#AcademicTwitter: has your department reckoned with its own disciplinary and field-specific racism? If not, it's worth questioning how and why your department is eager to jump past that critical step and move immediately to "anti-racism."

There's something about the suggestion that anti-racism is just a gut feeling that can be accomplished easily, in one summer, without critical introspection or guidance from people who have been undertaking this work their entire careers/lives that is troubling.

And, of course, we see this all the time in academia in terms of the way the work of Black and brown people is treated -- it's never viewed as specialized or expertise. As Zora Neale Hurston described it, it's assumed to be always already known and accessible to all.

Anti-racism is lifelong work. It's not a box to be checked off. If requires your recognition that racism is a permanent function of society (as Derrick Bell described) but that we are ALSO compelled to combat it wherever it emerges. It is defined by forward momentum.

Talking about anti-racism without considering racism itself, imagining anti-racism as a box to check off rather than as the beginning of continual work is the gentrification of anti-racism