One of the things I’ve struggled with the most about being a social psychology grad student is that many White faculty members & colleagues seem to have a deep-seated belief that their research is activism when it really just isn’t.

Writing an academic paper that ultimately gets cited by ~30 other academics is not really activism. Especially when you’re doing this research in a department that has no diversity & is upheld by workers who are being exploited, & you are not working at all to fix these issues.

I never thought that I’d be discouraged by other psychologists from engaging in efforts to better my community (e.g., being a member of my department’s diversity committee, but many of us have gotten this feedback in grad school. To be successful, we need to “be more selfish.”

And it’s really upsetting because I know that I can & should be doing much more than I am doing now. It feels deeply hypocritical to be doing any research related to social justice topics & not do any other work to try to make my community more inclusive & just.

I don’t mean to dunk on anyone who is doing important research related to social justice. But research on its own is not enough. If you’re a White social psychology faculty member, please get involved in your communities and encourage your students to do so, too.

Understand, too, that even if you do research on social justice topics, you are not absolved from critically examining your own words & actions. There are people in this field who identify as anti-racist but continue to unapologetically say & do racist things.

It’s also mindblowing to me that so many White academics seem to know how to use search engines just fine when doing their research, but when it comes to learning about racism, they demand their non-White colleagues to teach them instead. This behavior is obtuse & unacceptable.

I’m not really active on academic Twitter (esp. since the pandemic started), but I feel like this needs to be said. When White psychologists refuse to engage in activism due to fears of loss of productivity, we shift these burdens to our non-White colleagues & perpetuate racism.

Many of our Black colleagues & students are exhausted right now. For months they have been inundated with particularly graphic, catastrophic demonstrations of anti-Black racism. What work are we doing to show our solidarity with them?