It’s my one-year Anneiversary!

If I’ve learned anything over the past year, it’s that, by and large, academia is the same old dogshit disaster it always was & immeasurably worse than I thought. It’s deeply invested in whiteness & violence, which it exists to replicate. https://twitter.com/mistresssnowphd/status/1202708672461332480

This time last year, I was devastated by my former mentor’s abandonment. I still couldn’t reason that after nearly a decade of working together, she’d take a watery shit on my career prospects & then hide from the consequences. The childish cowardice was incomprehensible to me.

After months of processing the whorephobia, classism, & misogyny that set off her still-baffling chain of reactions, I thought, following an outpouring of support, that her biases were singular.

This year has demonstrated to me that most academics are just better at hiding them.

As you may have observed, I get in a lot of fights #onhere. H8rs tend to assume that I only feel safe doing so because of my “anonymity,” despite my having been lowkey doxxed on multiple occasions & assurances that I’m just as much of a stubborn, confrontational bitch irl.

In short, most academics think, bc I’m a sex worker who uses a pseudonym, as we all do bc we must, that I’m a coward.

I’m not just an online troll. I would dare some of you to say to my face the shit you spew on here. & I’m not anonymous—you just don’t know my “real name.”

I’m also quite sharp—bc I have to be—so tend to win my fights.

Academics have more or less sided with me on all but 2 of them. Both were cases of racial appropriation.

What astonished me both times was also that...well, I was right lol. So why, the loyalty to these white women?

For weeks I’ve wondered: between violence & “the profession,” is my indecorous tone *really* significant enough to excuse racism & abuse? Is saying the right thing the wrong way *really* more offensive than doing the wrong thing but within a social-justice framework?

tl;dr: yes

Let’s take a trip down Trauma Ave (fka Memory Lane). It wasn’t until I objected to @/whitneytrettien’s pro-gentrification ~financial literacy~ mini-manifesto that I had an exodus of followers...& only *after* a (now-)friend DMd me about Whitney’s racial appropriation: white locs. https://twitter.com/mistresssnowphd/status/1237105620651855873

While some—mostly grad students—agreed with me, others—mostly TT—expressed some variation on “ilu whitney .” But she had locs! My DMs were flooded with stories of her bullshit! Her defense of gentrification was that she had a low-paying job once!

No matter. I “attacked” her. https://twitter.com/mistresssnowphd/status/1237351640564457474

I was reminded that, despite protestations otherwise, most academics don’t actually give a shit about the communities they purport to support.

I realized, too, that academia’s dedication to whiteness means academics will not only ignore but even *defend* racial appropriation.

I was perplexed. I was mean, but was I violent? I didn’t muse on it for too long tho before I got knocked down by covid

I was on some new bullshit by the time I was back on my feet, but I continued to field regular complaints of my “unprofessionalism.” On my sex work account.

Y’know, professionalism. That racist, sexist, classist fantasy that we should maintain decorum amid violence, my distaste for which ignited this account in the first place.

I adjusted accordingly. I tried to QT & subtweet less, wondered if my “platform” had poisoned my ethics.

I’d never ~punched down~ but tried to punch less in any direction. The doxxing was interfering with my personal life, the fall semester was starting, I was tired.

I wanted to speak my mind without threats of violence, so I pivoted to shitposting.

And yet, we’re in a pandemic.

My friends are getting laid off; universities are shoveling students & staff into superspreader death traps; destigmitization of OnlyFans remains a dull silver lining as folks are forced into survival sex work.

I felt a collective collapse around mid-September. But decorum.

i.e., optics.

Academics who fancy themselves activists do not, on the whole, give a shit about antiracist work. They want to be *perceived* as one of the Good Ones without effecting any change. This ensures 2 things: they look good, & will continue to as long as shit stays bad.

So they’ll RT threads, join ad-hoc committees (service work), organize masturbatory conferences to lament the institutional violence that is the academy without a word on dismantling it. They may even listen to contingent faculty, via anonymous web form sent through a listserv.

What most of this does is overlook the material conditions of marginalized community members in favor of a performance that ultimately manufactures a new hierarchy, this one positioning them at the top, all to insist on their own institutional powerlessness when held to account.

This isn’t racial appropriation. At all. But it underlies how power is invisible & those in power weaponize their perceived powerlessness to silence anyone who doesn’t fall into line.

This dovetails nicely with RTs, committees, & professionalism—we tried. We wrote a report.

Ofc, some subvert these structures to uplift, sometimes within these structures. I can think of a few off the top of my head, whom I won’t cite here lest academic “allies” harass them. Their allyship is material, not performative. We’re junior colleagues, not marketing tools.

Which brings us to last month, when ole Whitney made a guest appearance. After observing another white woman grift for months & capitalize on others’ oppression, I called out @/sydneeisanelf for, among other things, claiming her family escaped genocide by “hiding in the forest.”

What I expected was...not much from shitposting on a Saturday. Incredulity, perhaps, followed by agreement.

What I saw was that, for the neoliberal intellectual, violence is justice when someone threatens your power, especially when you can wield their vulnerability over them.

I saw a deep commitment to white supremacy, starting with excusing white women’s racial appropriation to maintain power & dodge accountability for misusing that power, followed by tokenizing marginalized scholars to shroud institutional violence in the rhetoric of social justice.

I saw the weaponization of oppression; I can be perceived as “hiding behind” my own marginalization, using threats of violence against me as a defense from them. I saw a commitment to the carceral state that demands violence against the vulnerable to exploit that vulnerability.

I saw racism at work: my white colleagues were amplified albeit through the performance of ridicule & moral superiority; BIPOC were silenced & ignored. My status as “sex worker” cited only to reinforce my white womanhood, my PhD relevant only as evidence of my unprofessionalism.

So, after a year of navigating the intricacies of #AcademicTwitter, I’ve concluded that “the life of the mind” is a violent dehumanization of scholars whose bodies don’t fit the “profession,” & you will have to pry my cold dead hands off its throat before I stop clawing at it.