*your friends, your spouse, your colleagues, your neighbors, and/or you (probably you)
Sometimes people ask me What To Do about the racists in their lives. I’ll get to my response in a second, but a lot of this smacks of not wanting to seem racist themselves, and frankly, if you are more concerned about how you come off than about the actual lives of the racialized, I don’t think you actually care. You know what seems racist? Spending time with racists. So if your concern is saving face, you’re of no use to any efforts at racial justice. …
Racism isn’t really about being mean, but maybe that should be part of fighting it
I want to be clear, this is mostly for white people. The rest of you can read this, but that’s not really who I’m talking to. But please enjoy.
So. White people. Listen to me. Some of you have come a long way (in your heads), from understanding that racism is basically nooses and burning crosses, to a terrifying realization that it’s an entire massive system that you can either choose to be a part of choose to fight. …
To support racialized scholars, we need to confront the epistemology of whiteness in the academy
Once again, I sent this out to some publications, and they weren’t into it (for obvious reasons you will see below). So now you can read it. Enjoy!
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Now that the initial wave of interest in Black lives has largely subsided, we academic types have reverted to our usual tactics, with school presidents sending electronic missives to their respective student bodies, asserting their commitment to racial justice. We have released “special issues” of journals that are in actuality cobbled-together past articles, and even changed…
I wrote this for a journal, which wasn’t into it because, well, it’s more of an essay than it is research. But here’s the thing: more of you are going to read it here anyway, and it will rapidly become irrelevant if it goes through another review process! So here you go. Enjoy!
Introduction
In this current moment of potential racial reckoning, visible changes have occurred. Statues have been toppled, more people have marched than at any other time in American history, and opinions have shifted dramatically on the pervasive results of systemic racism and anti-Black violence, even when compared…
This ended up being about Shake Shack, kind of?
I try not to curse in my public scholarship. Twitter and my podcast are rated PG-13 because they’re mostly freeform, but if I write an essay, even one like this that isn’t peer-reviewed, I make it suitable for the children (or my mother). I mention this to say that this promise I have made to myself is really going to be tested in this piece, because the subject is infuriating.
I am not on the market for a job these days, but I still get email alerts to whatever Indeed wants…
We can do better than a return to normal in the education world
We are in the middle of something now that, at least for those of us in the United States, none of us have been alive to see. Older Europeans may remember the devastation of the 1940s, and of course many other nations that the United States itself has abused can recall the trauma of national chaos and despair, but for us, in the US, this is unprecedented. What I am going to say here does not at all discount the reality of the thousands who will die here (and have already passed away in many other countries), or the complete…
