My senior year, I had an opportunity to complete a Major Honors project where I worked 1:1 with a sociology professor to design and implement a research project. This project taught me a lot about literacy in the social sciences.
The pursuit of freedom is intertwined with literacy and apparent in many social movements, in which internal political education and study are essential to struggle. In many ways, the most organic place for learning is in struggle.
It was a big challenge for me to learn how to write a strong research question, review existing literature, propose and test a hypothesis and create a writeup of my findings. The project was deeply informed by my organizing experience and as part of a generation of anti-racist student activists in the period between the Ferguson and Floyd uprisings. Watching my, and other students activism be co-opted over the summer of 2020 by major capitalist interests, I became skeptical of the existing bodies of critical race theory literature.
Through surfing the network of ideas in the anti-racist and race theory literature, I was introduced to the work of the Fields Sisters and Adolf Reed. They are Black leftists who critique existing anti-racist discourses for too heavily emphasizing disparity discourses and mistaking race for racism. This anti-anti-racist literature pushed me to be more critical of liberal anti-racist discourse and movements. My honors project reflected this turn, providing a survey of more than 60 student demand lists from anti-racist student movements across the country following the uprising at the University of Missouri in 2015. What I discovered was that the demands put forward by students, particularly at elite colleges tended to focus inward or stop at DEI initiatives. I questioned the effectiveness of these demands for meeting the root and meterial causes of racism.
This project taught me new ways to read. How to read in the discipline of the social sciences and how to read a movement and identify its goals and theoretical frames.
Through this project, I also became increasingly frustrated with the emergent liberal hegemonic discourses of race, gender and class relations that focus on disparity or diversity. Under these hegemonic frames, I would spend time talking about how my racial ambiguity affects how people read my male and straight body. Or how no one mistakes me for Black (with one notable exception in undergrad) and how that shows the one drop rule, but there is enough of that literature already.
I don’t intend to be dismissive here, but I am also rapidly running out of time on this project and page… perhaps then this page, like most of the internet will bein-progress. (click on the tag to see other pages that are in progress)