Tag: racism

People of color are similarly hypervigilant when we navigate a white social world. We screen our jokes, our laughter, our emotions and our baggage. We constantly manage complex social interactions so we aren’t fired, isolated, misunderstood, miscast or murdered. We can come home, if you’re lucky enough to have a home, and turn off that setting.

Tressie McMillan Cottom, How we make black girls grow up too fast, The New York TImes

Reasons for quitting academia:

  • Consistently have to apologize to white men who are themselves assholes and in the wrong
  • White men are expected to do less service or teaching, and get rewarded when they jump the gun or behave inappropriately
  • Women must be twice as good to get the same opportunities as men, and this is particularly true of people of color
  • Women and people of color in positions of power buy into the system and do not do the work to protect people low on the hierarchy, pushing the burden of success and safety onto them
  • Faculty participate in diversity initiatives supposedly to improve diversity in the field, but then continue to behave in unjust ways
  • Endless push to get more underrepresented groups and women into the field, but without fixing the conditions that make them quit in the first place
  • Academia values productivity, measured as number of publications, at the expense of quality and depth
  • Faculty positions require teaching, administrative duties, student mentoring, and research for promotions and tenure, but the dearth of faculty positions and the dwindling amount of grant money means that junior faculty are pushed into overwork (60-80 hours per week) to meet the basic expectations of university administrations
  • Overproduction of PhDs means that getting a PhD only qualifies you for more training, requiring multiple moves and extended periods of instability
  • Overproduction of PhDs also means that extremely qualified academics end up going to ‘low-tier’ schools to teach, pushing research expectations up everywhere regardless of course-load or financial support
  • Academic work is undervalued so that both postdoctoral work and the majority of faculty positions are severely underpaid, especially as they require much more than 40 hours a week to fulfill all expectations
  • Postdoctoral trainees are often considered little more than indentured servants, and are treated neither as employees nor as students
  • Most academic positions are in geographical locations that are undesirable for most academics
  • Getting a job, getting tenure, and getting promotions depends as much on politics as on your quality as a researcher or teacher
  • Pervasive belief that academia, more than a job, is a vocation, to which you must sacrifice everything or be considered unworthy or undeserving, to the extent that looking for better opportunities is considered immoral or questionable

If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.

Lyndon B. Johnson

The architects and cheerleaders of the Republican party’s policies are, with a few exceptions, white people. The voters they turn out in midterm and presidential elections are, with a few exceptions, white people. Their opposition to the president and to Democrats didn’t need to be racist in order to be racialized. Those demographic facts were true long before Obama, but his presidency and the monochromatic opposition party arrayed in lockstep against him certainly seemed to cast those dynamics into sharper relief. There was no way to unsee it.

Gene Demby, Obama’s racial legacy: Some last words on the first black president, NPR

The grand negotiation amounts to a whitewash operation. The majority of white Trump voters (as distinct from those who like to light up crosses and have no problem with racism) are presently invested in conceptualizing ethical positions in which they can feel not racist while fully and willingly enjoying all the benefits of an openly racist system wherein whiteness has an immense value. This is not new either. Indeed, this is how white America has operated for a long while. […] But the only ethics that matter are act-based ethics—it’s what you do that matters, not what you feel.

Aleksander Hemon, Screw Your Feelings, Slate

We’re not angry that our candidate lost. We’re angry because our candidate’s losing means this country will be less safe, less kind, and less available to a huge segment of its population, and that’s just the truth. […] And it is not only that these things have been ratified by our nation that grieve us; all this hatred, fear, racism, bigotry, and intolerance—it’s knowing that these things have been amen-ed by our neighbors, our families, our friends, those we work with and worship alongside. That is the most horrific thing of all. We now know how close this is. It feels like living in enemy territory being here now, and there’s no way around that. We wake up today in a home we no longer recognize. We are grieving the loss of a place we used to love but no longer do.

John Pavlovitz, Here’s why we grieve today

There’s another side to this. People have talked about a miracle. I’m hearing about a nightmare. It’s hard to be a parent tonight for a lot of us. […] You have people putting children to bed tonight and they’re afraid of breakfast. […] This was many things. This was a rebellion against the elites, true. This was a reinvention of politics and polls, true. We’ve talked about race–we’ve talked about everything but race tonight. We’ve talked about income, we’ve talked about class. This was a whitelash. This was a whitelash against a changing country. This was a whitelash against a black president, in part. And that’s where the pain comes.

Van Jones, CNN