Over the years I have confronted a great deal of academic gaslighting from scholars in the field who constantly tried to get me to second guess myself. Some examples of this academic gaslighting are included in this thread of receipts:
1.) Scholars who insisted that "we already know that" when I sought to bring attention to how white supremacy shapes the concepts used to describe the language practices of racialized communities despite having never written the words white supremacy in any of their scholarship.
2.) Scholars who took personal offense at my critiques of their work with one prominent scholar going as far as sending me multiple e-mails questioning my intelligence without ever addressing any of the points I made in the article that they had clearly not read.
3.) Scholars who I have never cited feeling personally attacked by my scholarship. Word on the street is that one scholar who I had never met or even heard of before even lobbied to get a keynote that I was invited to give revoked. They were not successful.
4.) Scholars dismissed my work as ideological because of my insistence in centering questions of race. I was called "militant" on multiple occasions with some European scholars (people from the continent that invented race) even suggesting that racism is solely a US problem.
I share all of this to assure emerging race scholars that academic gaslighting is real and is designed to get you to second guess yourself. It is important to develop a strong social support network who will have your back when you feel some kind of way about this gaslighting.
It was this social support network that I have been able to cultivate that provided me the strength to keep going no matter how demoralized I felt. And it is this social support network that will keep me going in the future. You know who you are.
