This is an excellent piece, and I urge my colleagues in the Academy to read it. It resonates with my own observation that the greatest challenges for faculty of color come from progressive people who imagine themselves to be allies who are personally free from racism.
I worked for over a decade at a school where I had a joint appointment in a black studies program. I was the first white professor hired in the program, but my colleagues there welcomed me warmly into their vibrant academic community.
White faculty at the college assumed that because of the color of my skin I sympathized with their perspective. They believed my colleagues of color to be overly sensitive, seeing racial slights in everything, and they felt free to tell me about it.
But in reality, I saw on a daily basis how my black and brown colleagues and students were treated differently. Their concerns were quickly dismissed, their sense of alienation seen as unreasonable, even as they experienced slights on a daily basis.
This was at a progressive school, where everyone publicly opposed racism. Yet the liberal faculty there rarely questioned their own attitudes and behavior. They thought that they had been magnanimous in welcoming diversity into "their" (white) institution...
...but they didn't see any need to change the institution. The assumption was always that the POC were the problem, that they were not adapting to the institution despite the supposedly best efforts of the school.
I'm not trying to claim that I am particularly woke (the half of my family that is black will be quick to point out my many blind spots!) But I did have a unique vantage point to witness exactly the types of micro-aggressions that @mkguliford is writing about.
My point is to urge my white colleagues (and myself) to be more conscious of our own racial biases. Overt racism is a relatively easy problem to address, but racism and inequality deeply engrained in our institutions is much hard to solve. It requires us to change ourselves.
