Let’s talk about the #ScholarStrike. Specifically, I want to talk about what it means to withhold or redirect our scholarly labor in support of the movement for Black lives and the efforts to defund police and end mass incarceration. 1/

My main form of participation in the strike is to not teach or do administrative work for the two days. I’ve canceled synchronous class meetings and am refusing to do most admin work, with the exceptions of situations where it would negatively impact vulnerable people. 2/

However, it must be acknowledged that this decision comes with some risks since I’m up for tenure this year. ( @AntheaButler is my dept. chair, so I think I’m probably good at the department level, but still….) 3/

To play it safe, I went ahead and recorded lectures as usual for my asynchronous lecture course and recorded and uploaded some content for my semi-synchronous seminar. This thread is also written with my students in mind. 4/

I had LOTS I wanted to say about police brutality, mass incarceration, etc. when I went to make my #ScholarStrike video, but I felt somewhat compelled to keep the content adjacent to the themes of my courses, both of which are about Asia. 5/

Ultimately, I decided to record a lecture about the controversial NHK video from 7 June. Here’s that video in its 80-second entirety. CW: Racist depictions of Black people. 6/

(My #ScholarStrike lecture is here: ) 7/

In my lecture I refer to racial profiling of Black people living in Japan, which is most definitely a thing. I’ve written about my personal experiences in this thread: https://twitter.com/jolyonbt/status/1261268498354970624?s=20 8/

In tweet 8 of the thread I linked immediately above, I link to an old essay in which I refer to the creepy minstrel kitsch that is all over the place in Japan. It’s super weird. 9/

I also refer briefly to caricatured images of Black people and the (not uncommon) use of blackface in Japanese media. Antiblackness in Japan is rampant. People often associate blackness with crime and pollution. But some people in Japan fetishize blackness. 10/

It comes out in weird ways, and we often see it in anime as well as in the Japanese music industry. 11/

Just this morning, this image came across my feed. It is the “Buddhist Band” Vowz donning afros as a joke. https://twitter.com/vowzband/status/1303565022619025408?s=20 12/

But fetishization cuts in multiple ways. Often, students who have signed up for my “Religion of Anime” course have imbibed all sorts of problematic presuppositions from the stereotyped images of Japan they get from the media they love. 13/

Part of my job in that course is to get them to recognize how they may fetishize a Japan that doesn’t actually exist. I do it by focusing on the techniques whereby media are made and building out from there: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2_hl-gzX_MmE2mjuQ-HhlvEBSzXDf3zx 14/

Now, I wear lots of scholarly hats, so let me expand on the ideas here for several different scholarly communities with which I am affiliated while also speaking to/for/with my students. I will also have something to say about the academy, broadly conceived. 15/

My seminar this term is “Asian Religions in the Global Imagination.” It argues that Asian studies and religious studies are conjoined twins, born together out of the experience of Euro-American encounters with cultural difference: 16/

We focus on imperialism, decolonization, and the centuries-long trajectory whereby Asian traditions transitioned from being “paganism” to “religion” to a sort of suprareligious “spirituality” that reinforces quietist politics and rampant consumption under global capitalism. 17/

Race and racialization are central to this story. If we look at the maps that have been generated to support the notion of “world religions,” for example, we can see that they have reinforced the notion that territory+race+religion= “civilization.” 18/

Indeed, the notion of “civilization” that still appears in some Asian studies department titles is, arguably, a racist notion that should die a quick death. 19/

But it’s a powerful notion. The problem is not just that civilizationalist discourse privileges Euro-American intellectual traditions over others, nor is it just that Asian studies scholars try to prove the value of their work by saying “Hey, our guys are civilized, TOO!” 20/

The problem is deeper because people in Asia also play the civilizationalist game, reproducing and expanding on hierarchical notions about race, culture, and religion. For some reason Black people always wind up at the bottom of the hierarchies. 21/

That’s partially why @mclaughlin_levi, @asianartlibrary, @KSanders58, and I authored a petition calling on @AASAsianStudies to support BLM and Black scholars of Asia: https://tinyurl.com/yyxkhpb6  22/

It also bears stressing that much of the knowledge production about Asia has served imperialist and quasi-imperialist agendas. That was true in the 16th and 17th c, it was true during the Cold War, and it remains true today. We must be cautious. 23/

Now, holding that point in mind, let me expand briefly on a point I made in the video about the politics of Japan studies. 24/

For the entirety of the time that the U.S. and Japan have had diplomatic relations, white Americans have presumed to speak for the U.S. and, crucially, Japanese people have tended to assume that white Americans represent the U.S. fairly and accurately. It’s a problem. 25/

Because they are typically only interfacing with white people in positions of considerable power and authority, Japanese diplomats and our Japanese colleagues often unconsciously imbibe the white supremacist assumptions that are baked into elite U.S. culture. 26/

Thus, a Japanese person visiting Penn recently said to me with a straight face that the area around Penn had been “somewhat rough” but had been beautified. 27/

This 治安が悪い・綺麗になった binary uses Japanese language to reproduce white supremacist presuppositions about how the presence of Black people signals that a place is unsafe, even unsanitary. 28/

It whitewashes (!) the process locally known as “Penntrification,” suggesting that Penn’s presence has been strictly beneficial to an area that used to be known colloquially as “Black Bottom.” (It’s now called “University City,” and that should tell you lots.) 29/

(There’s much more I could say about Penn’s responsibilities to Philadelphia, and indeed I’m active in a group pushing for Penn to do more in pursuit of equity and justice. But let’s set that aside for the moment and come back to it at the end.) 30/

Anyway, the only other thing I’ll say on Japan/Asian studies is that I’ve noticed that while Black people are tremendously diverse, Black perspectives on things like Japanese literature and history often diverge quite productively from other accounts. 31/

This was brilliantly on display during the recent “Asian Studies and Black Lives Matter” webinar, where Will Bridges, @yazberrypie, @DocKBrown85, and Marvin Sterling spoke about their research and how Asian studies might be reimagined: https://vimeo.com/442807450 . 32/

To speak indulgently but briefly about my own work, my recent history of religious freedom and the Allied Occupation of Japan reflected how my experiences as a Black American made me suspicious of triumphalist U.S. narratives about freedom. Here’s @mclaughlin_levi’s take. 33/

My story differed from earlier accounts because I didn’t start from the presupposition that America has a monopoly on freedom or that American freedom is equally available to all. Small thing, but it totally changes how we perceive not only American, but JAPANESE, history. 34/

Anyway, I want to wrap up this very long thread by returning to the notion of labor, and specifically academic labor. 35/

A strike is the political act of withholding labor in pursuit of a specific objective. By that definition, the #ScholarStrike only partially counts. Starting with @AntheaButler and @TheTattooedProf, tons of labor has gone into this event. 36/

This is cumulative. Part of the problem is the national sin of white people stealing compensation from Black people in the first place, for criminally underpaying them after the abolition of slavery, and for using mass incarceration as a continued means of wage theft. 37/

This summer, due to a unique combination of factors, a lot of people are suddenly and finally waking up to these facts: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/10/the-next-reconstruction/615475/. 38/

There is a new urgency around fixing the problems, but also a lot of brand management as the political winds shift. Corporations have released milquetoast statements about BLM, for example. We must be wary of any effort to profit from the taking of Black life. 39/

Anyway, Black faculty have been doing a ton of uncompensated labor this summer as university administrations panicked at the height of the protests in June and tried to trot us out in front of the cameras to show that they, too, think BLM. 40/

Representation is important. 41/

But if you’re an administrator, I urge you to think seriously about what work you’re asking of Black faculty, and what work you’re doing to actually signal that Black lives matter to you. 42/

(I’ve said more on this particular issue elsewhere): https://vimeo.com/showcase/7260341/video/436888598 43/

Let me add a few key points for admin: 44/

First, if there is a statue of a slaveholding person on your campus, it has to come down yesterday. 45/

Second, if there is a building named after an avowed white supremacist, rename it. 46/

Third, if you have a private police force patrolling your campus, I guarantee you they are profiling Black people. That is, they are making some people feel safe at the expense of others’ actual safety. Defund and abolish, and cut ties with local PD. 47/

Finally, your tax-exempt status is a gift that can be rescinded. You technically have an obligation to use it for good. This won’t apply to all universities equally, but for wealthy schools like @Penn, there is only one choice from the perspective of racial justice. 48/

I’m not talking about offering targeted programs for university-area neighborhoods where faculty live and where faculty kids go to school. I’m not talking about throwing some money at a problem as a brand management strategy. 49/

I’m talking about paying some property taxes that support everyone in the local community. Spread the wealth, remove the securitized borders to your campus, and stop trying to make Black neighbors conform to your image of the good life. 50/

These simple practices will elicit much more goodwill than any performative programming (see @Penn’s recently announced “Year of Civic Engagement”). It will SHOW, not TELL, your community that you actually think #BlackLivesMatter /fin