Thread by @Tyler_A_Harper

Since some folks assume I’m a rightist scold I’ll reiterate: I’m opposed to the push toward activism-oriented trends in the humanities, and university antiracist BS more broadly, because as a scholar of color these developments have consistently made my life worse, not better 1/

https://twitter.com/tyler_a_harper/status/1728413871633809694

I’ll say it again: as a black guy who doesn’t work on race (I do British lit + history of science) I’ve fought tooth & nail for the right to study what I want at every stage of my career. Doubly so on the job market where committees/deans want black scholars doing black stuff 2/

As universities embraced antiracist BS in recent years, and rushed to hire scholars working on race, the result is that the only POC humanities scholars that are useful to universities + departments are one that burnish their antiracist bonafides or diversify their curriculum 3/

Black academics are instrumentalized at every turn, treated as props by universities and asked to play the role of “magic negro” in humanities departments, where we’re tasked implicitly — and very often, explicitly — with expanding the racial worldviews of rich white kids 4/

I’m not going to even begin w/ the insane amount of service work — in the name of fighting racism, of course — that POC academics are saddled with, way out of proportion to our white colleagues. And then universities have the audacity to wonder why folks’ research falls behind 5/

I genuinely love the college I teach at. But for 3 years the only service work I have been asked to do relates to antiracism, even though I’ve consistently requested service related to areas I have actual expertise in. The color of my skin is the only expertise that matters 6/

At any rate, what some of you see as a meaningful expansion of the humanities toward previously marginalized discourses, in my *lived experience* (I’ll use the magic word), all this expansion really amounts to is yet another way universities have found to be weird and racist 6/

And what some of you see as important trends toward redressing racism in academia, I’ve tended to experience as new and creative ways universities have found to extract extra labor from faculty of color, in the service not of social justice but public relations and branding 7/

So anyway, you’re welcome to think I’m some conservative troll, but I assure you Conservative Black Intellectual pays a hell of a lot better than what I’m doing. I complain about the humanities/universities because I hate paternalistic bullshit, and that’s all I see in academia.