imagining, worlding, strategizing, speculating:

practices that do more for me than “critique.”

Especially when critique seems hamstrung by merely identifying oppressive structures & logics. Ones many know to be true so no need identifying

From critique, what next? what work? What are your strategies & practices for enacting freedom & liberation?

What are the practices of others you see as leading to freedom, to different worlds that don’t have to be this one?

If you don’t yet have a language or practice for getting to freedom, how to cultivate it?

2nd year in grad school I promised myself I’d stop talking about “racism” & opt for terms like “white supremacy” “affective whiteness” in academic situations.

convos definitely pivoted, & the onus of responsibility & representing the “problem” of race fell on white folx. I think back, as a very young scholar, very new to graduate school discourse, & how afraid I was to speak about white supremacy or the overwhelming whiteness around me.

How that structures. When I changed my grammar, so many encounters became uncomfortable.

I teach NYC firstgen poc college students. Many in mixed-status homes. They’re parents/siblings of children who’ll be home for foreseeable future. They are losing hours & paychecks. Families will be facing unimaginable challenges.

pedagogy MUST center these conditions: synchronous learning, at this point, is unethical. Demanding students meet at the hour of the former class/at the same time is as if everything is business as usual is unfair and cruel.

I’m a Mex-Am AND Puerto Rican writer who did not get anything near a 7 figure deal for his upcoming memoir about growing up in white America which does not fetishize the border nor speak on behalf of PR islanders. All I got from publishing was explicit & veiled racist comments! I’m actually sitting here shaking writing this.

Shaking cause I have dealt with so fucking much this past 2 or so years with my book. So many comments: too niche, don’t know how to sell it, etc. all these comments from publishing & higher ed that I just had to stay quiet about

read a scholarly journal & found myself saying, “Wow, I felt like twitter already covered all this material. This feels repetitive.”

if critique/close-reading/citing work is no longer just done by sanctioned scholars in academia, what does this mean for the scholar? [thread] this means people are engaging with texts, getting higher educations, using methods that were supposed to be the exclusive tools of sanctioned academics.

The internet moves fast, has better, broader distribution—scholarly journals do not.