English departments have so much work to do to correct course on the insidious racism they have visited on their faculty, their students, and thinking itself.

I can name three English departments right now completely sundered because of the racism they won’t address or discuss.

And all while they sink under failing enrollments, leaching talent as fast as they can hire.

But truly the greatest evil is this: that literature itself continues to imagine worlds beyond the one we exist in now and that recalcitrant faculty get in the way of the many students who want to meet us there.

Disciplinary suicide by racist ignorance.

Anti racism is what would actually save literature departments if people would only get out of the way.

Not for the sake of the departments. But for the sake of what can happen when more people meet in the sacred space that literature makes when more and then even more people read together.

And I say this not to defend The Literary, the way Literature so often does in its profoundly amoral and violent ways. But to say: enough gate keeping. Enough confusing literature with social capital. No more deploying art against justice.

No more barring students from their right to learn by protecting a space that denies that entire other worlds and ways exist.