#BlackLivesMatter, education, James Baldwin, race, racism, Ralph Ellison

Why Dorothy Counts?

“I must admit this is a strange book,” Eddie S. Glaude Jr. explains in the “Introduction” to Begin Again, explaining:

It isn’t biography, although there are moments when it feels biographical; it is not literary criticism, although I read Baldwin’s nonfiction writings closely; and it is not straightforward history, even though the book, like Baldwin, is obsessed with history. Instead, Begin Again is some combination of all three in an effort to say something meaningful about our current times. (p. xviii)

One such “something meaningful” is quite large: “A moral reckoning is upon us, and we have to decide, once and for all, whether or not we will truly be a multiracial democracy” (p. xix).

Begin Again by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.
Begin Again, Eddie S. Glaude Jr.

Addressing that large scope for the book, Glaude navigates James Baldwin witnessing and confronting “the lie“:

The lie is more properly several sets of lies with a single purpose. If what I have called the “value gap” is the idea that in America white lives have always mattered more than the lives of others, then the lie is a broad and powerful architecture of false assumptions by which the value gap is maintained. These are the narrative assumptions that support the everyday order of American life, which means we breathe them like air. We count them as truths. We absorb them into our character. (p. 7; see Chapter One excerpt for a full explication of “the lie”)

But as Glaude notes about his own transition form Ralph Ellison to Baldwin—”Baldwin was too personal. In contrast, Ellison remained hidden behind his elegant words and powerful insight” (p. xxiv)—another “something meaningful” is as small as an individual person, a jumbled intersection with Baldwin, Dorothy Counts:

This picture signaled an end to segregation. Why has so little ...
Photograph: Douglas Martin/AP

Chapter Two, “Witness,” opens with the harrowing story or Dorothy “Dot” Counts, a Black teenager carrying the weight of integrating Harding High School in Charlotte, NC, in 1957.

“Dot walked a racist gauntlet to enter Harding High School,” Glaude details. “She made the walk for just three more days before deciding never to return” (p. 30).

The racist anger launched repeatedly at a fifteen-year-old young woman personifies the lie, but that indelible image of Dot Counts became a twisted mythology for Baldwin (even as he fumbled details and the facts of history):

[I]n No Name in the Street, [Baldwin] would start at the beginning, with the image of her amid the hatred on her first day, and use the famous photo [above] of Dorothy to justify his own decision to join the fray….

Looking back, after the deaths of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr., the photo with all of its pathos, anguish, and pride represented for Baldwin in 1972 the demand to bear witness to what was happening in 1957 and to what had transpired since, which led to his [mistaken] recollection of it in No Name in the Street. Dot’s eyes captured the trauma of that journey. Baldwin sought to narrate what happened on the eve of a social movement that would attempt to transform the country, and to testify to that odd combination of trauma and grit, which he now knew so well, seen in a fifteen-year-old black girl’s courage that spurred him, so he believed, to leap into the fire. (p. 43)

So, why Dorothy Counts?

Glaude weaves a motif of trauma through this work, and certainly there is trauma linking Baldwin and Counts, the latter more often than not ignored by white America: “It has never been America’s way to confront the trauma directly, largely because the lie does not allow for it” (p. 46). The result, Glaude notes, is “historical gaslighting.”

That did not happen, or That did not happen that way, or That is only the past, not who we [Americans] are today—so it goes.

While Baldwin’s mythology of Counts and his charge to bear witness are a narrative of the South, it certainly has become a prescient story about all of America, especially those supporting Trump:

The white southerner had to lie continuously to himself in order to justify his world. Lie that the black people around hum were inferior. Lie about what he was doing under the cover of night. Lie that he was Christian. For Baldwin, the accumulation of lies suffocated the white southerner. (p. 49)

That was then; this is now:

We are told every day not to believe what we see happening all around us or what we feel in the marrow of our bones. We are told, for example, that Trumpism is exceptional, a unique threat to our democracy. thus view that Trump, and Trump alone, stresses the fabric of the country lets us off the hook. It feeds into the lie that Baldwin spent the majority of his life trying to convince us to confront. It attempts to explain away as isolated events what today’s cellphone footage exposes as part of our everyday experience. Exceptionalizing Trump deforms our attention…. Trump represents a reassertion of the belief that America is, and always will be, a white nation. (p. 54)

Read Glaude’s exceptional work grounded in Baldwin and you will soon learn that there is no question why Dorothy Counts.

Dorothy Counts-Scoggins Still Fighting

This picture signaled an end to segregation. Why has so little changed?

From Observer archives (2007): Dorothy Counts at Harding High, a story of pride, prejudice

Where Are They Now?: Dorothy Counts

#BlackLivesMatter, education, Sports, White Fragility, Whiteness

Big Time Football: “angry white man society”

While Trevor Lawrence—probably the highest profile white Division I college football player in 2020—has become the face for the #WeWantToPlay campaign calling for a start to college football amidst a pandemic, the Colorado State University football program has been forced to reckon with a racially toxic culture, implicating their former coach and current assistant coach at the University of South Carolina (Mike Bobo).

The #WeWantToPlay campaign appears to be garnering greater media and public coverage, but the CSU controversy should not be ignored, and should not be examined as a culture problem somehow centered only at CSU or in the individual coaches named in that coverage.

Charges by Black players at CSU are powerful and damning:

Image

However, again, this is not about CSU solely or a few high-profile coaches; this is about “closed systems” and a normalized culture of abuse “hidden in plain sight”:

Image

Black athletes describing the culture of their football program as “an angry white man society” can and should be amplified to describe the entire system of big time football in the U.S. Start by considering the numbers:

Div I head coach race football
NCAA Demographics Database

The power-base of college football is significantly skewed toward white men, disproportionate to percentage of white men in general U.S. society as well as disproportionate to the demographics of men who play the sport:

In mass media and popular culture, sport is often presented as a level playing field where the most skilled and committed athletes rise to the top. The racial composition of American football is often presented as evidence of the supposed meritocracy of sport. While 13.2 percent of the U.S. population is black, 47.1 percent of NCAA Division I football players and 68.7 percent of National Football League (NFL) players are black.

White Americans hold the vast majority of power and wealth in the U.S., skewed significantly toward white men. Yet, white Americans tend to struggle with concepts of systemic inequity (racism, sexism, etc.) that depend on understanding the invisibility of white privilege for white people and the key statistical concept exposed above, “disproportion.”

Even as the killing of George Floyd by a police officer has reignited awareness and public protests about police violence being racist, this movement has not silenced or erased the “but police shoot and kill more white people” response, echoed by the current white nationalist POTUS.

For people with power, then, grasping data about disproportion is often a paradoxical experience (Simpson’s Paradox) because of white denial and white fragility:

The people making this argument don’t dispute the fact that police kill Black people at disproportionate rates. A Black person in America is roughly three times more likely than a white person to be killed by police. But according to this argument, the disparity is rooted in crime rates and more frequent encounters with police, not racism. In 2018, the rate of arrests for violent crime was 3.6 times higher for Black people than white people. So actually, the argument goes, Black people are underrepresented as victims of police killings, after controlling for the number of encounters.

Big time college football is both a reflection and perpetuation of the larger systemic inequities (such as racism and sexism) throughout the U.S.

But the current charges against coaches and the program (culture) at CSU are not merely a condemnation of CSU or the former and current head coaches. These charges are historical and current features of sports across the U.S., starting when athletes are children and running through the very small percentage who make sports their livelihoods.

The mythology that coaches (overwhelmingly white men) are building character in their athletes and are nearly universally “God-fearing, good family men” is one of the ugliest lies in American culture.

Sports in the U.S. is never about building character and certainly isn’t in the service of God (despite the veneer of Christianity that is layered onto every aspect of scholastic sports in the U.S.), but about winning and the wealth and aggrandizement of coaches and the institutions associated with those teams at the expense of the athletes (often disproportionately Black bodies):

“After watching George Floyd being humiliated before he died, it triggered in me the times I saw or heard about certain coaches humiliate student-athletes and the fact that not going public made me complicit and compromised my integrity,” said the 65-year-old Stewart, who is white. “I also became conscious that racism is about being a bully. In that encounter with the Black student-athlete, Coach Addazio had this attitude that he’s bigger and more powerful than the student-athlete. The student was enslaved.”

The day-to-day normalized behavior of coaches—yelling, berating, swearing, threatening—would be viewed as bullying and abuse in virtually all other situations where there is the sort of power, age, and racial imbalance as there exists in sports.

The abrupt and sustained pauses created by the Covid-19 pandemic have the potential for not only the needed reckonings echoing around many of the foundational aspects of American culture but also long-overdue revolutions in those institutions, including how we educate young people as well as how young people are invited into and coached through sports (since in the U.S. formal education and sports are nearly inextricably intertwined).

White men coaches are reinforced at every turn that they are “good men” despite their behaving as bullies, despite their racist and sexist ideologies mostly veiled or closeted behind the secrecy of male bonding and locker rooms:

A member of CSU’s football staff said Addazio has downplayed the COVID-19 health threat and Black Lives Matter movement, which have dominated public discussion in recent months, calling both a “distraction from football” to be managed.

“He’s smart enough not to come right out in public and say it, but he thinks BLM (Black Lives Matter) is a crock of s—, and that has come out in meetings,” said the football staff member who wished to remain anonymous. “When we had the incident with the player (a Black CSU football player was held at gunpoint by a white man while working in Loveland), the players wanted to march with shirts that had BLM on it, make posters and say chants. He told them if you are going to do that we aren’t marching.”

CSU and the University of South Carolina likely have some hard decisions to make, and probably are hoping to sweep all this under the rug while people struggle against the avalanches of crises surrounding them—from the Covid-19 pandemic to the rumbles of a 5.1 magnitude earthquake at the North Carolina/Virginia border.

I suspect these universities will issue a few more statements, probably conduct some investigations and also create reports months down the line; there may be some very mild consequences for the coaches named (but their already earned millions will not be touched, of course).

The white coaching shuffle, in which mediocre white men fail upward while stepping on those Black bodies for leverage, will continue, however.

The messages coming from Black football players at CSU are not just about CSU, or big time college football, or the most disturbing aspects of coaching; the messages coming from Black football players at CSU are about systemic inequities pervading all aspects of the U.S.

Big time college football is an important subset of American culture, a point being fumbled by Lawrence calling for #WeWantToPlay.

The U.S does not need major college football to return to normal and resume as soon as possible in the coming weeks, the fall of 2020.

A full and complete unmasking of big time college football would be welcomed, and should precede any efforts to return to our contemporary and slightly sanitized gladiator event that was always about sacrificing some Other bodies.

UPDATE

ACC players speak out against Trevor Lawrence 

See Also

Dabo Swinney and the White-Man No-Apology Apology

The Christian Veneer: On Dabo Swinney and Donald Trump

Confronting Aaron Hernandez, Big Time Football, and Toxic Masculinity

The United States of Hypocrisy: Scholastic Sports

College Athletes’ Academic Cheating a Harbinger of a Failed System

Coach K, Sports Fandom, and More on My Redneck Past

I Swear: On “Grit,” Adult Hypocrisy, and Privilege

 

#BlackLivesMatter, memoir, race, racism

Neil Young v. Lynyrd Skynyrd 2020: “Southern Man” Redux

What happens to a dream deferred?

“Harlem,” Langston Hughes

My empty-headed adolescence spanned the 1970s—I turned 18 and graduated high school in 1979—in rural upstate South Carolina, only about 25 minutes away from where I live now.

Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama” and “Free Bird” were persistent background music on the radio and in dance clubs well into my college life. I never owned a Lynyrd Skynyrd album, but I knew every word to both songs and gleefully (and mindlessly) sang along to them in my car or holding a long-neck Budweiser on 25-cent beer night at O’Sullivan’s.

I was a very conflicted, insecure, and anxious-to-near-paralysis teenager, and my musical tastes reflected the jumble of the mindlessness (Tom Petty, Eagles) with my late-to-develop serious interest in music that I didn’t just know the lyrics, but began to think about their implications (Parliament, Pink Floyd).

My deep and careful affection for Neil Young did not develop until the 1980s. But like most people, I was always aware of the so-called feud between Young and Lynyrd Skynyrd.

The songs that are permanently intertwined are Young’s “Southern Man” and “Alabama” (which Young has distanced himself from in moments of self-criticism) that spurred Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama” with the infamous lines:

Well I heard Mr. Young sing about her (Southern man)
Well, I heard ol’ Neil put her down
Well, I hope Neil Young will remember
A Southern man don’t need him around, anyhow

And that band’s iconic single cover art also sent a pretty strong symbolic message:

While the band’s relationship with the Confederate Flag is complicated, Lynyrd Skynyrd as a band and MCA Records were certainly intentional about fostering a strong relationship with some of the worst realities about Southern pride.

Young’s “Southern Man” and “Alabama,” of course, took square aim at those Southern sins, prompting (as some have tried to clarify) Lynyrd Skynyrd to write “Sweet Home Alabama” as a rebuttal anthem along the lines of “Not all Southerners.”

Young has noted that his songs may have painted with too broad a brush, but Lynyrd Skynyrd’s revisionist explanations stretch credulity.

Both the tension and controversy surrounding Young and Lynyrd Skynyrd were grounded in a sort of regionalized ideological divide that remains today—Young as the liberal Canadian and Lynyrd Skynyrd as the conservative Southerners.

I was born and raised in the racist, redneck Southern culture that embraced and celebrated Lynyrd Skynyrd and the Confederate Flag. Both are steeped in a sort of jumbled logic about tradition and pride that refuses to acknowledge the harsh realities of racism that created the South but also lingers in the South and its traditions (such as the Confederate Flag and idealized mythologies about Dixie and the Lost Cause whitewashing of the Civil War).

It took a great deal of critical introspection for me to slay that past, deconstruct and then reject it, and it took too much time for that process, a transition occurring while I was an undergraduate (a racial awakening overlapping with many nights at O’Sullivan’s singing along to “Free Bird” and holding a long-neck Budweiser).

In Young, the Self I constructed out of the shell that chose to walk away from my racist upbringing found the music and lyrics that resonated with the person I wanted to become.

Recently, I saw a post on social media asking people to choose between Neil Young or Lynyrd Skynyrd. At first, it seemed out of place in 2020.

Like others who replied, my first thought was there is no choice here; it is Young because of the many problems surrounding Lynyrd Skynyrd, including “Sweet Home Alabama” and their embracing the Confederate Flag.

Over five decades, however, there really is nothing simple about that choice because it is 2020.

The Southern-apologist strategy is alive and well in 2020 even as states have taken more aggressive approaches to renaming buildings and removing statues honoring Civil War figures who unequivocally were racists and slavery enablers.

The jumbled history of Lynyrd Skynyrd and the band’s relationship with both the Old South and the New South are an aging quilt, but the threads of that quilt are being disturbingly re-spun in support for Trump by reinvigorated white nationalists in the U.S.

And while conservatives have long clung to “Sweet Home Alabama” and “Free Bird” as right-wing anthems, Republicans have also co-opted Young’s “Rockin’ in the Free World,” and Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.”—seemingly (mis)understood with the same sort of empty-headedness I practiced as a redneck singing along to “Sweet Home Alabama” in the 1970s.

History has been far more kind to Young’s efforts at social consciousness through his music than to Lynyrd Skynyrd regardless of to what degree you backward (re)construct their messages about the South and its iconography (people claim, for example, the “Boo! Boo! Boo!” following “In Birmingham they love the governor” as both rejecting and endorsing infamous racist George Wallace).

There is an irony to asking people to choose between Young and Lynyrd Skynyrd—the former a flawed but earnest choice and the latter a tarnished if not irreparably stained choice.

There was never room for the Confederate Flag, and “Not all Southerners” is a coward’s plea against the historical and lingering systemic racism that plagues not just the South but the entire U.S.A.

But 2020 has proven James Baldwin’s edict: “the time is always now.”

Lynyrd Skynyrd, the original band, and the reconstructed Lynyrd Skynyrd as well as their fans are real-life examples of the great failure of the South, clinging to the old ways simply because they are the old ways.

So much of literature has warned about the folly of pride that it feels cliche, but “Proud to be a Southerner” and “Proud to be an American” both fall flat against the “rigid refusal” to acknowledge our sins past and current.

Now, Young recognizes his warning “Southern change gonna come at last” ( applies to the entire country, not just the region he targeted:

Young posted a 2019 performance of the song on his Archives Wednesday, writing: “Here’s me as an old guy singin’ his 50-year-old song that was written after countless years of racism in the USA. And look at us today! This has been going on for way too long. It’s not just ‘Southern Man’ now. It’s everywhere across the USA. It’s time for real change, new laws, new rules for policing.”

It’s 2020 and there is no credible way to justify Lynyrd Skynyrd, just as there is no credible way to justify Trump.

It’s 2020 and there really is no choice, but it certainly is time to make the choice in ways other than mere words or simply clinging to something that should have never been held dear to begin with.

#BlackLivesMatter, education, race, racism

Academic Freedom, Pedagogy, White Privilege, and Racism in Higher Education

“Reckoning” is an imposing word for those with power and privilege; for white people in the U.S. the threat or possibility of a reckoning is often terrifying, triggering what has now been identified as white fragility.

For those abused, assaulted, or marginalized by racism, sexism/misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, etc., the possibility of a reckoning is exhilarating—although tinted with at least skepticism if not cynicism about any reckoning coming to fruition.

Amidst a pandemic, however, the murder of George Floyd at the knee of a police officer seems to have reignited with a renewed stamina the #BlackLivesMatter movement.

Professional sports, including even the ultra-conservative NFL, have blinked finally against the call for police reform and racial reform across all aspect of the U.S.

Like the symbolism now being allowed and celebrated in the NBA and WNBA, the diversity and inclusion initiatives in U.S. higher education remain mostly rhetoric (and seemingly endless committee work).

While higher education is often characterized (and demonized) as some sort of insular liberal and progressive playground for college professors, the truth is that colleges and universities—like K-12 schools—are deeply conservative and mostly a reflection of society and the populations they serve.

Yes, a good portion of college faculty talk the talk of moderates and progressives, but almost all institutions are conservative by nature in order to exist; revolutionary behavior fits poorly with the economics of running a college or university.

Public universities are governed by politicians (mostly conservative and right-leaning moderate across the U.S.), and college and university boards tend to be populated by wealthy and conservative advocates for sustaining the institution (not brainwashing students with Marxism).

We of a genuine leftist persuasion, Marxists or critical scholars, are small outliers on college and university campuses; we are at best begrudgingly tolerated, often with significant consequences to our professional and personal lives.

Here’s the ugly truth—colleges and universities are systemically inequitable places. The campus, dorm, and classroom cultures are more often than not hostile to marginalized groups.

Black students, for example, are under-represented on college campuses (except at HBCUs), and even though women are the majority of students at those colleges and universities, they still must navigate sexual assault and harassment cultures with weak university support as well as significant inequities in access to majors as well as extracurricular activities such as athletics.

At my university, there have been a number of diversity and inclusion movements over the years, and we have fairly recently hired a Chief Diversity Officer.

The university has also been relatively proactive in confronting the racism in the founding of the institution, creating a report, Seeking Abraham, and establishing a series of action steps to address the racism built into the institution.

Yet, a new reckoning appears to be upon the university, best represented by an Instagram account, Black at Furman.

Alumni have been posting anonymously, detailing that the campus, dorms, and classrooms have been and remain hostile environments for students who have been marginalized by race, gender, nationality, sexuality, etc.

To their credit, administration at the university has responded positively so far to a petition by those running the IG account. Faculty seem also more motivated than in the past to acknowledge and address campus-wide inequities, especially those impacting Black students.

Along with other faculty, I have created a Equity, Anti-Racism, and Anti-Bias Statement, fore-fronting it on all course materials across my fall load:

#BlackLivesMatter

In my teaching, scholarship, public writing, and life, I am fully committed to racial, gender, and all forms of equity not yet realized throughout the U.S. and world. While academic spaces are often intellectually challenging and even uncomfortable, I will not tolerate in any aspect of this course language, ideas, or behavior/symbolism that are hostile to marginalized/oppressed groups (racism, sexism/misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, etc.).

Academic freedom for students and professors is tethered to consequences, and is not license. (See Free Speech and Diversity of Thought?)

Students uncertain about what language and ideas are not acceptable because they are hostile or offensive are invited to discuss those questions with me privately and are guaranteed those exchanges will be treated confidentially and respectfully. I am eager to share evidence, research, and reading to help anyone better understand goals of equity, anti-racism, and anti-bias (see materials in Box, Race and Racism).

If you witness or experience any form of bias, please report here:

Bias Incident Report

Anti-racism and anti-bias practice has been central to my teaching career for almost four decades; students are well aware of where I stand against the -isms that deform us, and my public work (such as my blogs) and my scholarship are firmly grounded in critical pedagogy, critical race theory, and critical discourse analysis.

I have also been a vocal critic of the ways in which my university falls short of critical practice and ant-racism/anti-bias commitments.

Yet, the IG account has highlighted in vivid and disturbing ways that far too often—and like many colleges and universities—inexcusable behavior is tolerated in dorms, across campus, and in classrooms because of tradition, fear of upsetting students and parents as customers, and more insidious ideologies such as academic freedom and narrow (traditional) expectations for research, scholarship, and teaching.

Central to my statement above, I think, is a confrontation of academic freedom and how it has been weaponized in the name of white privilege and racism.

Again, read the experiences of Black students in courses at my university, class sessions where language and comments that have no credibility have been allowed and have created hostile learning environments for Black students.

As I note in the statement, academic freedom is not license; it is not about “anyone can says anything in a class setting.”

For example, biology professors might acknowledge creationists and their rejecting Darwinism/evolution, but many do not, and certainly none suggest that “counter opinion” is credible in the field fo science.

How much time is spent in courses on World War II allowing Holocaust deniers equal time? Do we allow students to hold forth about the credibility of exterminating Jews?

In other words, academic freedom is about the boundaries of a discipline, and who determines the boundaries. Biology professors determine the boundaries for teaching evolution (not the university’s board of directors), and that is academic freedom.

Academia is not about knowledge bereft of moral or ethical parameters.

I will not sit in a classroom and allow students to create the sort of hostile environment former students lived and learned through because of the negligence of their professors and the university’s administration.

In the U.S., our government failure is a lack of political will, allowing and perpetuating what is ethically wrong because doing so gains political capital.

This, I fear, is an equally valid commentary on higher education.

College and university administrators and faculty too often lack the political and ethical will to simply do the right thing.

Academic freedom, how we teach (pedagogy), and what we teach are sacred and even potentially beautiful things, enormously valuable to the students who walk the grounds and sit in our classrooms.

But we have failed too, too many of those students; we have hidden behind a tarnished vision of academic freedom and proper pedagogy.

Let’s hope this reckoning is the real thing. It is long past due.

Recommended

This Ain’t Another Statement! This is a DEMAND for Black Linguistic Justice!

communism, Covid-19

Social-Distance Traveling during the Covid-19 Pandemic

DevilsBackbone
Cycling through the back roads to the south of Horsetooth Reservoir is an annual adventure.

For nearly a decade, I have been taking about a 2-week trip in July or early August for a cycling/brewery vacation. Many of the trips have been to Colorado, but also Asheville, NC and Fayetteville, AR (where I am sitting now).

To insure a good place to stay, reservations must be made many months ahead of this trip; so for the summer of 2020, I had secured and apartment near Old Town in Ft. Collins, CO many weeks before the reality of the Covid-19 pandemic occurred.

Beginning in early to Mid-March, my life has been changed significantly as it has been for most of the world. Also, I and my family as well as close friends have had to make decisions about how to navigate the pandemic in terms of social distancing.

Throughout the first phase of Covid-19, the shut-down phase, and into the phased-in reopening, I have taken a practical approach, recognizing the threat of the pandemic to myself and my communal responsibility.

I have maintained a semi-normal outdoor routine (I am an avid cyclist), but have stopped group riding (riding alone or with one or a very few other cyclists). I have also restricted my “social” activities to outdoor seating or take-out.

One of the most fascinating aspects of the pandemic has been the wearing of masks; yes, I wear a mask for being indoors and especially when being indoors is crowded.

As June slipped by, then, I and a couple friends had to make a decision about the trip to Ft. Collins (which was to include a brief stop in Great Bend, KS and a few days in Fayetteville, AR). Since the U.S. is mostly in a re-opening mode—and since several states such as my home state of SC are handling that badly, with Covid-19 cases increasing at record-setting rates—we decided that a trip while maintaining the same approach to social distancing created only slightly greater risks to ourselves and others.

EstesParkhike
Our day of hiking at Estes Park was temporarily detoured since park spaces were restricted (and we were unaware) due to Covid-19.

I understand that some would disagree with this decision, and I recognize those arguments certainly have credibility. Here, however, I want to share some thoughts about moving for over about two weeks through South Carolina, Kansas, Colorado, and Arkansas.

Some of the value in taking the trips has been witnesses first-hand the various policy and political/ideological differences of moving across the country. SC has some of the more antagonistic approaches to mask, for example (possibly only outclassed by Georgia), but just before I left the state, many towns were mandating in limited ways the wearing of masks.

Masks were not required in Kansas, and many people were not wearing masks like in SC, but the extreme rurality of Great Bend (very few cases of Covid-19) and the voluntary safety policies of some businesses felt far safer than being in SC.

Great Bend, however, has not moved to expanded outdoor seating as many other states have. The positive consequence of Covid-19 for my hometown, Spartanburg, SC, has been dramatic expansion in outdoor seating, much of which will be permanent (Main Street has been closed off for all restaurants to have open-air seating now).

While we went into the trip committed to outdoor or take-out eating only, the unfortunate result has been a few instances of eating indoors—although in establishments with significant care for safety and social distancing.

A powerful experience for those of us from SC has been to live for several days in areas with strict and clear mask requirements—first in Colorado and then once we arrived in Arkansas (which has just implemented the mask requirement a couple days before we arrived).

NewBelgium
New Belgium Brewery in Ft. Collins required booking seating space online and had a diligent outdoor seating and ordering policy.

Maxline
Maxline Brewery in Ft. Collins was one of the few places where we sat indoors briefly; this wall art, I think, captures well the need for community as part of our economic and social obligations.

Mandatory mask culture during this pandemic is, despite what detractors suggest, extremely conducive to restarting something like a normal economy and semi-normal public socializing.

While what businesses were open or semi-open has been a challenge for visitors, the mask requirement has clearly facilitated not just businesses reopening but consumer confidence.

As some friends back home have noted, being out of SC has likely been in many ways safer than not traveling. Colorado was refreshing in the clear and consistent messages about and wearing of masks; a couple establishments had very direct and even demanding signs outside about wearing masks and there appeared absolutely no resistance or loss of patronage.

As we headed back toward SC with a few-day stop in Arkansas, I expected a return to the new-normal of SC, but arrived in Fayetteville right as the state mandated masks and many business were just reopening.

We have had trouble finding fully open restaurants, but the practices in Arkansas have been even more diligent and reassuring than Colorado—requiring masks be worn until after ordering (and not once you are seated), for example.

I head back to SC in a couple days, and I also face returning to full-time face-to-face teaching in just 3 weeks. While taking the trip has increased to some unknown level risk, I will be required to much more significantly take daily risks with the start of fall courses.

There is no returning to normal after Covid-19, and “normal” has likely always been an illusion, a mirage. The world changes beneath our feet whether we want it to or not.

In my lifetime, over almost 60 years, many of the ways of the world and life have so dramatically changed I have trouble remembering when some of now’s normal didn’t exist.

Covid-19 has forced us to rethink many things, including how we function in relationship to each other, as communities and not just individuals. That, even more so than expanded outdoor eating spaces, may be the silver lining in this dark cloud of a pandemic—but only if we make the right decisions about being responsible members of a community and not rugged and ruthless individuals.

As John Dewey implored, we humans are not either individuals or part of a community. To be fully human is to navigate our individual selves with out communal selves.

To be free is not license; freedom is not without responsibility or accountability.

Mask requirements are no different than stop signs and lights, markers of taking care to balance our individual behavior with our communal responsibilities that often mute or even trump our individual wants.

Human existence is chaotic and inherently dangerous. To live is to die, and to live with varying degrees of abandon is to flirt with an unnecessary death.

That tenuous reality has a moral imperative in that each of us must live as if our lives are precious while also directing our commitment to the lives of others as equally (if not more) precious.

I did not cavalierly choose to take this trip, but the decision to reach for some tranquility and pleasure is certainly tinged with a degree of selfishness that I do not deny even as I have made the decision with my ethical commitments fully acknowledged.

Covid-19 implores us all to reclaim our communities and intimacies for everyone in ways that sacrifices no one. It is a gross and inexcusable fatalism to suggest that goal is futile.

It is never whether or not humans are capable; it is always whether or not we have the moral will to be fully human.

George Carlin, Whiteness

Canceled?: The Day Comedy Died

Lenny Bruce is not afraid

“Its the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine),” R.E.M.

[Header image public domain]

Recently, when I watch standup specials through online services, I think about Don McLean’s “American Pie.”

As I have explained before, a foundational part of my critical Self was established during my teen years through listening to the comedy of George Carlin and Richard Pryor. Along with them, The Firesign Theater and Steve Martin also had a profound impact on me, but Carlin and Pryor led me to studying the life and comedy of Lenny Bruce.

Bruce, Carlin, and Pryor were incredibly important voices for free speech and the power of words, including the power of offensive words and the sacredness of those words.

So there is more than a bit of nuanced irony to the evolution of standup comedy in the #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter era, an evolution that looks to me like the death of comedy.

Standup comedians—especially white male comedians—are quite predictable now; they turn immediately or eventually to the anti-cancel culture bandwagon that appears to be mandatory for a standup routine in 2020.

There’s a lot of “Don’t judge me because the line has moved” and “Comedy is a ‘joke,’ right?” kind of laziness in the routines. While contemporary comedians seem to be joining a tradition found in Bruce, Carlin, and Pryor, the ugly truth is that these routines are lazy and angry responses to a mostly mangled and even fabricated message about “cancel culture.”

Comedians have joined a backlash against cancel culture, and these challenges to cancel culture come from people who already have amplified voices, including outsized privilege in those voices as well as histories of skirting by with little to no accountability for their insensitivity and bigotry.

As Michael Hobbes explains:

While the letter itself, published by the magazine Harper’s, doesn’t use the term, the statement represents a bleak apogee in the yearslong, increasingly contentious debate over “cancel culture.” The American left, we are told, is imposing an Orwellian set of restrictions on which views can be expressed in public. Institutions at every level are supposedly gripped by fears of social media mobs and dire professional consequences if their members express so much as a single statement of wrongthink.

This is false. Every statement of fact in the Harper’s letter is either wildly exaggerated or plainly untrue. More broadly, the controversy over “cancel culture” is a straightforward moral panic. While there are indeed real cases of ordinary Americans plucked from obscurity and harassed into unemployment, this rare, isolated phenomenon is being blown up far beyond its importance.

The panic over “cancel culture” is, at its core, a reactionary backlash. Conservative elites, threatened by changing social norms and an accelerating generational handover, are attempting to amplify their feelings of aggrievement into a national crisis. The Harper’s statement, like nearly everything else written on this subject, could have been more efficiently summarized in four words: “Get Off My Lawn.”

Along a spectrum from Louise CK to Woody Allen and Harvey Weinstein, I want to know: Who among these men has been canceled?

Louise CK had his career temporarily interrupted for many years of sexual harassment and inexcusable sexual aggression. Allen hasn’t missed a beat in his career.

And Harvey Weinstein is a convicted sex criminal.

Is a temporary moment of mild accountability “canceled”?

Is rumor, innuendo, and published accounts charging someone with sexual assault “canceled”?

Is being found guilty of sexually violent crimes “canceled”?

The implication about and direct challenges to cancel culture seem to suggest that “cancelling” is unfair, widespread, and poised to end free speech.

This cartoon version of cancel culture is hyperbole, Urban Legend. It suggests a cavalier and indiscriminate assault on good and descent (white and male) people.

None of that is true, however.

As a white male, Louise CK will survive the brief pause to his career with excess wealth and fame; he will likely experience a rehabilitation phase and find a place where people just forget about everything he did.

Allen has never really suffered anything more than the stress of being accused publicly of sexual assault.

And being found guilty of a crime is not some sort of “canceling”; it is justice.

Some of the problems with standup comedy are simply being exposed by the cancel-culture backlash. Smart and culturally critical comedians often perform for audiences less informed or sophisticated than their material.

Bruce, Carlin, and Pryor could never know if their audiences were just cackling like children because of the cultural taboo around “fuck,” for example.

None the less, Bruce, Carlin, and Pryor were using words in order to interrogate not only those words but the failures of humans to interrogate their own biases and blind spots.

And none of these men were perfect; although all of these men faced genuine threats of censorship and career-ending consequences throughout the mid-twentieth century. Those threats, however, were directly about their language and critical comedy, and not about their personal behavior or failure to acknowledge bigotry in their routines.

It is a sad thing. The comedy levee is dry it seems.

We are left with the hollow ring of laziness against the childish laughter of an audience prodded with “Fuck cancel culture.”

education, Public Intellectual, Teaching, Writing

Scholars, Educators, and Students as Public Writers

Early in my career as a high school English teacher in the Deep South during the early and mid-1980s, several weeks into the new school year, a tenth grade student became so exasperated that she blurted out in class, “When are we going to do English? All we do is read and write, read and write!”

In those days, my school system had a grade 7-9 junior high, and then high school was grades 10-12. Sophomores, then, were the transition grade, but for this student, my approach to teaching English was more transition than she could handle.

She had been an “A” student in English throughout junior high, where English had been primarily grammar exercises and vocabulary tests.

This student recognized what remains true throughout my 36-year career, the current second half as a professor of education; all of my courses at their core are writing classes.

While I taught myself how to teach writing throughout my 18 years as a high school English teacher (and soon gained the trust and even respect of my students, parents, and educators for my commitment to writing), I have learned even more over the more recent 18 years, navigating teaching writing as well as writing myself as a scholar and public writer in the context of higher education.

In What Academics Misunderstand About ‘Public Writing,’ Irina Dumitrescu addresses one of the key lessons I have learned working among scholars and academics who must publish and often have to teach writing themselves: “Even as readers, however, scholars tend to misunderstand how public writing — or as the public would call it, ‘writing’ — works, what it’s for, and what makes it good.”

Another distinction I have witnessed is that in higher education, most professors are scholars who must write, and then some are writers who are also scholars/academics. These two groups approach their own writing and the teaching of writing quite differently.

Throughout my undergraduate and graduate courses, then, I include some key strategies that address some of the concerns raised by Dumitrescu about scholars but that tend to apply to K-12 educators as well as those in other fields or disciplines (see for example this graduate literacy course, this first-year writing seminar, and this upper-level writing/research course).

One fundamental strategy is requiring different writing assignments that must be submitted in multiple drafts and revised after receiving written feedback and feedback from conferences.

I tend to pair one public commentary assignment with a traditional scholarly essay including formal citation (such as APA or MLA).

These paired assignments help students consider the importance of writer decisions based on an identified audience, establishing the writer’s authority, and navigating the ethical use of evidence.

One very important point made by Dumitrescu is about writing quality between public writing and scholarship: “Academics sometimes make the mistake of thinking that their standards do not need to be particularly high when writing for the public.”

In short, public writing and scholarship should both be well written, well supported, and engaging for the intended audience; both approaches to writing are, also, mostly acts of persuasion, making a valid and compelling argument.

However, public writing and scholarship achieve those basic goals in different ways.

To emphasize those differences within the overarching guiding principles above, I provide students these strategies for their public writing:

  • Think of a public commentary as a framed argument; that framing (as opposed to thinking “introduction/conclusion” structures) includes an opening and closing (both multiple paragraphs) that are linked by key terms, a similar image, or a guiding narrative. (See Barbara Kingsolver’s opening and closing paragraphs for an example of framing.)
  • Using personal narrative or nonfiction narrative is a powerful way to engage the reader, establish writer authority, and make an abstract argument concrete.
  • Formatting, writing structure, and citation/use of evidence are all different in public writing versus academic scholarship. For example, I provide students formatting and structure models for preparing a public commentary that addresses line spacing, paragraphing, hyperlinking (instead of formal citation), etc.
  • Public writing also must be vigilant about speaking to an identified audience (not fellow scholars), which impacts diction, style, and selective use of evidence (often focusing on one representative source instead of an overview of scholarship).
  • A tenet of creative fiction writing has long been “Show, don’t tell,” and I find this to be equally as valid in non-fiction writing, especially public commentary. When an expert writer is addressing an audience without expertise, the writer should always be striving to answer this: “How does this look?” In other words, public writing needs to be vivid and concrete so that the argument and evidence are compelling. (Scholars make a writer mistake often by depending on the argument and evidence alone to be compelling, failing to write in compelling and engaging ways.)

“[M]any of the qualities that make for good public essays — clarity, conviction, style — can improve your scholarly writing too,” Dumitrescu concludes. Ultimately, Dumitrescu offers a strong argument for the power of being a public writer if you are a scholar, but as a teacher of writing, I find this argument applies essentially to all contexts of teaching writing.

Having multiple experiences navigating between public and scholarly writing is not just effective but essential for all students as well to develop a nuanced and deep understanding of the complexities of writing.

#BlackLivesMatter, race, racism, White Fragility, Whiteness

What White Folk Want

KEEP AMERICA PURE

WITH

LIBERTY PAINTS.

(Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison, p. 196)

What do white folk want?

Rigid accountability for other people.

License for “me” (the white view of the world is rugged individualism masking white nationalism/supremacy).

And “whiteness” never to be named, never voiced—only allowed to be embedded as an understood in “human” (“There is only one race, the human race”) or “lives” (“All Lives Matter”).

This last point is vital for the first two, in fact, and appeared recently on a Twitter exchange:

Reich is recognized as a Democrat, a progressive or liberal associated with Bill Clinton.

Yet Reich offers what he intends as a racially woke Tweet, only to expose the power of whiteness not to be named. Reich, of course, means “Black people weren’t even considered people by white people on July 4, 1776,” but omits the white context because in the U.S. whiteness is a given.

Even or maybe especially to, as Martin Luther King Jr. described, the “white liberal who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice, who prefers tranquility to equality.”

The mythologies masquerading as history leave out that white people came to the Americas to escape a specific religious persecution of them—in order to establish their own brand of persecution with them in charge.

The eventual rebellion from England, again, was not about universal human freedom, but about restarting white/man dominance on stolen land:

Let’s put our heads together
And start a new country up
Our father’s father’s father tried
Erased the parts he didn’t like (“Cuyahoga,” R.E.M.)

July 4, 1776, represents another independence for white men, the wealthy a bit more free than others. And, like Reich’s Tweet, the Preamble has a glaring omission: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all [white] men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

That independence for white men begun in the summer of 1776 also included their freedom to enslave humans as well as freedom to rape the enslaved.

But that use of “freedom” is also misleading because with the Declaration we witness a country established in the first two points above—accountability for other people who are not white or male, and license (not freedom) for “me.”

Well into the next century, the U.S. begrudgingly ended enslavement, and not until the next century did women earn the right to vote. Four decades after that, civil rights were acknowledged for Black people (again begrudgingly as well as with violent resistance and symbolic protests often by white political leaders in the South).

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness have come quite a bit later and in our recent past for LGBQTIA+ people.

However in 2020, to understand the U.S., as James Baldwin repeated throughout his career, you can still expose whiteness by its relationship to Black people and Blackness; for example, the Reich/Moore Tweets.

What do white folk want?

Black Americans who assimilate into the unspoken whiteness called “American.”

But in that assimilation, there can be no confronting of whiteness. Certainly no dismantling.

White folk want Tiger Woods or Michael Jordan, not Muhammad Ali or Colin Kaepernick.

White folk want Ben Carson or Clarence Thomas, not Barack Obama (a master assimilator who, however, rose too high).

White folk want the passive radical myth of Martin Luther King Jr., only tolerating MLK until he rose too high and had to be sacrificed to make that myth possible, not Malcolm X or James Baldwin.

White folk want white Jesus, not historical Jesus.

White folk want O.J. Simpson and Bill Cosby, not Dave Chappelle.

White folk want Ta-Nehisi Coates, not #BlackLivesMatter.

Fit in to get in but don’t rock the boat.

Along with the unspoken given of whiteness and the essential rugged individualism myth to maintain white privilege comes the need for holding other people accountable and clinging to white license.

The frailty of whiteness has been exposed by Covid-19, in fact, even as the virus disproportionately ravages Black Americans—a painful real-life science fiction allegory of U.S. racial inequity.

The anti-face mask movement is white denial, white privilege, and white fragility in real time acknowledging very little about individual or public health but demonstrating that white folk want license, not universal human freedom.

Driving intoxicated is not freedom, it is license.

Public smoking is not freedom, it is license.

Refusing vaccines is not freedom, it is license.

Not wearing a face mask is not freedom, it is license.

But whiteness requires that the world be seen only as “I” and never “we” because “individual freedom” is a powerful code for white license.

White Americans are panicking because they sense a loss of white privilege, of white license.

The sort of white license that allows you to murder Black people but have your name emblazoned on public buildings, ground your political career in racism but have your name emblazoned on public buildings, lead a military revolt against your country to protect the license to enslave people but have statues built in your honor, or boast about grabbing women by the “pussy” but become president of the U.S.

It is 2020 and what do white folk want?

Rigid accountability for other people.

License for “me.”

#BlackLivesMatter, Bayard Rustin, Carter Godwin Woodson, Critical Pedagogy, diversity, education, Frederick Douglass, James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., Nina Simone, Paulo Freire, race, racism, Ralph Ellison, White Fragility, Whiteness

Confronting DiAngelo’s “White Fragility” in the Time of #BlackLivesMatter

1 Comment

For a book on racism written by an academic, Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility has experienced a level of popularity over the last two years that is interesting, if not surprising.

With the #BlackLivesMatter movement re-ignited after the killing of George Floyd by a police officer, DiAngelo’s book has also experienced another significant boost in readership, primarily by white Americans seemingly having a long-overdue come-to-Jesus moment with their whiteness and complicity in systemic racism.

On social media, however, blog posts and Twitter threads have warned “don’t read White Fragility” and “don’t worship DiAngelo.” These warnings come from Black scholars and advocates for anti-racism activism, creating a powerful and important tension in that fight to eradicate white privilege and racism in the U.S.

There is also an insidious challenge to DiAngelo and White Fragility that comes from and speaks to white denial and white nationalism; this denial is grounded in a dishonest use of “science” calling into question DiAngelo’s statistics, methods, and scholarship.

This rebuttal is ironic proof of the existence and resilience of white denial and racism. It has no credibility and is a distraction.

Black voices, however, challenging the centering of DiAngelo in the conversation about race and racism must be acknowledged by anyone—especially white people—claiming to be anti-racism.

Having been raised in a racist home (with parents who embraced white celebrities such as Elvis Presley whose celebrity erased Black entertainers) and community throughout the 1960s and 1970s, I have documented that my journey to awareness about white privilege, white denial/fragility, and systemic racism has been grounded in Black writers and scholars.

When I first read DiAngelo’s essay, I found nothing new or surprising, except that a book existed and that people seemed to be reading it.

If anyone had wanted to understand white America or white fragility, James Baldwin unpacked all that often, for example in 1962’s “Letter from a Region in My Mind”:

quote 8
quote 9

My reading and scholarship on race, whiteness, and racism began in the late 1970s and early 1980s, including Malcolm X, James Baldwin, Alice Walker, Audre Lorde, Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, Carter Godwin Woodson, bell hooks, Paulo Freire, Martin Luther King Jr., Nikki Giovanni, Frederick Douglass, Nina Simone, Claude McKay, Zora Neale Hurston, W.E.B. Du Bois, Bayard Rustin, and others.

I cannot emphasize enough the essential role social media has played in my evolving racial awareness through my being able to connect to an invaluable wealth of Black and multi-racial scholars, academics, writers, and creators whose voices drive my own commitments to anti-racism: Natalie Hopkinson, Jose Vilson, Chris Emdin, Trina Shanks, Camika Royal, Theresa Runstedtler, Nikki Jones, Mariame Kaba, Robert Jones Jr., Mychal Denzel Smith, Andre Perry, Ernest Morrell, Seneca Vaught, Michah Ali, Nikole Hannah-Jones, Rhondda R. Thomas, Jay Smooth, Greg Carr, Imani Gandy, Lou Moore, Simone Sebastian, Yvette Carnell, Asadah Kirkland, Venus Evans-Winter, Roxane Gay, John Ira Jennings, Jacqueline Woodson, Cornelius Minor, Stacey Patton, Jessica Moulite, Chenjerai Kumanyika, Brittney Cooper, Lisa Stringfellow, Angela Dye, Sherri Spelic, Bree Newsome Bass, Zoe Samudzi, Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Jonathan W. Gray, A.D. Carson, Terrenda White, Clint Smith, David E. Kirkland, Dereca Blackmon, Alondra Nelson, Teju Cole, Colin Kaepernick, Morgan Parker, Tressie McMillan Cottom, Crystal Fleming, Eve L. Ewing, Johnny E. Williams, DeMisty Bellinger, Imani Perry, Josie Duffy Rice, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Etan Thomas, Ijeoma Oluo, Natalie Auzenne, Ja’han Jones, Howard Bryant, The Root, Jemele Hill, Ibram X. Kendi, Nnedi Okorafor, Jason Reynolds, Jamil Smith, Valerie Kinloch, Michael Harriot, Bomani Jones, Rashawn Ray, Walter D. Greason, Hanif Abdurraqib, Sarah Thomas, Joshua Bennett, Marc Lamont Hill, Sarah J. Jackson, Clarkisha Kent, Robert Randolph Jr., Peter Darker, Tanji Reed Marshall, Sil Lai Abrams, Sami Schalk, Bianca Nightengale-Lee, Jessica Owens-Young, Andre M. Carrington, Christena Cleveland, Christopher Cameron, Val Brown, Kim Pearson, Kim Parker, Nicole Sealey, Margaret Kimberley, Malaika Jabali, Lisa Sharon Harper, Benjamin Dixon, Tade Thompson, Maria Taylor, Terri N. Watson, Zaretta Hammond, Shea Martin, and Kim Gallon.

There simply is an enormous wealth of Black voices historical and contemporary that white people should read and listen to, often easily accessible online, in fact.

DiAngelo is finding a place in mainstream and fragile America in a similar way that Ta-nehisi Coates and Michelle Alexander have, the latter two Black writers having also received criticism from Black scholars and public intellectuals for appeasing whiteness even as they confront racism.

I have included DiAngelo’s book as a choice reading in my courses as I have introduced students to Coates and Alexander—with caveats and in the context of required reading from critical Black writers, thinkers, and scholars.

White privileged students have admitted openly in class sessions that they finally listened to DiAngelo, even though they have heard and resisted claims of white privilege and systemic racism before.

DiAngelo’s White Fragility and her celebrity from that work fit into what I have called the paradox of centering whiteness to de-center whiteness (a paradox of which I am a part).

DiAngelo represents centering whiteness, acknowledging racism and Black suffering only in proximity to whiteness, and Black voices given space because of white approval; these all work against anti-racism and are in fact racism.

Simultaneously, and paradoxically, DiAngelo represents the importance of and power in white-to-white confronting of and naming racism as well as white denial and fragility.

Yes, we should all feel skeptical about celebrity status and capitalizing from racism, just as we should resist monetizing and career-boosting that surrounds poverty studies as well as poverty workshops and simulations.

White people must not worship DiAngelo or her book, and no one should be recommending that white people read only White Fragility or read it instead of Black voices.

My students who have been introduced to DiAngelo know that dozens of Black writers, thinkers, and scholars made the case against whiteness and racism over decades starting at least a century ago (in terms of the works I offer as required reading).

I take the warnings of “don’t read DiAngelo” from Black scholars very seriously, and find compelling without qualifications the alternative offered—read Black voices, listen to Black voices, and believe Black voices on their own merit.

I also think there remains a place for DiAngelo’s work—even as it has one foot solidly in centering whiteness—as long as it is an element of de-centering whiteness and eradicating white privilege and racism.

My critical commitments make me concerned this caveat is a mistake, yet another concession to that white fragility which DiAngelo is naming.

Is a contextualized place for DiAngelo necessary as white people continue to wrestle with racism? I think that is likely true.

“Don’t rely on only white voices about whiteness and racism” is the goal, the ideal.

Since we find ourselves in the midst of the paradox of centering whiteness to de-center whiteness, at the very least white people committed to anti-racism must reject calls for reading only DiAngelo or reading DiAngelo instead of Black voices.

White celebrity and white authority can no longer be allowed to rise on the backs and instead of Black labor and experiences, as that whiteness occupies spaces that erase or bar Black voices.

There simply is no place left for approaching the work of anti-racism while tip-toeing around the delicacy of white people.

Ultimately that is the sort of white fragility we must recognize, name, and check.

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educator, public scholar, poet&writer – academic freedom isn't free