White legal scholars please take note. On crowdsourcing & teaching law. Are you introducing new courses on 'race & law' or convening special blog symposia on BLM, racism, slavery & colonialism? A thread & thoughts from a non-expert scholar of colour in the legal academy. 1/10

Some imp Qs for you: (1) why are you suddenly interested in this? are you serious about racial inequality, racial hierarchies in law, racism in the legal academy or is it just the flavour of the month, you are scared of being seen as not 'doing something'? 2/10

(2) have you taught/ engaged w any of these topics before? have you researched them? do you understand the intersections between race & law? do you understand the broader context of racism, esp the structural & systemic nature of racism outside your field of legal expertise? 3/10

(3) are you really the best person to be teaching/convening this? is there someone else, a person of colour, a white scholar who has expertise in this area, who can do it better than you? if you have never done this before & think you can 'learn on the job', think again 4/10

(4) how do you plan to integrate your understandings of race & racism into your current work, in your course, in your edited series, in your blog synposia? Race isn't something you shoehorn into existing endeavours but an integral part of what you do as a scholar & teacher 5/10

(5) do you have friends or colleagues of colour you can discuss this with? have you spoken to them about their lived experiences as scholars of colour in the legal academy? What do they think? Have you asked them whether what you are doing is apopropriate? 6/10

(7) have you reached out to a scholar of colour & engaged with them about their concerns or are you merely thinking performatively about what your outcomes will be from this process? do you live values rather than perform them? 7/10

(8) have you thought of any pastoral/welfare/safeguarding issues involved in teaching/convening on issues you do not have lived experience of & have you taken steps to ensure that mechanisms are in place to address concerns & trauma of your students/ readers of colour? 8/10

(9) are you willing to mainstream race critiques into your work? are you willing to address the racist foundations of law & Eurocentricity of the legal curriculum & whiteness of the legal academy? or is this a niche or silo project? 9/10

(10) integrating race into the legal curriculum requires a deeper level engagement than crowdsourcing reading lists on Twitter. It can be very dangerous if you get it wrong. White privilege allows you to disengage when you want to, scholars of colour don't have that option. 10/10

And just as an addendum: I have been teaching a imperfect deolonised international economic law curriculum for many years now; I am a global south scholar of colour ; my expertise is IEL & development; I am privileged to have many friends, students & colleagues of colour...

Yet, I would never EVER think I would be able to convene a seminar let alone a semester-long long course on 'race & international law' because I just do not have the expertise nor sufficiently racially literate in that way to do so.

My friend & comrade @TaraVanHo also has an excellent & more detailed thread on this: https://twitter.com/taravanho/status/1275162773425709058?s=21 https://twitter.com/taravanho/status/1275162773425709058