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It’s the season for applications for federal funding for graduate students in Canada right now and we have to talk about how this starts really really early in some white folks’ careers. https://twitter.com/taoleighgoffe/status/1301707101757231105
Which is to say that if your workshops on funding applications don’t talk about the broader structures of inequity in funding, which includes which kinds of students are encouraged to apply for funding, and who are vetted by departments and universities...you’re the problem.
And yeah, this is a huge problem in majority-white departments where it’s white folks who study and teach about race and ethnicity. Because obviously not all white folks who do are trying to be POC by omission, but one does notice who talks about their whiteness and why and how.
But also, white folks working on race who see themselves as “race traitors”...like that also doesn’t make them BIPOC? Doesn’t mean they deserve a job more?Whatever discomfort or consequence there is in divesting from whiteness is not the same as being Black (in particular).
I’m thinking about this re: recent discussions of how much money some white anti-racism writers and facilitators are making in comparison to Black folks (again, in particular, in this moment) who are doing this work.
I'm also thinking about the environment of the academy where precarity around funding and opportunities for knowledge acquisition can be a hotbed for it not being sufficient to just learn about something, but to have to try to say something about it in a particular way.
Which is to say that that amplifies the settler-colonial impulse towards evangelization and colonization, even if it's the flavour of "but I'm a white person and I gotta make this academic career happen so I can make sure other white people aren't racist, too."
In recent years I've heard discussions by white scholars - even senior scholars - who are like "well, should I just not be here then, doing this work on race? Am I taking up space?" Like, yes, maybe? And if yes and if maybe then like...what beyond the anxiety of it?
