No one warned me about white students. How they would willingly enroll in a class that centers blackness and then get frustrated, resorting to defense that “this is just too complicated, why can’t we all just be one race” narrative when discussing race. No one prepared me for this. Not my colleagues nor my cohort. Surely not the administration. No one!

No one prepared me for my colleagues’ white supremacist practices in graduate school. Of their pedagogical and discursive violence. They were quick to quote Baudrillard, Burke, and Foucault, but gave no serious thought to Asante, hooks, or any cultural workers for that matter. Or the time when a classmate told me during a class break that she liked my analysis of a specific article but “did not agree with [me] saying Black Lives Matter.”

And then I read bell hooks’ Teaching to Transgress, and she reminded me of what I always knew/felt in my body: “For black folks teaching—educating—was fundamentally political because it was rooted in anti-racist struggle.” That to pursue the life of the mind for black people is always already a revolutionary act.

That when an academic culture places so much value on preserving whiteness at the expense of racialized others, it is soul murder.