Read on Twitter
Blackness isn& #39;t a fun theoretical exercise or a thought experiment--a space to demonstrate one& #39;s own intellectual prowess or a tool to prove one& #39;s political commitments. It is, of course, a contested, capacious category that far exceeds identity, *and* it& #39;s home. I live here. +
I know black life intimately; I love black people. I& #39;m not afraid to encounter blackness as unfamiliar or as fraught, as a constellation of possibilities I haven& #39;t imagined. I still have much to read and I like to leave space for play, but sometimes (esp. white) academics seem +
to forget--if they ever knew--that blackness conjures whole worlds. There are bodies of work that think through (some of) them, in and outside the ivory tower, but these worlds exist and are coming into existence in ways that resist or refuse apprehension too. Working "on," or +
even with and through, blackness doesn& #39;t absolve anyone of the responsibility to reckon with their relations. By that I mean not only personal and professional connections, but the (imperial, settler colonial) histories of which they& #39;re a part, the genealogies they& #39;re building, +
the silences they& #39;re leaving, the communities implicated in their work, both as subjects (or worse, objects) of study and as the audience. Esp. if those two groups aren& #39;t imagined to overlap.
I& #39;m not convinced it should be an entirely independent process of introspection. +
I& #39;m not convinced it should be an entirely independent process of introspection. +
It& #39;s too easy to think oneself out of accountability. "It& #39;s not relevant because I am..." or "my field is...," but no one is above it and least of all people in a position to shape student minds, public memory, scholarship, even policy at and above the institutional level. +
And it doesn& #39;t make sense to talk about impact--to insist on it as a metric for success, then to claim that one& #39;s own scholarship is at worst neutral, at best positive; that it does no harm. Consider at least that it could, and work from there.
I& #39;ve written (tweeted) about +
I& #39;ve written (tweeted) about +
this theme before and as I reflect on my Twitter presence, I feel ambivalent about returning to it. I have said nothing new and can expect no change, so rather than record a familiar frustration, perhaps I should devote myself to more constructive work--work more likely to +
"spark joy" and to reflect my desires, not academia& #39;s deficits. It& #39;s critical for me to reorient myself towards blackness, to let myself have and find language for my relationship to it, to figure out what love and care can do. I& #39;m not sure this is the space to do that work and +
I treat my platform at least partly as an archive of my experience in grad school, so...I vent. I hope that when I remind people to "reckon with their relations," it& #39;s more productive than mere frustration because I expect, and know other people expect, my negative feelings +
to have a use value. I like to imagine my reflections might prompt more than a like or retweet. The dopamine hit isn& #39;t the point and perhaps in an attempt to engage with the metatext in play here, I& #39;ve lost the point altogether, but.
It& #39;s strange to hear/read non-black and +
It& #39;s strange to hear/read non-black and +
esp. white academics talk about blackness and to realize that it& #39;s little more than an abstraction for them (or at least, in their scholarship). It& #39;s jarring to see the limits of their engagement with black thinkers and black thought, with the field of Black Studies altogether. +
I cannot help but think that if someone& #39;s inheritance (broadly defined) is rooted in the ownership of black people, white supremacist violence, etc., and when their work is enabled by the same, it behooves them to recognize it and to ensure they don& #39;t reproduce those dynamics. +
It& #39;s possible there& #39;s some work that can only reproduce those dynamics and if so, I think people are better not to do it. That& #39;s what it means (for me) to reckon with relations.
When I say that we all have to do this work, I mean it. I live and breathe anti-blackness, too, but +
When I say that we all have to do this work, I mean it. I live and breathe anti-blackness, too, but +
our relationships to blackness and to white supremacist power differ. The forms of engagement and action required/produced through them will, too.
Blackness necessarily reflects the lack Europeans desired, and imposed on us by force, but it& #39;s not an invitation to continue +
Blackness necessarily reflects the lack Europeans desired, and imposed on us by force, but it& #39;s not an invitation to continue +
producing black people as lacking, as in need of interventions that aren& #39;t intervening at all.
