Robin D.G. Kelley's foreword to Black Marxism by Cedric Robinson is fascinating and I am inordinately excited to read this book.

I wish I'd read this in law school, and I'm reflecting on how white my radical theory and history reading has been, and I'm just glad there's still

some time to catch up (though, really not much at all).

Also recently started listening to the audiobook of Orientalism, and it's like there was a scheduled event in my radical curriculum to put all the pieces together around whiteness.

It's overdue, and so that's one reason

I'm tweeting about it. I haven't avoided Black authors, but I have approached radical education with the same Eurocentric and Orientalist biases that you would expect a white leftist to have. I am extremely interested in removing these filters from my analysis of the world.

It is really important, and it is not part of a game of woke one-upsmanship, for white radicals and participants in liberation movements to study anti-racist ideas and strive toward anti-racism. All the credit to Ibram X. Kendi's book How to Be An Antiracist for that formulation

Some very great law students follow me, and so I also just wanted to advertise being a philosophy nerd who is interested in talking about theory and the law and liberation all the time.

Keeping law school grounded in a radical context is hard to do, and in retrospect,

I probably would have read even more theory during school if I had engaged more with the Black Radical Tradition, and I thought it would be worthwhile to point out that being white and the false psychological security that provides is what made me drag my feet.

So, to conclude

whiteness will not just go away. It is a product of law, and white people derive substantial material and psychological benefits from keeping it unexamined. It is not enough to click through an implict bias test.