Bingo. I appreciate the heartfelt post. Each tenure professor can challenge their campus fo hire Black. We’re qualified and have endured more trials than tribulation under white leadership and tutelage. It took me 35 yrs and graduate school before I saw a Black professor outside of a HBCU (historically Black colleges and universities). That campus (University of Houston Clear Lake) is now led by a Black woman, Dr. Ira Blake. They didn’t just say and post about diversity and inclusion, UHCL demonstrated and continues to dismantle white privilege and leadership. Dr. Thomas, I apologize for digressing in a way but I wanted to piggy back on your platform to advocate to the academic audience. However, this candid post about your immersion in whiteness and your unceasing commitment to Black Equality and Injustice is greatly appreciated. The opening of doors and transfer of leadership for Black Americans goes even further. How are you or any white person “paying it forward for a Black person?” It’s not an askance for a handout but benevolently turning over leadership, especially in academics.
I was born in 1961, after Brown v. Board but before the Civil Rights Act.
My childhood in the upstate of South Carolina included the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and Robert Kennedy as well as vivid memories of my mother’s family living through the racial unrest in nearby Asheville, North Carolina and my uncle being shipped off to the Vietnam War.
My parents had been raised in the 1940s and 1950s throughout North and South Carolina; they were among the white Americans who disapproved of King, and I recall vividly my parents’ animosity for Muhammad Ali that sat next to their anger at the mainstream media for bringing down Richard Nixon.
I was born in 1961, but I was baptized and washed daily in whiteness.
I believed in whiteness even as I was conditioned never to see it because my accusatory…
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