If you're a student who is a member of an underrepresented group and you think that getting a PhD, postdoc, or faculty position is going to make those oppressions be less impactful in your life: no, sorry.

There is no degree or job that turns the racism (other -ism) down.

The ways that you feel empowered and disempowered shape shift until you get full professor, although the balance between empowered and disempowered significantly shifts when you get tenure.

But as junior faculty, I feel precarious still, just in completely new ways and with way more people to satisfy than I've ever had to worry about. It's maddening. In a different way than being a precarious postdoc was.

Lying to people about what the road looks like is a dick move, so this is the truth. It gets better financially. A lot of other things don't get better. But you get more competent at confronting it.

The only way out of racism is ending violent white supremacist heterocispatriarchy and fixing that requires looking past personal success in academia as a solution