Yesterday, the academic excellence committee of the trustees of the University System of New Hampshire approved the President’s recommendation to promote me to Associate Professor with tenure. This brought to an end a journey that I’ve been on since I was 11, when one of Stephen Hawking’s graduate students responded to my e-mailed query about how to become a theoretical physicist. There are many people to thank for their support of me on this journey, including my family, my friends, my committee, the late Karsten Pohl and the late Julie Williams, my other colleagues including the administrative staff at my home institution of UNH as well as MIT (where I am a research affiliate), and the many people who mentored me, wrote letters for me, talked through problems with me, promoted my work, read and shared my book, and collaborated with me, most especially the early career members of my research group. Thanks to this community, I am the first Black woman in North America — and possibly the world — to earn tenure in either particle theory or cosmology theory.

I earned tenure primarily on the basis of a body of work that includes notable contributions at the intersection of theoretical particle physics and astrophysics to our understanding of axion dark matter and how it might shape observable structure formation. Value was almost certainly placed on my ability to bring in almost half a million dollars to fund this research, most of which went to paying the salaries of early career researchers, who I got credit for training. I was also judged on my more minor contributions to research on neutron star structure, an award-winning book for general audiences that is now taught in classrooms around the country, and a well-regarded interdisciplinary body of service and peer-reviewed research that touched on questions relating to race, gender, ethics, justice, and diversity in science — on dreams deferred.

But, while I was dreaming of becoming a theoretical physicist like Stephen Hawking, the academic world and the world of particle physics were both going through seismic changes due to changes in funding. Particle physics was in the midst of a decline that has accelerated during the two decades since I graduated from college and began graduate studies. More broadly, public universities and colleges, in a process that roughly began with Ronald Reagan’s two disastrous terms as POTUS, have gone through extensive defunding that transfers the cost of higher education away from community-wide responsibility and onto individuals and their families. The same people who have pushed through these changes have also transformed university management into a neoliberal corporate enterprise that thinks in terms of products and customers and prizes the mythical market over ensuring we all have our basic needs met. Fuck curiosity, they said. Education must serve capitalism, not humanity.

By the time I applied for college, as a Pell Grantee, I could not afford to attend any of the five University of California campuses that I applied to and where I was admitted. I chose Harvard because I wanted to work at (what was then) the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, but also ultimately out of necessity, despite the expectation that I would have to work to survive financially. The fiscally responsible alternative — Caltech, which offered me a full scholarship with cash in my pocket — would have potentially meant being the only Black girl in my entire entering class, and at age 16, I was not prepared to choose that life.

For today’s students, the conditions are even worse, with not only UCs and other flagships around the country becoming even more unaffordable — despite occasional programs that keep tuition low for Pell grantees because the cost of living has gone through the roof — but also community colleges and institutions designed to improve economic mobility becoming increasingly costly. As someone noted on Twitter, “number of students selling plasma to eat” isn’t a category that affects how colleges are ranked; I think it probably should be because the number is not zero.

The defunding of public higher education has not only stuck students with a higher bill: it has also stuck faculty and staff with a higher workload and lower pay. The life of a particle physics and cosmology professor that I signed up for as a kid simply no longer exists. The majority of university and college faculty are no longer tenure-track and are instead overworked and underpaid contingent faculty who have varying levels of job stability, sometimes not knowing until the end of the semester whether they are employed for the next one. They are sometimes paid as little as $3000 to teach a course. Even with five courses per semester, that’s $30,000/academic year before taxes. And they probably have student loan debt.

I debated whether to say I am lucky or fortunate or privileged because I am one of the increasingly small number of people to have a tenure-line position. I will simply say I managed to squirm through the slim opening through a combination of factors that mostly have little to do with my scientific curiosity: I experience less racism than other Black people because I am light skinned, I was a good test taker as a kid, I pushed myself beyond reasonable physical and psychological limits including being willing to remain in a community that required me to have occasional contact with the men who sexually assaulted and sexually harassed me, occasionally family and friends helped me out financially, and I had enough community support that I got the letters and resources I needed despite petty bullies (not all of them senior to me) who actively worked to damage my career because of what were often petty disagreements, which are quite abundant in academia.

But I also did not get the job that I was promised at age 11, and it’s not because as a kid I was naïve. It’s because as more people from the margins have entered historically white colleges and universities, these institutions have been defunded by people carrying Reagan’s hateful torch. I had to pause working on this piece multiple times to reply to administrative emails that a few decades ago would have been managed by an expert. Today, as a faculty member I am expected to not only be an excellent researcher, pedagogue, and mentor. I am also expected to be an excellent grant writer (or else my graduate students have nothing to eat in summer, which is a terrifying burden), a financial manager and accountant signing off on documents that have serious legal implications, and an expert bureaucrat who has memorized a dizzying array of information about what forms to fill out and who to talk to in order to solve problems (instead of there being one person for me to talk to in HR, there are something like five, and before anyone will explain anything to you, first they will email you an opaque PDF and only then will they take the time — to send lengthy castigations when you use their poorly designed software wrong).

Nearly all faculty have to deal with this bullshit. My experience with this isn’t unique, and we in the sciences still have it better than our colleagues in the humanities. But I’m not done. On top of all the usual crap, I have to deal with the microaggressions that people like me face and because of my own ethical standpoint, I end up helping others deal with the oppression they face, not just at my home institution but at institutions across three continents. I have no regrets about the support I provide people, but I am angry that these are our working conditions. These are our labor conditions. And it’s not just faculty, of course. Graduate student salaries are typically poverty wages, and faculty have limited ability to change that. Administrative and facilities staff are underpaid (and no, I don’t mean executive admin, LOL) and overworked. It’s been made clear to the faculty where I am that the executive administration intends to transfer more administrative responsibilities onto principal investigators — research faculty like myself. This isn’t something I’m paranoid about. This is something they are openly telling us.

I struggle to find time where I can truly focus on actual ideas because there is so much time spent doing management and struggling to pay for the time where I and my research team might hypothetically have time to truly focus on actual ideas.

And my students suffer for it, including the undergraduates who pay our bills with their high price tuition. There were a number of mornings last semester where I went into class less focused on the material than I would have liked because I had just been managing a slew of emails related to what can only be called bureaucratic bullshit. Where I am, we still handle a bunch of things using PDFs that get circulated for signature. This inevitably leads to mistakes as information is transferred off the PDFs. There is also no central storage system for this information, which makes getting audited by the NSF interesting. People who are responsible for knowing information come to me asking me to look through my emails. Then another person who clearly hasn’t spoken to the first asks me for the same information again. I am frustrated. They are frustrated. We are all tired and especially tired of being asked to do things that we didn’t sign up for.

There’s more I could say (and did, in my book), for example, about the gruesomeness of this particular political moment which is such that I kept my bid for tenure a secret lest any political actors try to make an example out of me. I didn’t talk about the death threats I received, or the harassment my department chairs weathered because of people who claim to care about “American freedom” but don’t like it when I use my free speech. These same people are doing everything they can to claw back any civil rights gains that queer people, people of color, and women as legal classes have won over the last century. As a Blackqueer and Jewish agender woman, I am the outspoken and non-compliant bogeyman they are worried about. I am the thing they want to snuff out. In some cases they want this because they have been told that their freedom depends on my silence and even my non-existence. The psychological wages of whiteness, as W.E.B. Du Bois called them, and white skin privileges, as socialist Noel Ignatiev called them, are real — real dangerous. They articulate me as a divisive concept so that the white working class forever remains divided from their class interest in solidarity with the rest of the 99%.

Despite all of my complaints about academia, I make N times what my mom raised me on, I have had the opportunity to think about ideas and become a decent (and award-winning) writer and scientist, and I don’t have to punch in and out at a job where I am constantly being watched — yet. This is all to say that I have better working conditions than many, and I work to stay aware of that and to close that gap (to stay “woke,” as it were, before a certain demographic ruined that word, as they tend to do with anything they get their hands on).

I don’t think I would choose another path if I had to do it again because all of the things that happened to me in the world of academic physics could have happened to me elsewhere. As a particle cosmologist, I am able to hew more closely to my values than I would in most other workplaces that utilize a physicist’s skillset. And I occasionally get to do the thing that I love: math which maybe describes the universe. I have a stack of quantum field theory books that I like to lug around with me, and thanks to my training, I can already understand much of what’s inside of them and have the competency to work out what I don’t understand.

I am glad that I have this kind of freedom, and I am genuinely pleased that I live within reasonable driving distance of the beach and work in a department with colleagues that I respect both as individuals and as a group. But I am sad that it’s not more — for me or for others. Capitalism is a shitty system, and it has brought us to the edge of total ecological collapse. Our world does not have to be this way. We can and should liberate ourselves from capitalist notions of education and intellectual work. This is an endeavor that should go hand in hand from saving ourselves from the capitalist technological crisis that has wreaked havoc on our ecosystems.

The universe is too fucking awesome for capitalism. The universe is too fucking awesome for us to let capitalism control our relationship with it. Now that I have tenure, nothing’s changing: I intend to keep pointing that out.

(cross-posted to substack)

A personal view on #Strike4BlackLives/#StrikeforBlackLives and #ShutdownSTEM

note: This is my perspective on this, and it should not be interpreted as speaking on behalf of any other author whose name appears on the Particles for Justice website. If you haven’t heard about this action that took place last Wednesday, please see our press page.

I haven’t sat down and read a book all the way through in a while. During the first month and a half of the pandemic, I was actually doing pretty well at keeping up with my scholarship, both in physics and feminist science, technology and society studies. Then the re-opening announcements, including from the University of New Hampshire, came. By then the stories of excessive, unnecessary Black deaths from COVID-19 were everywhere. I saw a quantification somewhere, that without structural racism something on the order of ten thousand Black people would still be alive. Of course, the wide spread of COVID-19 wasn’t a given, but a political decision. And when you decide to let people die in America, that means Black people will be among those hit the hardest, along with our non-Black Indigenous kin.

Back in February when I unfortunately correctly used my “Fermi problem” solving skills to accurately guess the order of magnitude of people who would die, I worried over how to protest the Trump administration’s murderous policies. Folks needed to go out into the streets, but also going out into the streets was exactly what I didn’t want people doing while a highly contagious plague that we have no cure for spread like wildfire among the population. Activists were creative in the face of this, organizing small protests from their cars.

But eventually the people were forced into the streets. A protest for Black lives is always a matter of risking your life because of how police and vigilantes are known to respond, but never in my lifetime has it been so dangerous. Yet it remains painfully necessary. The protests have made some of our dead household names: Tony McDade, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd, Regis Korchinksi-Paquet. Regis, who was both Black and Indigenous, was murdered next door to the building where I lived some of my happiest moments in grad school. That High Park apartment is where I also once had a traumatizing interaction with what I will politely describe as two extremely cruel Toronto police officers who were the only respondents sent to what was ostensibly a medical emergency. Regis could have been me 11 years ago.

On Monday June 1, 2020 when I first began formulating the Strike for Black Lives idea with fellow Black physicist Brian Nord, what I had in mind was a combination of things. I had heard from Brittany Kamai about her #ShutdownSTEM idea, and I was discussing with Brian an idea he had of his own. I come from a labor family. I am the granddaughter of Selma James, founder of the Global Women’s Strike (GWS), which was launched by the International Wages for Housework Campaign on International Women’s Day, March 8, 2000 and has happened annually around parts of the US, Europe, the Caribbean, Latin America, Africa and Asia since then. My mother, Margaret Prescod, is one of the two US coordinators of the GWS.

March 8 is not a day of rest for the women and others who participate. Just like the union strikes that my father helped organize when I was a child, the GWS involves a lot of work. A lack of work is not what distinguishes that day. Rather what makes the day different is that it is a refusal to do business as usual.

Brian and I had this discussion not privately between the two of us but in a space that we share with colleagues in Particles for Justice. And that was purposeful — I was thinking out loud in a community that I would want to join me in whatever work I was thinking about doing. And I was thinking it was time for the particle physics community to be dragged into the 21st century. While we may be on the leading edge of asking and answering questions about fundamental physics, the particle physics community remains intensely white and male, not just demographically but also culturally. I mean that unstated expectations of how we will behave — the ways we are expected to act and speak — conform to whiteness. I mean that aggressive, masculinist behavior in discussions is rewarded, particularly among theoretical physicists.

I also mean that there are things that people expect you to be passionate about if you are a particle physicist, and there are a range of hobbies that people typically have. Many of them are nerdy and/or physical activities. Like hiking, that seems to be a big one. As a disabled person, I often feel left behind during workshops at the Aspen Center for Physics because there’s nothing else to do in Aspen but hike, ski, and drink. But I digress. The point is that I learned early as a graduate student that caring about social justice is something that is alright, as long as people don’t see you devoting a lot of time to it. Also, it’s discussed like a hobby, like going rock climbing.

Importantly the movement for Black lives isn’t a hobby. It’s a movement to save my life, my mom’s life, my cousins’ lives, the lives of beloved friends and chosen kin, and the lives of all Black people, including all Black scientists and Black science students. It is not something that people should feel morally justified in opting out of. The movement for Black lives is a human rights movement, and it is a movement against genocidal structures and tactics.

This is what I was thinking when I named the Strike for Black Lives. I was thinking that business as usual in America means death, mass incarceration, and living, constantly, under totally fearful conditions — if you’re Black. If you’re not Black it means choosing whether to care about the fact that we, Black people in America, live under these terrorizing conditions. I was thinking that business as usual needs to stop, so that we can reconfigure the material conditions under which Black lives are lived. And I was thinking, my beloved community of warriors and survivors needs a break. A long, long vacation.

Practically speaking a one day Strike/Shutdown will not achieve these goals. But I knew that realistically I couldn’t call for an indefinite permanent strike and have many people, much less physicists who tend to be conservative about taking social action, heed the call. And I also knew that something is better than nothing. A day where white people and non-Black people of color took up the work of anti-racist action meant that the playing field might be slightly more level for a day and Black people could feel more comfortable taking the day off from being productive or trying to be productive. And if even 5% of the people who take up that work stick with it, then I will feel like we have advanced the cause, which would be a small but real victory, and I will take my victories as I can get them.

We wanted action, not another book club.

All of the people who put their name to the Strike call contributed to the document somehow. Yes, I played a big role in writing it — I’m both the only critical race studies scholar in the group and the only one with a book deal. That doesn’t mean I was the sole mastermind. This was a truly collective effort. I point this out because I want to make a comment about how our strike call, which went live with about 120 pledges from colleagues on June 5, ended:

Importantly, we are not calling for more diversity and inclusion talks and seminars. We are not asking people to sit through another training about implicit bias. We are calling for every member of the community to commit to taking actions that will change the material circumstances of how Black lives are lived — to work toward ending the white supremacy that not only snuffs out Black physicist dreams but destroys whole Black lives. In calling for a strike, we call on people who are not Black to spend a day undertaking discussion and action that furthers this work, while providing Black scientists with a day of rest. Every single institution around the world can and should get involved in this work, and the strike marks an opportunity to recommit to the humanist values which should underpin academic work, including the belief that Black Lives Matter.

In my view, we were articulating a two-pronged desire: a day of rest for Black folks and again, a day where everyone else went on strike from business as usual. What we didn’t want was for everyone else to do what academics always do when talking about racism: hire some professional diversity experts to give some talks, read some books, say they’ll treat Black students better, and call it a day.

We tried to hit this home in our Strike Details where we said:

The strike is not a “day off” for non-Black scientists, but a day to engage in academia’s core mission to build a better society for everyone; see below for suggested actions that participants can take on strike day to educate themselves and advocate for change in their communities. Those of us who are Black academics should take the day to do whatever nourishes their hearts, whether that’s protesting, organizing, or watching “Astronomy Club” . . . Our usual academic responsibilities will be replaced by actions that center Black lives and agitate for change in our communities.

After that last sentence, we listed some examples, and it was purposeful that the first action we proposed was this, “Participate in a protest. If there are none local to you, organize one. Any number of people can form a protest together.” As an intellectual, of course I believe that reading and studying is important. But as a physicist, I know that my own problem-solving activity, “research,” only moves forward when I take action. It is not enough to passively read the textbook, we tell our students. You must work through the equations line by line and then solve problems. A paper does not write itself. First calculations are done, experiments run.

Ultimately what I wanted people to do on the Strike day was show competency in active problem solving and develop a long term commitment to sticking with the problem until it is solved. And for me, it was not just about Black physicists. Yes, we need better learning and working conditions. The bias and loneliness we face is extensive and heavy. I have only been the only Black professor in my department for 18 months, and I am already over it — and I like my department a lot, actually. That’s when we’re allowed through the door and still the barriers to entry are enormous and often totally unyielding.

But my ability to derive the non-linear Schrödinger equation from a minimally coupled action for a scalar field will not protect me from the police. The fact that I might become a person who could learn such a skill did not stop Los Angeles county from allowing a battery factory to poison the ground water that my mother bathed in and likely drank while she was pregnant with me. I found out recently that I, like all kids who were gestated in my neighborhood of east Los Angeles, were exposed to lead in utero. My future as a theoretical physicist didn’t stop my fourth grade teacher from telling all the Black students in the class, when our school reopened after the 1992 uprising, “if you don’t like it here, go back to Africa.” As if my family left Africa voluntarily.

And importantly, my future as a physicist shouldn’t protect me. What should protect me is my humanity, my human rights. No one should have to earn their human rights, but often that is what Black people feel forced to do.

I want Black children to grow up free, knowing the night sky, knowing that it belongs to them too. I want Black people to live good long lives, free of fear of police and vigilante violence. We cannot do this until we confront and end white supremacy and anti-Blackness.

When I called for the strike what I wanted was for particle physicists and academics at large to understand that and to take action in response to it. I understand that this will require spending some time learning. It will also involve making mistakes and having to hear about how you made a mistake. It’s not that different from being a physicist, really. Except in this case, lives depend on your willingness to make the effort.

So if on Wednesday, June 10, 2020 you and colleagues and friends spent the day in meetings, discussions, and listening to speakers — make sure that this is translating into material action that is long term and sustained. Make the effort like Black lives matter, because they do.

I was asked by a scientific organization to write a piece on “diversity and inclusion.” This is what I turned in. They didn’t like it because they didn’t think it was relevant to science. Ok.

When I was in my first year in a PhD program in theoretical physics, I watched an associate professor informally present some research to two senior professors from different institutions. I couldn’t really follow what was going on, but suddenly the man at the board started punching it, before walking off yelling. A couple of years later, the director of our research institute had a yelling match with one of our speakers, who I later found out is infamous for yelling at students. All of the white men in these stories had tenure and are well-known and successful, despite displaying what one might argue are “unprofessional” behaviors in the work place.

By contrast, I’m a first-year assistant professor in theoretical physics and women’s studies, the first Black American woman to hold a faculty position in theoretical cosmology, and recently, I received a phone call from a senior person in my discipline that I was on a committee with. I knew the agenda ahead of time, or so I thought. “I have to start by playing the tone police,” he told me. What didn’t happen next: I didn’t say, “Do you? Really?” The person I was speaking to had been told that I used a profane word (in a casual, non-professional environment) and as a result, we were discussing my use of the word, instead of the much more serious topic that I had expected to discuss.

The story sounds ridiculous but nonetheless, it happened, and it is emblematic of a larger trend in conversations about diversity, inclusion and equity. What outspoken advocate for the well-being of people of color and other minoritized people in STEM hasn’t been told some version of, “It’d be easier to hear your message if it was more pleasant to listen to”? The people making these kinds of comments always think they are saying something of great practical importance, but really what they’re saying is that they will allow injustice to persist until its victims grovel with sufficiently pleasing manners.

As a Black woman who learned details of the stories of Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman before she learned how to multiply, it’s not complicated to interpret these kinds of comments which propose that if I make white people uncomfortable when I talk about racism, they are justified in refusing to end racism. Slavery outside of prisons may be illegal in the United States, but it is still widely socially acceptable to treat white feelings as if they take precedence over Black feelings. The relationship between this type of behavior and science is so mundane that it can be difficult to point to. It’s not unique to STEM, but it exemplifies the kinds of problematic behaviors that enhance marginalization in STEM.

More broadly, whenever someone in a position of social power experiences discomfort at the cries for justice by those with less power, the wider social expectation is that the person with more power must be accommodated. So, when a wheelchair user sounds angry when an airport employee is mishandling their wheelchair, the disabled person is often framed as unnecessarily rude and angry. Society attacks the victim, not the system that often translates into disabled people having essential, expensive medical equipment casually damaged by able-bodied people.

Under the guise of encouraging “civility,” this focus on problematizing people’s responses to injustice rather than simply eliminating the injustice actually reinforces the injustice. Withholding allyship until demands of emotional fealty are met is a way of taking justice hostage. In my view, this is deeply uncivil behavior, and in academic spaces it targets minoritized people, especially folks who are Black, Indigenous, and other People of Color the most.

The analogy with policing is worth interrogating. No one is killed by tone “police,” you might say. But the fact of the matter is that Sandra Bland ended up dead in a jail cell in an incident that began with a police officer feeling she had taken the wrong tone with him. Moreover, scientific research shows over and over that racism is not merely experienced by its victims psychologically but has real physical consequences. Is tone policing racist? Is it ableist? Is it transphobic? The answer to these questions must be a resounding yes, it is -ist and -phobic to put the feelings of minoritized people last in conversations about their own experiences.

There’s another side to this civility discussion too, which is treating certain English dialects as more acceptable than others. Scientists like to pretend that how they do things is rooted in objectively “best” practices, but they are usually just a matter of tradition. The way we speak to each other in the scientific workplace — and the way we understand the workplace — is organized around straight white middle class notions of social norms and “proper English.” Communities that have been forced to thrive outside of the tent of power associated with being straight, white, middle class, and neurotypical have developed other ways of talking to each other. Sometimes those ways of talking involve using words that are considered impolite in certain quarters or when used by the wrong speaker. Ironically, in this publication, it is difficult to share examples because it would be considered unprofessional. Those aren’t the rules that Black queer people would write if we were in charge. [Note: Of course, said Publication decided not to publish. For anyone confused, for example, Black people get to say the N word, non-Black people don’t. In case you’re feeling like this rule is unjust, just remember that’s actual injustice out there, like deathly racism.]

If our working environments are going to become more diverse, people who are from traditionally dominant communities need to accept that people will have different linguistic traditions from them. The diversity and inclusion discourse is too often oriented toward assimilating people into behaving exactly like people who have always been in the room, rather than making the room more welcoming for people who are different. In fact, there are so many rules about diversity and inclusion that work in opposition to the existence of difference that I recently published a list of 50 of them. The focus on diversity and inclusion can act as a dangerous distraction from a needed focus on justice.

How else can we get white/cis hetero/able-bodied people to listen? The unfortunate reality of the situation is that if someone won’t attend to cries of injustice until those cries accommodate their socialized notions of civility, they won’t attend to injustice. Robin DiAngelo has named this phenomenon of intense sensitivity “white fragility.” White fragility will not be ended by accommodating it, just like no one learns their times tables by being allowed to avoid dealing with multiplication.

Rather, white fragility and other forms of power-based fragility must be confronted. These forms of sociopolitical-emotional dominance must be confronted by people who share access to the dominance but who know better than to invoke it. In other words, white people must confront white people about their white fragility. It’s a lot easier to pick up the phone and say, “Another white person asked me to talk to you about your tone,” but it’s more important to say to the white person who made the request in the first place, “You know what? Your white fragility is dangerous.”

Underneath this danger is fear. Audre Lorde poignantly addressed this in her 1981 keynote speech to the National Women’s Studies Association, “My response to racism is anger. I have lived with that anger, ignoring it, feeding upon it, learning to use it before it laid my visions to waste, for most of my life. Once I did it in silence, afraid of the weight. My fear of anger taught me nothing. Your fear of that anger will teach you nothing, also.” Rather than fearing the anger being expressed, we must learn about the causes of the anger. We must tend to the deep, multi-generational wounds that produce the anger. We must end the injustices that wounded in the first place.

There is of course an element of complexity to this. We may find ourselves in different locations in the matrix of domination. I’m Black, agender and from a working-class background. But I’m also light skinned, cissex, and thanks in part to my marriage, living an upper middle-class life. My experience is different from, for example, dark skinned Black trans women in academia who have not formed life partnerships that helped shift their class status. Within the communities that center our overlapping identities, the dream of a common language remains a challenge. We will sometimes hurt each other and sometimes not be generous enough with each other as we learn and grow. Patience is required.

But whoever we are, we must work to understand the deep roots of the anger prompted by injustice and keep our eyes on the prize. We must understand that no amount of tone policing will make the anger go away. Returning to that phone call, I wish the person had started with, “I heard you felt strongly about a persistent harasser. Someone complained to me about the language you used to express your concerns, and I told them that my primary interest was in helping you address the abuse. I hope in future you feel comfortable coming to me with your concerns and don’t feel like you just have to vent in private.” I can guarantee that if the call had gone that way, I would have used fewer profane words in my explanations to my friends about what happened on that call.

The most effective form of tone policing is to let go of policing entirely and instead to become an accomplice in the fight against injustice. Contacting someone to say, “your tone rubs people the wrong way,” does absolutely nothing to end injustice. In fact, often this kind of behavior reinforces the injustice at hand by focusing on silencing critics. Ask yourself who you are serving when you do this. This isn’t to say that you have to like everyone or enjoy what they are saying. But you should focus on the message more than the delivery, and if the message is about the urgency of needed change, the best thing you can do is make the change happen.

Don’t let your trauma turn you into a spokesperson for the establishment.

A Black student studying a STEM major recently asked me how I overcame difficult moments. I think it’s possible I failed as a mentor in my response: rather than talking about what I had done for myself, I talked about the people who showed up for me. I talked about Mr. Wilson, who noticed when at the age of 12 I went from being his top student to failing his algebra class because my single mom was at home sick with a mystery illness and I wasn’t handling it well. I talked about Mr. Buckner, who noticed when at the age of 14 I went from being his top student to failing his calculus class — for reasons that are actually still sort of mysterious to me but probably have to do with puberty.

At every stage of my education and professional development, I can think of a time when I was in danger of leaving the path I had set out for myself and someone — sometimes several someone’s — took steps to not just support me, but lift me up and get me back on track. This is not to say I don’t deserve credit for my accomplishments. I am the one who made the plan at age 11 to become a professor and no one else is teaching my senior undergrad/graduate astrophysics course this semester. But as I wrote last week in Quanta Magazine, there have been people along the way who held the door open when I got stuck and struggled to make my way through it alone.

I’m not saying anything new when I say that no one accomplishes anything alone. But we don’t often acknowledge that our interdependence with other people takes on a certain complexity in a world where power is not evenly distributed and where the systems that govern our lives are often organized around abusive extraction.

I think about this the most as a scientist who has spent over half her life in academia, beginning as a frosh at age 17 and now as a first year tenure-track professor at age 37. As I’ve written (e.g. here, here, what feels like a bajillion other blog entries and somewhat extensively in my forthcoming Spring 2021 book release The Disordered Cosmos), there is much to deplore about academia and about the scientific establishment. Science (as it is understood professionally) has long been integral to socioeconomic systems that helped extract labor and resources from indigenous people. Academia has deep roots in the Catholic Church which is at this point fairly famous for its human rights abuses, and it is also a system that was developed with a certain kind of white man in mind. People like me weren’t part of the equation except as bodies to extract labor from — for example through Harvard directly benefiting from slavery in Barbados, where my mother was born. Maybe my family was owned by the institution I went into debt to attend.

There is no question that academia is abusive. I’ve mentioned in my writing that I’ve experienced sexual harassment and sexual assault from fellow academics. There’s been racism, classism, sexism, and homophobia. I’ve written about them extensively. At the same time, I’ve done my best as someone who was never formally trained for it, to mentor students in ways that would hopefully help them avoid the worst of academia and to support them by making professional connections whenever I felt I was in a position to.

I have, in the process of doing this work, definitely been guilty of helping too much to the point of sometimes not being received as helpful. I have also, in the process of doing this work, helped so much that it was at my own expense and not sustainable, leading to disappointment and hard feelings. I am learning, I hope, from those mistakes.

I have also, I think, not been as thoughtful as I could have been about avoiding transferring my trauma to students with whom I come into contact. And I am not the only one. As I go over the advice I have gotten over the last two decades, particularly from women who are older than me (white women and women of color alike), I can see their own traumas embedded in their words. To not totally discount my work, I did very early on make a commitment to telling students that I thought they could be more accomplished than me and that there was always the very real possibility that they would not run into the barriers I had.

It has been my guiding principle — and something I’ve said to mentees many times over the years — that just because I couldn’t do something doesn’t mean the student in front of me can’t do it. I wanted to avoid, desperately, the projection that I saw from the women who gently tried to tell me that there were things I couldn’t do. It wasn’t because they hated me or didn’t want me to succeed but because they couldn’t see past the barriers society had erected for them and couldn’t imagine I’d have a better chance of getting over them.

White men have to stop trying to project their sense that these barriers don’t exist, and at the same time, some of the work that we have to do as minoritized people in academia (and probably any professionalized career path) is avoiding transferring our trauma while also acknowledging that trauma is a possibility. (For example, just because you had a terrible time as the first Black woman professor in your department doesn’t mean you should discourage someone else from becoming a first in another one. She may have a better time than you.)

More and more one thing I want people to know is that trauma is not a guarantee. And the fact of trauma does not automatically translate to the existence of an insurmountable barrier.

Maybe now what I wish I had said to the student who was asking how I had overcome difficulty was that in one case I was willing to tell someone that there was a problem. And in the second case, I was willing to listen to someone who had identified that there was a problem and proposed a solution. (I had to stay after school and tutor people for a semester — this professor’s first taste of teaching at school.) In both cases these were teachers who had enormous power over me. They were both men. And I was old enough and had enough of an analysis to know that not every teacher was on my side.

But I was willing to understand that the world isn’t made out of binaries. As I have moved through the ranks of academia, I have not only had to continue believing this, but I have had to rely on this fact. There are terrible faculty out there, like the white people who treat minoritized students as a professional opportunity. But there were also the faculty who gave me shelter, who wrote me letters, and who made phone calls on my behalf. Sometimes they are complex. There’s one very famous white male professor who has never looked me in the eye or spoken to me even though we were in the same department for several years. He also quietly sent a note to hiring committees telling them to choose me because he thought I was a brilliant thinker. I also had an advisor who was incredibly important in supporting my professional success, who also knowingly wrote a paper with my sexual harasser.

I was willing to ask for help. I was willing to take help. I was willing to accept that people can be imperfect and still be a source of support. When people think of me as a strong person, they imagine that I’m very good at going it alone. That I’m very good at rolling with the punches in my hate mail. That I am not afraid to speak truth to power. (That’s not true — it’s always scary!) While I try to say thank you to people individually, it’s possible that in my rush to tell the truth about what’s wrong with academia, I haven’t done a good enough job highlighting the people who have been what’s right about it for me.

I want to give examples, just to make sure my point is clear:

Nadya Mason has been a mentor to me since she was a postdoc and is now tenured Black woman physicist goals for me. One of the most important lessons she’s taught me is the importance — for everyone involved — of saying “no.”

Priya Natarajan has always given me wonderful advice, most especially but not only about interesting directions to take my science in, even when it was quite different from what she was thinking about.

Julianne Dalcanton, who is now the chair of the University of Washington Department of Astronomy, is the person who introduced me to Ann Nelson, and she has repeatedly stepped up for me, encouraged me, and always had an open door for me even though I was never in her department or area of astronomy.

Anna Watts, one of the few women in the Netherlands to hold the title of full professor in astronomy, has similarly been a vigorous advocate for me, and she’s the reason I work on neutron stars now.

Vinothan Manoharan, a professor of physics and applied physics at Harvard, has for over a decade been one of my closest friends and confidants. When I was going through a tough academic time, he called me sometimes several times a week to talk strategy.

Alan Guth gave me a research group home when I needed one, wrote a paper unusually quickly with me. Alan also was very patient with me when I was very timid at first because I was intimidated by him, and he taught me what it looks like to be incredibly thoughtful and methodical.

David Kaiser welcomed me with open arms, immediately welcoming me to join a project he was starting when I joined the Guth group, and has always been incredibly encouraging of my efforts to forge a path in Science, Technology, and Society studies even though what I do may not be at all interesting to him (I have no idea haha).

Arlie Petters made sure I took General Relativity and taught me that professors could care about the success of students in their classes.

I could actually really go on. Ask anyone who read my dissertation acknowledgments: they were four pages long!

These people are real. But, academia is also trash and a lot of that has to do with the people who tend to be allowed to succeed in academia. But academia isn’t special in this respect. And this has a positive side: there are good people here too. The difference I see between academia and other professions is that this is a particularly badly paying working environment given all of the abuses that go on, for example compared to the legal and medical professions. The proliferation of #MeToo stories across every facet of human society makes clear that we aren’t special but rather much like the rest of human society.

And I was lucky to be able to stick around when I wanted to stick around. Not everyone gets a fighting chance to stay in academia. I worked hard for what I have, but hard work is often not enough. Wherever you are on this spectrum (in academia, kicked out, chose to leave, somewhere in between), if you have experienced academic trauma and are doing mentoring and advising, I challenge you to think about your own trauma and try to understand that what your trauma tells you is true is not always true. I should have realized this earlier as someone with PTSD — trauma rewires your brain and effectively can lie to you. Once you’ve thought about this, think about what power you have to influence other people’s perceptions of their own environment and how you are using it. Are you promising people that they too will be traumatized? Are you telling them that they can’t do it? Are you telling them that they can do it but their heart will be trampled in the process? Are you telling them that they are powerless?

There were many times I felt like I didn’t have the power I needed to protect myself, but I was never powerless. I always had the power to ask for help. I always had the power to organize with others. I always had the power to speak up, even if it came with consequences. I have chosen speaking up far more often than I have chosen silence, and I am grateful for people like Sarah Tuttle (for example) who made sure that I have rarely done it alone.

So, on to another mistake I have made as a mentor and writer. I have not done a good job of communicating this to students in my writing about academia, although it is always something I try to emphasize in my talks: students have more power than they often think they do, and wielding it is a matter of strategy. Indeed, students, there will be faculty, staff, and friends who will help you. Never let anyone convince you otherwise. The helpers may not be omnipotent, but they are real. And if you’re not sure how to seek out mentoring, I wrote up some thoughts about that here. ❤

MrProfChanda insisted I put a song at the end, so here is a song:

An Urgent Plea to Fellow Astronomers

Do not let the Thirty Meter Telescope begin (with the military at your side)

It is late at night where I am, but it is also still Sunday in Hawai’i and there is still time. I don’t want to write a lengthy piece, so I will just say the following:

When I was nine years old, the National Guard came to my home town of Los Angeles, and for weeks they occupied the community where I went to school, where my mother bought groceries, and where many of my friends lived. Why? Because a minority of our community had risen up in anger at and fatigue with white supremacy.

The whole community was punished for the actions of those who shouted in the language of the unheard. We shopped for food with armed guards at the stores, holding machine guns, making sure that only people allowed to buy food (people who could afford to buy food) were able to acquire it.

I want you to know:
It changes a child to see the National Guard act as enforcer in their community.

It changes and irrevocably damages relations when the military becomes part of the conversation, armed or unarmed.

Arresting people for crying out against injustice is a grave injustice. Taking police action against the protectors is not the way.

It will change how the world sees astronomy, forever, when there is a militarized, police response to Indigenous people who disagree with the way astronomers want to use what we all must admit are the traditional lands of the Kanaka ‘Oiwi — of Native Hawaiians. This will be our international headline.

The Hubble rate is large (although we are less certain of its value than we were a year ago, perhaps) — but on the scale of a human lifetime, the galaxies and most stars will still be there, later, when the project gets off the ground in the right way or somewhere else. After there is opportunity for consensus and healing.

But I said I would not be long-winded, so instead I will just beg you to consider the lasting consequences for Kanaka ‘Oiwi children and for the many generations after them, and if you will not think of them, think of the lasting consequences for us of being a community that partners with the military and the police on indigenous land and then publicly brands itself as being about wonder and the majestic.

There is nothing majestic about using military or police force against indigenous people anywhere, but especially on their lands.

So, astronomers, I beg of you: pause. Take a pause. It is still Sunday. Tomorrow can go differently from how it is planned. At the very least, send the police and the National Guard away. Do this like civilians and like the people in disagreement with you are civilians with big heart and a deep connection to the land, their family.

Please.

Maybe then, there will be time to talk about what it would mean to work toward consensus.

The country will not be saved by electing a Democrat to the White House in 2020 by @MrProfChanda

note: just making clear, in case you missed it in the subtitle, I DID NOT WRITE THIS! ~ Chanda

Republicans and Democratic neoliberals/moderates were undermining progress long before Trump came onto the political scene. Let’s be honest: they have been since neoliberalism and centrism were invented. And they will continue to rollback any modicum of progress made in the last century even after Trump is gone if we (meaning people who care about progress) don’t change our focus beyond just who gets to be POTUS. Nothing will change is we don’t win back the Senate AND start winning PROGRESSIVE control of state legislatures and governorships.

The Senate is inherently anti-democratic and conservative. That’s how it was designed; it says so right in the Constitution. But winning the Senate isn’t optional. We have to play the long game, and to get there, we need the Senate to be at least nominally controlled by Democrats so that we can pass bills to make things better, and stop the lifetime appointment of judges who will actively make things worse.

Progress — the real kind — can actually happen when progressives control state legislatures and governorships. Living wages, affordable housing, Medicaid expansion, free college, decriminalization of marijuana, bans on homophobic “conversion therapy,” and more all happen at the state level. And these things are actually happening in states where Democrats control the government. But we also have to have a Congress that won’t undercut that work, and won’t confirm judges that will undercut that work, and that’s where the Senate comes back into the picture.

Here is your 2019–2020 Electoral Game Plan in 3 Steps:

1) Spend some of 2019 on 2019 elections.

There is one governor’s election in 2019, and it is for a state where we have a real chance of flipping executive control from the Grand Ol’ Party to Democrats: Kentucky. Kentucky has a history of electing Democratic governors that have done good work. Former Governor Steve Beshear expanded Medicaid eligibility under the Affordable Care Act and cut the percentage of uninsured Kentuckians from 19 percent in 2013 to under 7 percent in 2015. His son Andy Beshear is running to replace the current Republican governor, who has rolled back Beshear Sr.’s progress on health care. Consider putting some energy into helping flip this race *this year* and not waiting for 2020 to help make change.

In addition to the Kentucky governor’s race, there are elections for state legislature in four states this year: Louisiana, Mississippi, Virginia, New Jersey. I don’t know too much about the lay of the land yet, but it’s always important to help elect the most progressive (or least regressive) state legislatures possible, so those are states to put some energy into as well.

2) Make your time, energy and money go further by investing in 2020 state legislature and governor elections.

When you give time, energy, and money to Democratic candidates for POTUS, it is like a drop in the ocean. When you give to a state legislative candidate, sometimes it’s like a drop in a bucket, but other times it’s like a drop in a bowl. Or a cup. Because there are fewer volunteers, less money, and less attention being paid to these races, you can make a much larger impact. And that impact matters.

Almost all other states (besides the four above) have state legislature elections in 2020. State legislatures and governorships are responsible in most states for redistricting, which means the folks who win this next election at the state level will very much decide the fairness of elections for the next DECADE. Don’t forget to help flip swing districts in your home states. Even if you can’t flip the whole legislature, shrinking the size of regressive majorities helps, too.

There are also 11 governor’s races in 2020: seven for offices currently held by Republicans and four for offices currently held by Democrats. Consider putting work and energy into these races, too. If you live close to one of these states, consider volunteering. These are larger bowls or buckets than the ones for state legislatures, but especially in smaller states, you can make a huge difference. The states where we have the best chance of flipping the governor’s mansion from Republican to Democratic control are West Virginia, Missouri, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Indiana. The states where we have a chance to hold on to a Democratic-controlled governor’s office are Montana and North Carolina.

3) Win (nominal) Democratic control of the Senate

I hate the Senate. I hate Senators. Even if Democrats “control” the Senate, we will still have asshole Senators like West Virginia’s Jim Webb and Alabama’s Doug Jones who will fuck us over while they roll around in piles of white supremacy. Alas, having Democrats in control of the Senate is a precondition for a Democratic POTUS to get literally anything done, including appointing judges and passing legislation like universal child care, the Green New Deal, and Medicare for All. So, despite the fact that the Senate is the absolute worst, here are Senate races that we absolutely NEED to focus on for 2020, roughly in order of how likely we are to win those seats: Colorado, Arizona, Maine, Iowa, Georgia, North Carolina, Kansas, Kentucky (fuck Mitch McConnell!). There are other races where Democrats have smaller chances of winning, and if you live in one of those states, you should work to win those seats, too.

In closing, we can’t put all our work and heart into the POTUS election and ignore all the other elections that are happening. If we do and a Democrat gets elected President, they will get nothing done because the Senate will block all of their intiatives and judicial nominations, and then Republican-controlled state legislatures and governorships will gerrymander their districts after the 2020 Census so that even more Republicans will get elected, including to the House of Representatives. So follow the game plan. ❤

My Feb 6 remarks to Occidental College during my visit as the 2019 Stafford Ellison Wright Black Alumni Scholar-in-Residence

Many thanks in particular to Regina Freer and Krystale Littlejohn for this prestigious invitation and an opportunity to think about what the night sky means in 2019. I also incredibly grateful to the students I met and learned from, particularly the members of the Black Student Alliance. I am also thankful to the faculty who welcomed me in their classes. I had so much fun!

Thank you for welcoming me today. I would like to thank Regina Freer and Krystale Littlejohn as well as the rest of the Stafford Ellison Wright selection committee. I was thrilled by the invitation to be the 2019 Stafford Ellison Wright Black Alumni Scholar-in-Residence. I feel honored to have been selected to spend time with students and faculty during the inaugural year of the Black Studies program. I know that at every campus where one exists, students, staff and faculty fought hard — often for many years — for Black Studies, and I am grateful for those fighters. Without Black studies, I’m not sure Black women in STEM would be where we are today.

[then I gave an introduction to cosmology and dark matter using a powerpoint presentation]

I’ve just told you a cosmological story and I ended it by saying that science is a social phenomenon, with problems of its own to solve. I’d like to contextualize that some more.

When I was in high school in West LA I had about three hours of roundtrip commute that took me through Eagle Rock twice a day, except for during the months when I lived here with my best friend and her family, which shaved about 30 minutes off my daily commute. During the long school bus rides, I used to regale people with tales of the particles I read about in Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time. I explained what a quark was, even though I had no idea. I explained the lepton family, even though I didn’t have a clue about it. I was very excited about my future as a Harvard-educated particle physicist and cosmologist.

I left East L.A. for college because someone like me was free to. By that I mean, a good test taker, someone who enjoyed school, someone who because of a combination of luck and colonial social structures hadn’t gotten caught up in the mass incarcerationist dragnet.

And when I left for college, I thought I might stand out because I looked different, but I ultimately believed the multicultural diet early millennials had been steadily fed, that the world was better now, and barriers were begging us to break them. I didn’t understand that I would stand out because I came from a different world, one of cholos from metro 13 and bloods and crips but also Black and brown girls with lips boldly outlined in thick brown lipliner and pre-crossover Shakira blaring loudly as folks drove down streets with brightly colored houses that were near train tracks and cancer-causing factories and billboards that hadn’t seen a word of English on them in years. I didn’t understand that I would stand out in my professional community, for years on end, even today, because I refuse to decide that I am no longer of that world, that those are not my people, even if it has been half my life now since I lived in it. I did not know how lonely I would feel, and the grief I would experience as my ability to speak Spanish has dissipated, that my only opportunities to speak it would come with, as I moved up in my professional world, increasingly frequent visits to four and five star hotels (like the one I am staying in right now) staffed at the lowest-paid levels by people who live in neighborhoods like the East Los I grew up in: El Sereno, Lincoln Heights, and Eagle Rock.

At Harvard, I learned to wear J. Crew when I needed to look professional. After Harvard, I learned to wear big hoop earrings not just because that’s how we do but because that’s how I consciously put hiring committees on notice about my political commitment to Black femmes, to Black womanhood. I learned also to name the academy as a place where the ruling class is produced, sometimes through psychological warfare, even as it is also a place where we learn wonderful things like the fact that in the Orion nebula water naturally produces masers, which are the radio version of lasers.

People I went to college with tell me that East LA is becoming cool now. This returns me to my 16 year old self, and the day I got into Harvard, the same day two white boys in my class sat me down and said no matter where I went to college, they would always be better than me. I was probably in the bottom quartile of my high school class socioeconomically, and because of this my dream of becoming a scientist was also a revenge fantasy and a triumph fantasy: I wanted to come home a hero, the local girl who went to Harvard and came back with the magic of particle physics in her hands.

Dreams get deferred. Last month, when I became the first Black woman in history to hold a faculty position in theoretical cosmology, I couldn’t have been geographically and culturally further away from the grand homecoming that I dreamed of. And it took 8 years after my PhD was awarded before any Los Angeles institution recognized that there was something of value in my story and my work.

It feels strange to recall how all of this made me feel — and to recall all of my feelings about what an awful and often abusive place academia is — while people are locked up in freezing cages in Brooklyn and Texas and while children are being disappeared by the Department of Homeland Security and what I call “the bad part of” Health and Human Services (which has other offices doing important life-saving work). In many ways I lead the life of a highly successful token. I make way more money than my mother raised me on, and I am recognized in the press as a Black woman who is changing the face of science. Black women are outnumbered in physics by Black men at a ratio of 2:1, and Black people overall are outnumbered by white people at a rate that I couldn’t bring myself to calculate. My presence in the field represents a broken barrier, and I often feel that I broke that barrier with my bare hands, even though I know the ancestors began the work long before I was born.

Truthfully, I don’t believe there is a college or university or any capitalist workplace really that is a healthy place for Black women. Most painfully, my personal success will not end the structural racism that keeps so many Black people, especially single Black women and their children, in poverty, and it doesn’t do anything to fight the erasure of working class Latinidad in Boyle Heights and Eagle Rock.

Of course, the last year is not the first time in the history of the Americas that children were separated from their parents in large numbers. In one example, my African ancestors were forcibly separated from their parents and siblings during, before, and after the middle passage. Families were torn apart even in the search for freedom. Sojourner Truth had to leave most of her children behind when she walked away to freedom. We talk about Harriet Tubman using knowledge of astronomy by following the drinking gourd — the big dipper constellation — to make dangerous trips below the Mason-Dixon line to lead people to freedom, and perhaps we don’t emphasize enough that more than one of those trips was to liberate members of her family.

Today, children and their parents have marched miles and miles under the same stars that Harriet Tubman used to navigate — also looking for sanctuary and freedom from violence. While the violence that these Black, Indigenous and white Central American refugees face has different historical contours than the violence of chattel slavery, the fact of running for your life by any means necessary, including by foot, is something they have in common.

I do not believe we can talk about the wonders of the night sky without talking about the fact that people are running for their lives beneath the same celestial structures that I get paid to think about every day. I do not want to wait to find out how this story ends if we don’t get in the way because I know, and as a Black Jew feel in every fiber of my being, what happened when Germans did the same.

It’s important to be clear that human rights are not just about food, water, shelter, health care, and equal treatment under the law. When I had my first chance to go observing at a major telescope facility, a newly minted PhD and fellow at MIT, I saw a night sky in the Chilean Atacama Desert that changed my life. I had two degrees in astronomy and could tell you how many stars there are in the Milky Way (about 100 billion) and until that visit, I really didn’t have a sense of how many stars there were in the sky. It was during that visit that I realized that access to a dark night sky — to see the universe as it really is — should be a human right, one that children in urban areas are usually denied.

And it is not lost on me either that the struggle around gentrification in east Los Angeles involves poor people who largely have geographic heritages that are very similar to the people that the government wishes to block and cage at the border. Often the arguments about diversity in science are made in the name of exceptional people among those being brutalized. Scientists ask: what if a refugee child could solve dark matter if we just gave them a chance? This framing is ultimately about what discursive value the refugee child serves to American intellectual economies, too close to the logic of slavery for my comfort. I invite you to join me in rejecting this framework. Instead, let us demand an end to the conditions that cause people to flee for their lives. We must question the value of borders and deny — completely — the value of walls, both here and in Palestine. Let us demand human rights for all, including the right to know and understand the night sky, not as the context of desperate and dangerous searches for freedom, but as the beautiful place that holds the answers to how we came to exist at all.

That phrase, it does not mean what you think it means

We realize that the only people who care enough about us to work consistently for our liberation are us. Our politics evolve from a healthy love for ourselves, our sisters and our community which allows us to continue our struggle and work.

This focusing upon our own oppression is embodied in the concept of identity politics. We believe that the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody else’s oppression. In the case of Black women this is a particularly repugnant, dangerous, threatening, and therefore revolutionary concept because it is obvious from looking at all the political movements that have preceded us that anyone is more worthy of liberation than ourselves. We reject pedestals, queenhood, and walking ten paces behind. To be recognized as human, levelly human, is enough.

from A Black Feminist Statement, often referred to as The Combahee River Collective Statement appearing in But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies. The Feminist Press at CUNY. Also available online.

Meanwhile, Merriam-Webster suggests that identity politics means:

“politics in which groups of people having a particular racial, religious, ethnic, social, or cultural identity tend to promote their own specific interests or concerns without regard to the interests or concerns of any larger political group.”

This is fundamentally different from the definition that the term was first articulated in writing with, but close enough to it that it reflects what I would call a co-opting of the term, alongside a complete erasure of why the term exists in the first place. This outcome isn’t particularly surprising given how often Black women’s labor is both stolen and then deployed by white supremacist patriarchy for its own purposes. What do I mean that it is fundamentally different? This part dangerously twists the original intent behind the Combahee statement’s articulation of identity politics: “without regard to the interests or concerns of any larger political group.”

A Black Feminist Statement never proposed that the interests or concerns of other groups were not meaningful. In fact, the statement articulates the meaningful importance of establishing nodes of solidarity. Understanding identity politics to mean the absence of solidarity is to contravene a foundational principle to the Combahee River Collective’s formulation of a meaningful politics.

Anyway, I’m guessing that a Black woman who knows her feminist history didn’t write that for M-W. And a linguist would certainly argue that words and phrases are allowed to evolve. But let’s ponder what happens when we refuse to acknowledge the origins of a term that was intended to teach us something very different from what folks seem to learn from popular discussions of “identity politics.” What we could learn from the original definition is that we have to look at what it means to be people who love ourselves enough to consistently work for our own liberation.

That means for those who are white and feeling underresourced can’t trust Donald Trump to care about them enough to consistently work for their liberation. Identity politics, like intersectionality (also a Black feminist concept), is an analytic framework that helps us make political decisions by helping us to assess how power operates and how we should respond to those operations. It asks us to ask ourselves who we are. In A Black Feminist Statement, the authors recognized themselves as not just Black, but also women, and also queer women, and also poor women. Identity politics is a call to use intersectionality to analyze one’s social position and to respond accordingly. In other words, poor white people should ask themselves if they actually do share much of an identity with Donald Trump, if he is really for them.

Why should anyone care about this apparently academic, technical point? Well, politicos keep claiming that working class white voters will never vote for a platform that includes things that they need like health care and a basic income and affordable housing and clean water.

Of course, it wasn’t poor white people who sent Trump to the White House so much as middle and upper class white voters, and this leads to a more complicated question: do they share an identity with Trump? Maybe. He’s far richer than most of them, and much as they might believe in the myth of the American dream, most of them are never going to be so rich that they can be as bad with money as he is.

But as Jackie Goldberg said on my mom’s radio show on Friday: there are more of us than there are of them. The real question ought to be whether we can figure out how to effectively organize with each other, which leads to the next identity question: who are the Democrats?

Zoé on Twitter

That Democrats believe that working folks-many of whom are in economically depressed areas where industry has vacated-would wholly refuse assured healthcare or minimum income speaks far more about politicians' limited imaginations than the communities they presume to know.

The Democrats are dominated by Baby Boomers who, besides Maxine Waters and John Lewis and Pramila Jayapal and Michael Capuano and other members of the Progressive Caucus, seem to be frightened of their own political shadow. And now millenials (who apparently can’t do anything?) are shaking the tree and saying, “What about the major disparity between the world you built during the Clinton and Obama years and the world you promised us?” They’re asking questions like why the government invested in ICE and not them.

The Democrats seem to be dominated by Baby Boomers who believe that their identity is “white moderate who can rely on Black voters.” The question is: does it have to stay that way? I guess we’re going to find out. My hope is that we all have the courage to reimagine identity and what winning looks like, and I see Zoé’s tweet as a call to do that. Maybe instead of being part of the dominant race, white people can stop going bankrupt because someone in the family got cancer. That trade seems more than fair to me, but I’m not white, so maybe I’m just not considering white people’s needs here. ;-)

“2018 wasn’t supposed to be this way. Fuck. Fuck. FUCK!” — Children of Baby Boomers

Prelude to the promise of jetpacks

The United States began because European colonists (primarily men, but not just the men) weren’t happy with the terms of engagement with their Royal overlords, and they figured that Native people weren’t shit so they could just make a new country on their land, primarily using labor that was violently extracted from kidnapped Africans and their children and their children’s children, the children that Black women were forced to produce. Slavery and rape go hand in hand. After that a lot of bad shit happened, not just to Indigenous folks and Black folks but also Asian folks who arrived in the wake of the end of slavery and the absence of slavery. There was war, more colonialism that went as far as Hawaii and the Marshall Islands, and imperialism that went as far as the southern tip of South America. The United States dealt with Hitler until it had no choice but to beat him. They turned boat after boat of Jewish children away. Jews died. We talk about the Jews who died. The Romani, not so much. Through all of this, Native Americans experienced dispossession after dispossession and genocidal maniacs like President Andrew Jackson, Trump’s favorite. And Black Americans were beaten, raped, lynched, beaten raped and then lynched all in one day sometimes, and then when hanging wasn’t okay, there were other ways. The Nazis made it illegal to be Jewish and human, and they learned this from the way that Americans had done the same to Black and Indigenous people. There was the Reconstruction, but then the Republicans (the 1870s equivalent of the 2010s Democrats) lost their heart for doing the right thing and capitulated to white supremacy. So eventually Jim Crow, then the Civil Rights movement. And somewhere in there a wise person said, “The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.”

We were promised justice jetpacks

I was born in 1982, and Reagan was president and in the 90s we remembered that period as being kind of bleak, even if it did give us Duran Duran, a sober David Bowie, more Michael Jackson and a-ha’s “Take On Me.” But the good news was that the moral universe was bending toward justice. Crack was racing through Black communities, and a serial killer was murdering Black women in South (Central) Los Angeles and mass incarceration was just taking off. The work was not finished. But it was being done. I grew up in a family of activists, and I saw that every day. Suffered with it, in fact. My family was sometimes not there for me in the ways they should have been. But I get that their hearts were in the right places.

When I was 4 and wanted to play baseball professionally and had figured out that girls couldn’t play professionally, my grandfather promised me that by the time I was old enough to play, I would be allowed to. He was a mensch, my Grandpa Norman, and I’m really sorry he didn’t get to live to see me grow up to become what he wanted to be, a professional scientist. My mom tells me his dreams for me stopped at CalTech because Harvard was beyond what a poor Ashkenazi Jew from Brooklyn who never finished high school and spent his life in factories could ever imagine for his little granddaughter.

My grandfather promised me equality jetpacks. I can’t be mad at him about it though because the fact that he was on Medicare meant that they didn’t catch the cancer until it had infested his body, and I was left on my own to grapple with the juxtaposition between his hope and my reality.

We were told the world was getting better. We were told we would get rights like the ones rich white people had.

It’s easy to pause, to yell at me now and say I grew up in a liberal pipe dream. But I grew up in east Los Angeles, where ICE regularly kidnaps people now. I grew up looking up to the Zapatistas and believing Marx had insights to offer, even if he didn’t have a great plan for how to change the world with them. I spent the last two years of high school writing furious screeds in the high school paper about Kosovo. Why won’t Clinton save them, I naively but furiously wrote. Aren’t they like the Jews, I thought.

I went home every day to a neighborhood where the police chased people through my backyard and there were shootings and people died, although luckily for me never anyone I knew. My mom very carefully managed who I was around and when because when you’re a single Black mom in the ghetto, well, hey, that’s one of the strategies for saving your kid from how white supremacy shapes our communities. But death was normal. Police violence was how things were. I also knew it wasn’t like that for everyone.

I also knew I wanted to be scientist. I thought I would go and come back one day, a hero for the community, a professor at a local university. That’s not how it works. I went, and I wasn’t able to come back again. Now I read the news from home in the comfort of my nice condo, near the fancy university I went to for college — on the other side of the country. It was a miserable place, but it also means I know people who can make calls when a call needs to be made to help someone out. I have that kind of power in my hands.

This jetpack doesn’t fly the way I want it to though

But even if I can chew him out in the Harvard red book, I can’t stop Jared Kushner. Not by myself. I haven’t forgotten where I came from, and I suppose there is much for me to be proud of about the life I have lived in the 19 years since I left home. But I was forced to come of age with 9/11 and here’s the thing.

I never thought things were great for Black people and Native Americans and Latinx people because I’m a Black kid from east L.A. who grew up spending time in Los Angeles and South Dakota Lakota communities. But I believed that better was coming. Things were good for many white folks, and that meant things could be good for all of us, right?

Now it’s 2018 and things are definitely getting worse for white folks. There’s a lot of blame to go around on that front although a very big all caps reason is WHITE PEOPLE DID NOT LISTEN TO US WHEN WE WARNED THEM THAT WHITE SUPREMACY WOULD GET OUT OF HAND AND CONSUME THEM TOO. So, even though I kind of knew this, it feels like a shitty kick to the gut to watch it and know that it means even more suffering for people of color and . . . the promise of that metaphorical jetpack to freedom seems to be dying. Maybe the promise was never real. But I hoped, and now it is harder to hang onto hope, even if my hope was always tied to a cynical analysis of how a society built on the morally decrepit actions of violent, racist colonizers could never come to any good.

I believed even when my white former Catholic nun teacher sat my fourth grade class down after the school re-opened post 1992 Los Angeles Uprising and said, “If you don’t like it here go back to Africa.” I mindlessly repeated this to my mom, at age nine not really understanding how bad it was. But I remember the look on my mother’s face when I repeated this to her while she drove me to track practice in the park that sometimes we had to leave early because the Bloods and Crips were going to get into it. (So yeah, the ghetto has a logic. People do care if other people live and die. But the economic logic that makes ghettoes ensures that we are always feeling like we have to choose between ourselves and everyone else.)

I believed even when a white math student (who I wasn’t even interested in dating) told me freshman year that we could be friends but he would never consider someone like me to be girlfriend material because he doesn’t see Black women as romantic partners. I quite like his white wife, who I helped him ask out, by the way.

I believed and now it is harder to believe, and I think it has to be okay to say that we feel lied to, even as we knew the world was bad that we didn’t think it would get so much worse. Or at least we had faith it wouldn’t. And now our faith is on fire. And many white people are also experiencing fear for the first time and don’t really know how to handle it like adults, which is kind of irritating for the rest of us who have always been afraid. But it’s also true that I am afraid of more things now. Charlottesville wouldn’t have happened in 1999. But it happened in 2017, and it’s going to be bigger and worse on the National Mall in 2018.

Trump really might manage to take the Department of Education and the Department of Labor and the Department of Health and Human Services (which its Refugee office aside actually does great work) and fucking ruin them and the mess is already hurting even more people than the mess under the presidents before him did. There is a down hill from here. It’s true the Democrats didn’t do enough to protect us or even anything to protect some of us. But there’s a down hill from here. We’re on it. We’re not flying.

Can we build our own jetpacks?

I don’t know how to deal with the grief and the fact that my faith has burned to a crisp. I know that I am grateful that some people have taken seriously the fact that now is the time to get it together. Now is the time to confront colonialism and anti-Blackness and xenophobia and how these are foundational to what is America even all about and why it even exists. Now is the time to confront the history of gender and misogyny and how enforcing a gender/sex binary in an essentialist manner was part of the violent colonial project. We must accept the truth about ableism and its connection to our fierce belief that some people are disposable and worth less. All of these things are tied together under the tent of white supremacy. We must somehow hold all of these actual truths about America to be self-evident and then make choices about what we do next.

I don’t have answers but here is what I am grateful for, and that seems like a good place to start:
 — Antifa. I am a pacifist but I believe in self-defense, and I believe antifa is defending humanity from what Kiese Laymon has called “the worst of white folks.”
 — People who use their imagination and refuse to stop using their imaginations. More than ever we need the arts to keep us on course as actual humane humans. We also need the sciences that enliven our relationship with the world, and here I use science expansively to include knowledge systems that are often not acknowledged within academic spaces.
 — Everyone who understands that “civility” is relative and cries for civility are often how people in power try to shut down cries for justice.
 — The helpers who are more interested in justice than protecting their egos. Look for the helpers, Mr. Rogers said.

I’m going to try and protect these people that I am grateful for, including the children who may grow up to be them some day, whether they are currently in an immigrant internment camp or mass incarceration internment camp, being trafficked in the foster system, or being threatened by the existence of racist policing. I’m going to try. I don’t know if we’ll ever be able to fly free. But I plan to die on my feet, rather than live on my knees.

And I’m going to listen to a lot of We Were Promised Jetpacks along the way, because they’re great:

Sorry for the bad writing. I’m really tired and there’s a lot going on. Here are some twitter threads I wrote that other people seemed to think are useful:

Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein🙅🏽‍♀️ 🇧🇧 on Twitter

I suspect we all could use an education in pre-Nazi German anti-Romani policy which included institutionalized discrimination, roundups, and deportations.

Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein🙅🏽‍♀️ 🇧🇧 on Twitter

Not to be all like the Marvel Universe is actually about us but you know how Hydra realizes the Holocaust didn't work because of how it was structured and then targets differently? Trump policy targets based on status rather than specific identities. a cover for the same show.

What does it mean to be mentored? What role do you play?

Also see earlier parts of this series:
I: Surviving Undergraduate Coursework
II: Doing Research as a URM astro/physics student
III: Understand what affirmative action REALLY is
playlist: My #BlackandSTEM Playlist
IV: Endless Death Seems Endlessly Endless
V: Applying to Grad School

While I have, for months, okay almost a year, been planning to write about how to be a graduate student and this is not that entry, this is actually an important entry for graduate students, especially those who did not have the luck of getting good advising in college. (Which is many people — if that’s you, you’re not alone!) It’s about how to be a mentee — a person who is gaining advice and experience at the hands of someone who has been around the block a few times.

Below I talk a bit about finding mentors, how you should treat your mentor, what to expect from a mentor, and some basic professionalism that can carry you a long way. This is maybe my most tough love-ish entry so far, but so much of what I say here is stuff that I didn’t understand at all when I was younger, and I wish someone had broken it down for me!

Finding mentors

I think seeking out mentors is a good and important activity. For those who are marginalized, mentoring can be especially important for success, especially from a person who shares their experiences, or similar ones, of marginalization. But I think there are good ways to seek out a mentor and then not so good ways.

As one of the only Black women in my field, I get a TON of requests for my time. I regularly get emails asking me to be penpals with elementary, middle school, and high school students. I also get emails from undergraduates asking me for advice. With some frequency I get emails from white people (undergrads through faculty) asking me for resources that they could get from other white people or from reading my blog.

I can’t say yes to everything. And it’s my life. It’s my prerogative to choose what I say yes to and what I don’t. I do say yes to Black, Latinx, and Native American student emergencies that I can help with quickly. I triage when I can — like if the request is from a Black student interested doing exoplanet research, I will try connect them with (Black) folks doing exoplanet research. If the student needs help with someone, and I don’t have a great relationship with that person, I might ask a friend of mine to see if they can get it sorted.

I also often say yes to Black, Native American, and Latinx students who are on my home campus. I don’t say yes to white women as often because usually there is someone else who can help them. The same is not true for racialized minorities.

I have never said yes to people who randomly email me and say, “Will you be my mentor?” I don’t have time for people who may be trying to collect me for their CV and don’t have a specific need for my fairly unusual skillset. That is how that question comes across.

Have a specific ask. Like say that you really need to talk to someone who shares their background or you have a specific need, like you don’t understand how to do the next step of your journey and are not sure who to ask. If someone says, “tell me by e-mail” and doesn’t make time to meet in person or talk on the phone, don’t take it personally. They’re probably busy, including with things that may not be public information.

While I was on the job market this year, I met with students during my lunch break in the middle of grueling 48 hour interviews. Don’t expect everyone to be like that. Don’t even expect me to be like that in future. It’s hard.

Accept that sometimes someone will do you a big favor once, and they may not be willing or interested in repeating it. That’s okay. Other folks are out there!

How you treat your mentor

I end up in a mentoring position with people that I think I can continue to be in a position to help, who I click with, and who actually at least sometimes takes my advice! Am I establishing that kind of relationship with you? A few clues: whether I ask you to keep me posted on how things are going, whether I actively check in with you, whether I tell you to let me know if you need anything.

I think it’s great that students are now using the internet so actively to find help with issues that might come up for them. But they do need to keep in mind that prospective mentors are still people with their own lives, their own feelings, their own schedules. There are things going on for them that you do not know about. We have family members who are dying, children who are struggling, siblings with mental illnesses that require care from us, etc. We also have research/paid work we want to do! So, please be respectful and mindful of that and be aware that often times you are asking us for free labor that both takes up time and is emotionally challenging work. Being respectful of that includes showing up to meetings on time and canceling with reasonable notice. Also, don’t hide things from your mentor. That makes it impossible for us to properly advise you. If you’re seeking help with a situation, you have to tell us everything that is relevant to addressing it, not just parts of it.

As the mentee it is critical to remember that mentoring is a gift, not an entitlement, and that women of color especially get a lot of requests. Nobody is your mammy. Allow for the possibility that your mentor is human, just like you. Remember to say thank you. You don’t have to spend money saying thank you, although when I get cards via snail mail, I’ll be honest and say I love it.

How you should expect to be treated by your mentor

Let me say off the bat that abuse is completely unacceptable. A couple of years ago I wrote an entry that multiple students have told me was useful to them, with signs that you may be experiencing academic abuse. I won’t repeat that content here.

But it is important to understand the difference between abuse and not getting what you want. Your mentor/advisor is not there to spoon feed you, work for you, or do exactly what you say when you say it. They are there to support you achieving your personal goals, to the extent that they are personally able. You will often not be able to judge what their limits are, and you shouldn’t try in most cases. If you have a formal academic relationship with them, they have certain responsibilities to you. If your relationship with them is informal, you have to accept what they can offer.

Despite the possibility that the relationship is not institutionally formalized, first and foremost, you should expect your mentor to respect boundaries. They should not be calling you at 3 AM. During conferences, use your own best judgment about whether an invitation to their hotel room is ever appropriate — like maybe they are in a suite where there is a sitting room. It may not be, and you’re allowed to say no/suggest alternate venues for meeting. Your mentor should ask if it is okay to give you a hug before hugging you. You should never feel creeped out by someone. You should never feel like you owe your mentor regular emotional support. They are there for you, not the other way around.

You can expect that your mentor will make careful decisions about how they can help you or if they can help you. They may come up with a different strategy than the one you had in mind, and if you’re unsure why, feel free to ask. You can learn how to mentor from being a curious mentee. Be aware that they are usually doing complicated political calculations that involve power dynamics that may be relatively foreign to your own knowledge base or experience. Someone may be in a position of seniority relative to you and still abe vulnerable in ways that you are familiar with as well as in ways that you don’t yet understand. Often, your mentor is also someone else’s mentee.

Your mentor should be clear when they are saying no to you. When they say yes to something, they should follow through. That said, they’re busy and will forget things. Remind them of important pending deadlines. For example: need a letter? Ask them with at least a month to go whether they think they could write you a strong letter. If they say yes, give them the due date and clear instructions for how to send the letter in. One or two weeks before the deadline, send them a reminder and let them know to be in touch if they have questions.

If they’ve agreed to write you a letter, they should write you a positive but honest one. Know that even if your mentor is a Nobel Laureate, that will not open all doors for you. (I hear it helps though.)

Your mentor should respect your unique perspective as a minority and should not be trying to convince you that racism, sexism, transphobia, homophobia, ableism, etc. are less insidious than you know them to be.

It is often the case that mentor-mentee relationships bleed into friendship. Sometimes that’s okay, especially if you happen to be close in age or both well into adulthood — like you’re both past your early 20s. But make sure you feel empowered as an equal in the context of that friendship, otherwise it’s not actually a friendship.

Don’t be afraid to ask for things, and don’t automatically take it personally when someone says “no.” They may wish they could say yes and just find that, for a variety of reasons, they are not in a position to at a given point in time.

Professionalism

Foregrounding the following because it is maybe one of the most important things a student can do: if your mentor has asked you to read something or prepare something for a meeting with them, don’t wait to do it until the day before, unless you know, you set aside 8 hours the day before, and you’re the kind of person who can really go hard like that. Even then, I actually wouldn’t advise that. Intellectual work takes time to unspool and ferment in our minds. If you are preparing to present a journal paper, read it three times: once for 5–10 minutes with a focus on the abstract, introduction and conclusions; once for half an hour with a closer look at the details; a third time where you are working through the many things you didn’t understand on reads one and two. (Which, if you’re like me, could be most things in many of the papers you read!) You should also look up foundational papers that the journal paper cites. Show the advisor that you really put the work in and that you respect the time they are spending with you. This is how you learn the background science of your field, and it’s much more important than textbooks 90% of the time.

If your mentor has hooked you up with a job or an internship, it’s important to honor the work they have put in for you. If your mentor has helped connect you with a job opportunity, a mentoring opportunity, or something like that, follow up. Don’t drop the ball. And make sure to say thank you.

If your mentor or friend has helped get you a job through their connections, do the job well. They have vouched for you, and how you behave will affect whether your supervisors will take their word as seriously about other candidates in future. You are responsible for living up to the strong recommendation that you asked your mentor or friend to make on your behalf.

When you are asked to make a commitment to something, think carefully about whether you can actually follow through before saying yes. If there is a time limit, or you have needs related to fulfilling the commitment, be up front about it. Once you make a commitment to do something, follow through. If you are having a hard time doing so, alert the person you committed to immediately.

If you do have to let go of a responsibility, be mindful of how that will affect other people and of the circumstances they may be in when you tell them. (Did they just announce that their mom is in the hospital? Then it can probably wait, right?)

Give due notice. This is true for research positions, volunteer opportunities, and academic program participation. You should give folks a month’s notice if possible, but at the very least two weeks. Besides being respectful of other people’s time and energy, this will also give them an opportunity to find you help that you may not have even realized that they can offer you.

From my point of view there are a couple of reasons why it’s good to keep professionalism in mind:
1. It’s just decent.
2. Handled the right way, a mentor or a reference can be useful to you for years to come. Burning bridges unnecessarily is silly. ❤