Black academia thing worth some frankness: we should work on a better culture around the combination of rank/power differences with ideological and personal disagreement (step 1 of which might be insisting more heavily that we keep track of the difference between these two) 1/9

as someone who was very recently a grad student (and now junior faculty) I have seen.experienced lots of situations where folks of higher rank seemed to be nakedly pressuring or bullying people of lower rank into personal power struggles/beefs with other parts of disciplines 2/9

Ranging from retaliation on the students of an enemy to open denigration of kinds of research or researchers, insinuating to students that they'd lose social support if they spent too much time engaging with the other side of some internal sociological dispute, etc etc 3/9

None of that is particular to Black academia - obviously. experienced or saw plenty of this in mainstream philosophy, but it was mostly just odd to me that people would try to bully others into wars of position over the proper metaphysics of holes or whatever... 4/9

What's concerns me about Black academia - here I mean academia on topics of importance to Black people, not just Black folks in academic position - are the stakes of what we are talking about. For Black academics in this culture, the personal stakes of conformity are high 5/9

those who Black academia makes its business (tm), to put it *very mildly* (especially globally speaking), are poorly served by what little research even bothers to pretend to be invested in improving our material conditions. people who matter would not be studied this way. 6/9

bullying culture makes this worse, constricting what what questions we ask and what/who we're willing to challenge. Bad for anyone Black who isn't an academic, since what matters outside the ivory tower is the knowledge and resources produced in it + their political effects 7/9

Unlike the metaphysics of holes, weighty political questions turn on what the researchers are saying about incarceration does, how welfare is racialized, etc. the corresponding academic culture should be epistemically and politically serious. bullying culture is not. 8/9

we should be supporting, not intimidating students that want to learn about things or perspectives that can move this research forward - whether it threatens to empower our rivals, activate our intellectual insecurities, or upset our current prestige hierarchy. 9/9