Here on the Margins: My Academic Home

Abstract

It's not news, or it shouldn't be, that the academy is structurally hostile to meaningful diversity. the reasons FOR this are numerous, and many of them are represented in Written/ Unwritten: Diversity and the Hidden Truths of Tenure—an anthology I edited that features essays and interviews with academics of color. It includes interviews with Houston Baker, Jr., a past MLA president, and Cheryl Wall, Board of Governors Zora Neale Hurston Professor of English, along with an essay by Wilson Santos, an artist, poet, and adjunct professor. I framed the collection with an introduction that shows how the rhetoric of merit used to deny faculty members of color tenure was once used to deny them employment at predominantly white institutions and a conclusion that explores how social media are reshaping how academics of color cope with institutional racism. It's not work I planned to do, and until I stumbled on bell hooks's writing about marginality in Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics during my research for the project, I had mixed feelings about it.