A thread by Prof. Green that criticizes the historiography of Dr. MRO's recent article about how we talk about the links between COVID & the Black Death has been making the rounds. I just want to highlight one thing about the reactions to Prof. Green's thread. #MedievalTwitter

Prof. Green's critique of Dr. MRO's historiography is specific & demonstrates Prof. Green's status as a leading Black Death scholar. I am not criticizing Prof. Green, but instead how some others have taken that critique to mean something larger about Dr. MRO as a scholar.

Nobody is above--or should be above--critique, but when a black historian's critique of a junior black woman's historiography is seized upon to make much larger comments about the junior black woman, there is something more going on than a desire for scholarly rigor.

When a non-black tenured scholar who hasn't tweeted in a full year reappears specifically to suddenly tweet that the critique of Dr. MRO shows that "certain areas" lack "intellectual ambition," it's hard to believe that this is just an excitement about Black Death historiography.

Antiblackness and misogynoir are rampant in academia, and the eagerness of non-black scholars to rally around a critique of a junior black woman (and to expand it to mean more than it does) is troubling.

It is particularly troubling given that the article under critique is not about Black Death scholarship, but about how (mostly white) medievalists have been writing about the links between COVID and the Black Death without even mentioning race or persecution of minorities.

The article is itself a critique of white historical narratives about the Black Death and COVID, and their erasure of race. It's a public-facing piece about race and how we talk about the Middle Ages (a subject on which Dr. MRO is a leading expert) in the time of BLM.

RTs *immediately* seized upon Prof. Green's critique to claim that Dr. MRO's article was, for instance, a "hot take" that "racializ[ed] the Black Death". Some of these claims have been retracted since then, but it's a troubling pattern.

Prof. Green's points about sources demonstrate further the central argument of the article, imo: there is a wealth of scholarship on the persecution of minorities by Christians during the Black Death. Yet these public op-eds never mention the topic.

It's troubling that some non-black scholars have been so quick to see an indictment of Dr. MRO as a scholar in a criticism of a public piece written in support of the Black Lives Matter movement.

It suggests how pernicious antiblackness is in our scholarly community.

I'm not aware of any of these scholars tweeting criticism of the white medievalists who've written and spoken about COVID & the Black Death. Dr. MRO's piece is the only one I've seen that even cites Prof. Green's work, yet she seems to get the lion's share of critique.

I hope medievalists remain critical of antiblackness in our communities. If you haven't checked out the #BlackintheIvory hashtag, there is a lot about the ways that black academics--particularly black women--face particularly virulent racism.

I'm glad that many of the people engaging with the thread are talking about the need to cite and engage with black women's work. Prof. Green is absolutely right about the need to do this.

One good example is the work of Dr. MRO herself: I've noticed a flurry of recent work that talks about racism in the academy and cites Dr. MRO's Medium article on racism in OE scholarship...but only in a footnote. I've yet to see a published piece actually quote/engage with it.

Much less has there been any serious engagement with Dr. MRO's decade's worth of scholarship, which has continuously engaged with questions of early medieval historiography and how it reflects racial and national agendas.

Take her article on Æthelred's legacy--particularly in the judicial system--which (aside from simply being an fabulous re-examination of Æthelred's central importance to OE law and lit) examines how scholarly examinations of the medieval roots of the jury reflect national agendas

Or her article on the myth that the English flayed Danish raiders, which works through historiography from the seventeenth to nineteenth century to examine how this functioned as a political and national myth about the "origin" of the English.

We must cite black women, and we--especially those of us who aren't black--MUST examine our citational practices when it comes to engaging with their work. We also need to examine the antiblackness of some people's eagerness to turn criticism of their WORK into criticism of THEM.

Then there’s this leap to “intellectual dishonesty” and “8th-rate scholarship”: https://twitter.com/isasaxonists/status/1272934170919145479?s=21 https://twitter.com/isasaxonists/status/1272934170919145479