyme (yes, that’s the authors name! cuz it’s cooold out here!); This Cursed House by Del Sandeen; The Dark Thirty by Patricia McKissack; The Deep by Rivers Solomon; Fang Gang 1, 2, AAAAND 3* by Cyn; The Good House by Tananarive Due; Her Stories: African American Folktales, Fairytales, and True Tales by Virginia Hamilton (a repeat reading for me); Khan’s Choice* by Tacarra; Moaning Bones: African American Ghost Stories by James Haskins; The People Could Fly: American Black Folktakes by Virginia Hamilton (a repeat reading for me); Root Magic by Eden Royce; The Visitors: A Louisiana Paranormal Short by De’Andrea. [Books with * mean these are spicy novellas that cross over into CATEGORY H below]
CATEGORY C: A Black “Love Supreme” | These are the Black romance books that I danced with this year. For my 2025, these included: Black by Joan Vassar; Christmas with the Steeles by Brenda Jackson; Elbert by Joan Vassar; Emancipating James by Joan Vassar; Flirting Lessons by Jasmine Guillory; Spilling the Tea by Brenda Jackson. This category will be infinitely larger in 2026, cuz I’m already makin my list and checkin it twice.
CATEGORY D: D is for Drew Collins University| And in a category all on her own is the indie author who goes by Desiree and Granger! I have an admissions certificate and sweatshirt from her fictional school, Drew Collins University— “a privately owned HBCU for Black mythical and magical beings and creatures” featuring all kindsa xxx-rated shenanigans. For my 2025, these included: Mortal Affairs; The First Family; Saint and the Queen; When a Wolf Loves the Moon; the Secret World of Maggie Grey.
CATEGORY E: Poetics & Aesthetics | Poetry books conjure words about the world’s horrors in ways that seem to surpass language, so I always read a few. Closely connected are large, Black art books for me (what foolish folx call coffee table books as if coffee needs a table) that visually take you to other worlds. For my 2025, these included: Camo by Thandiwe Muriu; Gumbo Ya Ya by Aurielle Marie; How to Survive the Apocalypse by Jacqueline Allen Trimble; If They Come For Us by Fatimah Asghar; Nana Akua Goes to School (a picture book but I’m counting it here); The Unboxing of a Black Girl by Angela Shanté.
CATEGORY F: “Brickhouse” | These fiction and non-fiction titles come with big and well-deserved acclaim so I had to read them. These writers are like that Commodore song: “awwwe, she’s a brickhouse/ she’s mighty mighty/ just lettin it all hang out… ain’t holding nuthin back.” For my 2025, these included: Ace of Spades by Faridah Ábíké-Íyímídé; Black Networked Resistance by Raven Simone Maragh-Lloyd; Chain Gang All Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah; Dominion by Addie Citchens; Junie by Erin Crosby Eckstine; Lone Women by Victor LaValle; No Gods, No Monsters by Cadwell Turnbull; Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler (a repeat reading for me); Race and Digital Media by Lori Kiddo Lopez; Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals by Alexis Pauline Gumbs (a repeat reading for me); We Tried to Tell Y’all: Black Twitter and the Rise of Digital Counternarratives by Meredith Clark. And, of course, I must never forget Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers and Vera Wong’s Guide to Snooping by Jesse Sutanto. I laughed so hard and need Sutanto to do a Vera Wong series for Netflix sooo bad (or at least hurry and give us book 3 and 4 and on and on)!
CATEGORY G: WTF Did I Just Read? But… I Like It| Look, if you a dude out here playin women, do NOT let Octavia Grant or any of the Black women writers in this category get holdt to your story. You will never be the same (or alive). For my 2025, these included: Cut Throat and Dear Vicky by Octavia Grant; Hood Holiday with a Chicago Menace by Dominique Nikail; My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Brathwaite.
Category H: “Baby, I’m a Doggggg, I’m a Mutt”Romantasy| And in a category all by itself is romantasy. My 2025 romantasy dive centered Tessa Stone and Eva O’Hare. I saw the hype on them on BlackTikTok and followed it. Many of us are still on Amazon via Kindle Unlimited because of its vast publication of Black women indie authors (there is NO other reason to be buying books from them). Tessa Stone’s many, many novellas feature shapeshifters— mostly werewolves (hence, the Leon Thomas song reference as the title of this category), who have their own self-sustaining community in Michigan. These fine-ass Black men will tear you up if you try and come for one of their fated mates. The Black women in Eva O’Hare’s novellas go even further, literally: to other planets. For my 2025, I read Tessa Stone’s 13, first-published novellas and I read 5 novellas by Eva O’Hare. Again: if you are the pearl-clutching type, these books are not for you because the spice racks in these books are HOT AF! I had a 3-week run this summer where I was reading a novella per day by these two women. I just couldn’t stop. Black women can do anything (which we always knew) and this includes making wolves and aliens real fine and lustworthy. They out here turning Amazon out!
And now… it’s time to get ready for 2026. Let’s see if I can read 126 books this year so that I can sustain my mind and soul again! Television is getting whiter and so are movies and so are school curricula and so is Twitter and so is Nicki Minaj and so is GenAI and etcetera. As the elders would say: all you gotta do is STAY BLACK. I’m reading my way onwards.
I just arrived to Denver today and so I want to situate myself on this Land. I begin this letter to you by acknowledging that the land on which we are meeting is the territory of the Cheyenne and Arapaho peoples and all of their ancestors, past, present, and future. Here on this Land, I am committed to undoing white settler colonialism in the ways in which I work, speak, and act as part of my acknowledgement. As a descendant of enslaved Africans on stolen lands, I am among those whose lived realities sit at the intersection of what I call an INTERTWINED ABOMINATION — kidnapped from one land and forced to labor on stolen land… as such I am called to work towards a sisterhood of abolition and decolonization against apartheid, settler colonialism, genocide, and settler occupation everywhere.
For a visual description: I am a light-skinned Black woman wearing three afro-puffs down her head in an afro-puff/mohawk fashion. The puffs are in the color of brown and gold in T27 Marley Hair. It’s giving the lowwww-key version of a HIGH-key Lady Charlotte of Bridgerton. I am wearing a black cowl neck shirt and black pants with a very long jewel green bib necklace and very large silver hoops. Thank you to disability justice activists/theorists who have charged us with making such visual descriptions so that we might all see our bodies and our multiple selves in deeper ways.
We have come together on this day of the conference to move towards radical imaginings. For something like that, I always turn to Black feminisms and go way back for inspiration, examples, and ways forward. This time I found myself sitting with Combahee River Collective Statement as I have so many times in my life. What I am sitting with today is how current this statement feels for me, especially these words:
We realize that the liberation of all oppressed peoples necessitates the destruction of the political-economic systems of capitalism and imperialism as well as patriarchy. We are socialists because we believe that work must be organized for the collective benefit of those who do the work and create the products, and not for the profit of the bosses… We are not convinced, however, that a socialist revolution that is not also a feminist and anti-racist revolution will guarantee our liberation…
A political contribution which we feel we have already made is the expansion of the feminist principle that the personal is political… Even our Black women’s style of talking/testifying in Black language about what we have experienced has a resonance that is both cultural and political…
We exist as women who are Black who are feminists, each stranded for the moment, working independently because there is not yet an environment in this society remotely congenial to our struggle—because, being on the bottom, we would have to do what no one else has done: we would have to fight the world.
When I return to the Combahee River Collective Statement today, I do so as a writing teacher, as a community literacies practitioner, as a literacies/composition educator. Almost 50 years later, the Collective’s words still galvanize, the ideas still ring true, the impact still remains the same for me. 50 years later! So I ask us here, as part of our radical imagining, as part of how we do our philosophies of writing and literacy in communities: what are your words/ collective manifesto/ call to political action that will embolden the most marginalized amongst us, not just today, but 50 years from now? This means something very different from what schools and school literacies present to us: a way out through bourgeois middle class consumptions and assimilations. That’s not a future— that’s just more of the same of what we already have. Radical imaginations change the very purpose of literacies and writing— because you don’t look to the here and now; you charge yourself for wide-away and far-far-away futures with the conviction that the future is moldable.
This is especially critical for me right now because this moment asks us to shrink back and make smaller demands. We see DEI programs being banned and cut. And while we must fight these bans and cuts for what they represent, we have to remember we were always asking for more anyway. Many of us were deeply enmeshed in challenging the neoliberalist, for-profit, white comfort work of DEI projects, quoting decades of criticism by Sara Ahmed practically from memory. Now we are asking and fighting for the thing that never went far enough.
After the 2020 murder of George Floyd, countless people saw that it was lucrative to present themselves as anti-racist” from schools to professional journals to Target advertisements to university think tanks. White racist, heteropatriarchal backlash came soon and swift, like it always does, and those same folx hightailed it out, all after claiming abolition and the Black Radical Tradition, but won’t even say and think FREE PALESTINE right now or challenge their publishers who are honoring racist school districts’ book bans.
That’s not the future. That’s not our radical imagining. And that’s not the kind of writing the Combahee River Collective did 50 years ago. I’ll end here with the Collective’s words: “As Black feminists and Lesbians we know that we have a very definite revolutionary task to perform and we are ready for the lifetime of work and struggle before us.” Let’s radically imagine 50 years from today, 50 years at least, of future-making against the world we have now. Understanding the Combahee River Collective demands no less than that.
Dedicated to the seven Black women and author, Ntozake Shange, of For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf… and the five Black women who have come forward as TCU’s Jane Does.
I skipped a department meeting this week. There’s nothing particularly urgent about this fact since such meetings are usually futile in their ability to accomplish actual tasks anyway. This time though, I just couldn’t bear the performance of non-Black faculty or graduate students, who are not usually even invited and were even once barricaded from entering a department meeting by a dean. Somehow all have discovered a new political voice in relation to instructional requirements under the Coronavirus… and have been deathly silent when it comes to the abuse faced by Black folk. Yes, this is a new resistance of a sort, but it is solely in the service of whiteness for whom danger and death under COVID are newfound, daily realities. I plan to keep chanting #BlackLivesMatter because I know we are not included in this rage against new white precarity.
This meeting that I skipped was with an administrator who started at the university less than a month ago. And, yup, you guessed it: a woman of color. And, yup, you guessed it: from all reports I have heard, faculty and graduate students piped up in ways they have never publicly done when white leadership was at the helm (even when it locked them outside of the door), and especially not when Black pain was the topic of discussion.
Black pain is not an abstraction in this space. In FACT, you can read all about it below in the 215-point STATEMENT OF FACTS of this lawsuit. I am pasting the whole thing here because this text needs to be required reading for those who are interested in anti-racist teaching, the racial history of higher education, and especially the brutal experiences of Black women-identified undergraduate and graduate students today.
This is what higher education looks like for Black women across the country, and these five Black women— called Jane Doe #1 (read pp. 30-66; pp. 94-99), Jane Doe #2 (read pp. 67-74), Jane Doe #3 (read pp. 74-78), Jane Doe #4 and Jane Doe #5 (read pp. 78-94)— are making history today. They faced abuse, ridicule, and neglect at the hands of their peers, faculty, and administrations in ways that would have us in uproar if they weren’t Black. The lawsuit details the ways that these women filed complaints with leaders of programs and departments seemingly everywhere, with any kind of faculty member who seemed they might listen, and with every Title IX-ish type of office designed to officially investigate such claims. NO ONE—and I mean NO ONE— ever helped or protected them. Honor and recognize these women in the ways that their campus hasn’t. I plan to keep chanting #SayHerName because I know we are not included in this rage against new white precarity.
Even though it’s summer time and technically, educators have the summer off (unless teaching summer courses), every week is some new foolishness in my inbox. It’s like school is still in session. So let’s REALLY get in session here and stay mindful of who we are as Black staff, educators, researchers, and students in this moment. Remember the stories of the Jane Does above and show some courage. It’s what they deserve. We are not going to change the academy overnight, but we can most certainly control how we act upon it RIGHT NOW:
All kinda folk need a Black friend or colleague to co-sign or advise them right now. Black advice and guidance are now the Golden Fleece of the Academy. Do not participate in these informal discussions, ad hoc committees, or free consultations. Your ideas will be plagiarized by people who do not have their own (this has always happened, but expect it to escalate). White feminists will especially call this collaboration. It’s not. Folk of color will try and milk your ideas for their own white favor and visibility too. It’s all just plagiarism without the Turnitin. Call them on it and steer clear. Stop needing to be needed. The closer you are to these vampiric people, the more you are implicated in their violence.
Let’s stick with #1 a little more here: All kinda folk will need you on their new committees, task forces, programs, mission statements, or suddenly conscious projects. Take notice when a group of BIPOC faculty is gathered together and led by a white (usually male) leader (or a person of color acting for a white leader). You are there to help the white leader who will get the credit. You are like a corporate silent partner, except without any remuneration. Don’t be fooled into thinking that whiteness values your thinking all of a sudden. The closer you are to these inauthentic projects, the more you are implicated in their violence.
If white administrators and leaders have been accused of racial harm and do not voluntarily step down from their positions, know that these are NOT allies. At a time of a global pandemic that is targeting Brown and Black peoples during unprecedented racial protest in every state of the union, an administrator who has not practiced real anti-racism and has caused harm to Black people is INCOMPETENT for the tasks at hand. IN…COM…PE….TENT. This ain’t something a workshop, apology letter, or deep meditation can fix. They must step down. If they do not, do not work with them, do not support them, do not sign on to their ideas. Monitor AS VIGILANTLY as you can how many of their meetings you must attend, how much of their policy you must implement, how much time you must spend with them. Keep your distance as best as you possibly can. Stop taking their classes and attending their workshops (contest it if it is a REQUIREMENT). The closer you are to these harmful administrators, the more you are implicated in their violence.
Notice the close friends of the white administrators and leaders who have been accused of racial harm. Their friends are NOT allies either. These are friendships based in white nepotism and advancement, a value system a real ally would forego. If you are a friend of a white administrator or leader who has been accused of racial harm, hold your homie accountable and if they refuse, get yourself some new homies. The closer you are to these anti-Black campus leaders, the more you are implicated in their violence.
For the folk who do step down (see #3 and #4), notice whether or not they actually STEP UP when they step down. I have never witnessed a white administrator step down and repair their harm. What I have always gotten is a lunch request where the only thing being served is gaslighting. For starters, the people who you have harmed do not want your lunch, coffee, or phone call so back off. We are also not interested in your life-story, list of Black-based volunteer activities as proof you are not racist, white tears, or convictions of how YOU perceive our misunderstandings of racism. Stay away from these lunches and excuses. And be wary of the warm, fuzzy, and congratulatory good-bye letters listing the outstanding accomplishments of demoted folk accused of violence. These writers are not allies either. Do not be lulled into this white complacency touted as sympathy for abusers. Wanna know what I call people who have made significant accomplishments for which they were never credited or recognized? BLACK FOLK! The closer you are to these fake apologies, the more you are implicated in their violence.
Black folk will be in high demand on thesis/ dissertation committees now. Ask yourself some questions. Are you the token? Has the rest of the committee (or at least some of them) perpetrated anti-Black harm? Does the dissertation center white theory and then merely pepper-sprinkle Black scholars on top and without deep analysis? Can you see trends in the racial politics of thesis/ dissertation committees across the country right now? How many students of a perpetrator have been hired in your field and department? How many graduate student assistants of a perpetrator have been hired in your administrative ranks? How has your department’s graduate program siphoned off its anti-Blackness into the rest of the academy? The closer you are to these anti-Black graduate students and their mentors, the more you are implicated in their violence.
Don’t trust whiteness when it uses this excuse: I didn’t know this was happening. Ignorance is not a justification for not acting towards racial justice. I have never had the luxury of not knowing when a Black student on my campus was being brutalized, even when I wasn’t actually present on the campus. Willful white ignorance is not a pass for the racial violence that serves as the foundation on which white institutions (and their white privileged accomplices) rest.
Everyone has somehow found consciousness and mission statements these days but all are still deeply wedded to institutional anti-Blackness. That is the nature of the academy. If you think your university is somehow better, then you ain’t thinkin right. If you think working outside of academia saves you, then you haven’t come to terms with the fact that INSTITUTIONAL RACISM means all institutions work within the terms of anti-Blackness, yes even in the non-profit industrial complex (actually, especially there).
These 7 points are things many of us have always kept in mind as we move through the academy. The stakes are higher now in a summer that will be like no other.
To CCW Cyphers and Our Charge to Radically Imagine!
Tracing the Canons/Cannons and Futures of Black Educational Theory in Graduate Classrooms
Not New To This/True To This: Black Language, the Internet, Southern Roots, and the Failed Entrenchments of Whiteness
When Robots Come Home to Roost: The Differing Fates of Black Language, Hyper-Standardization, and White Robotic School Writing (Yes, ChatGPT and His AI Cousins)
