In this moment, when so many of our fellow citizens are risking their lives to take to the streets and protest the systemic oppression that white supremacy visits upon the existence of Black people, the work we do at our institutions #AcademicTwitter #ShakeRace #LitPOC 1/

and in our courses and classrooms also matters. How do we uphold or challenge white supremacy? How do we normalize it in thought and language? 2/

How do we marginalize Black life and uphold our privilege by deciding whether or not to even address these events and the national crisis that they signal? 3/

We must consider these questions if we aim to uphold the values of plurality, diversity, equity, and inclusion that we and our institutions claim as foundational to our educational mission. 4/

Non-Black people and educators can no longer afford to treat systemic white supremacy as ancillary or incidental to our lives or our work. We must be worthy of this moment and confront it. 5/

As someone who teaches early modern English literature and Shakespeare, whiteness is all around me. It saturates the texts I read, written by and for white people. 6/

Indeed, it is so pervasive and all encompassing that we don’t even notice it until that whiteness is disturbed by something non-white, like me for example, a non-white scholar of Shakespeare. 7/

In my first teaching experience as a graduate student, I failed spectacularly in trying to get my majority white students to interrogate the racial politics of Shakespeare’s Othello. The fault was both mine and my students’: 8/

I lacked experience and sufficient pedagogical training to tackle this difficulty and my students lacked basic racial literacy. I took this experience personally because my students made me feel as though the tension that our discussion was generating was my fault 9/

because I, as a Brown woman, was invested in race in a way that they, as majority white people, were not. In many ways, I didn’t have a choice in thinking about how race was in the room and affecting my teaching, 10/

because my students could see, because of my identity, that it was. Yet, my race was the only one that was in the room, whiteness, even though it was there, and governed how we discussed this play, remained invisible, always exerting power but remaining unmarked & unnamed. 11/

The unmarked and unremarkable nature of whiteness is its superpower. Indeed, when we as teachers and scholars of one of the greatest white, male writers in the history of the English language, don’t position him and his work as such, we continue to feed that power. 12/

At this moment, we must stop feeding whiteness and white supremacy. We must engage in anti-racist pedagogy. If we teach Othello it can't be as a play about Blackness, because it is a play about whiteness and its desire to possess and destroy non-whiteness. 13/

We must expose the whiteness that structures and organizes our field, how these aesthetic objects are implicated in the violence of racism and systemic anti-Blackness. We cannot do otherwise. We owe it to our students. 14/

#BlackLivesMatter 15/15