(here’s part one from February; this essay stands alone too).

In this moment, in the wake of the brutal murder of George Floyd by police and nationwide protests in support of Black lives, many of us in academia are waking up to the need for anti-racism. Others of us, who’ve been doing this work of moving away from injustice and towards equity in academia for a little while longer, are somewhat buoyed by the energy. We’re working hard to direct the current momentum into channels that will sustain for more than a few days, weeks, months and that will yield systemic change. And so I’ve been thinking a lot about how to transform this moment’s energy into the enduring work of lifetimes.

(Part of why my biologist brain loves this question is that the answer hinges on the spanning of scales—short-to-long and past-to-present-to-future time scales, small-to-large spatial scales, individual-to-collective-to-systemic scales of organization. And this, precisely, is why becoming an activist and becoming trauma-informed has alchemized how I think as a scientist. Stay tuned for some weird academic work that arise from this transformation, as well as longer creative non-fiction writing about it.).

My more immediate reason for writing this essay, though, is to explore the annoyance I feel about my fellow academics seemingly directing so much of the energy of this moment towards reading books about anti-racism (I wrote that sentence a couple of weeks ago, now even the book reading seems to have died down, at least according to the twitter and instagram posts). Before you get upset at me, I promise you I have nothing against books. As Victor Ray and Alan Aja put it in a recent perspective, “Nothing warms our nerdy professorial hearts like seeing people buy books, and we understand the need for knowledge to attack entrenched social problems (please keep borrowing, exchanging and buying books, everyone)…But,” they continue, “we also are aware of the limits of the education-as-cure-for-racism trope when it is uncoupled from commitments to redistribute resources.” Reading a book, or many books, is not the same as action, though we academics can readily delude ourselves into thinking that understanding a (complex) problem is no different than solving it. I’m going to repeat that so we can all take it in—understanding systemic injustice is not equivalent to dismantling it.

So in this moment, we have lists of books to read. We also have lists upon lists of actions to take. And what I’m interested in is the psychological and practical gap between them—how do we become the kind of people who are committed, who are intrinsically motivated to recognize where we can and must act against our individual self-interest (i.e. leveraging and dismantling our privilege) for the sake of the equity and justice we claim to believe in? How do we become the kind of people who see lists of actions as inspiration but not a how-to manual? How, in other words, do we do the work, especially once the moment has passed, once the books read and the lists of actions either checked off or forgotten or no longer relevant?

I want to speak to these questions, as a human and an academic. I think my voice might be useful here is because doing the work is, in large part, about reconfiguring one’s mind, and because I’ve seen in myself the wild transformations that can happen to a person when they commit to reconfiguring their mind. I love how Gil Scott-Heron puts it in this clip, where he says “The revolution will not be televised…that was about the fact that the first change that takes place is in your mind. You have to change your mind before you change the way you’re living and the way you move. So when we were saying that the revolution will not be televised, we were saying that the thing that’s going to change is something that no one will ever be able to capture on film.”

So how can one reconfigure one’s mind? The desire to reconfigure your mind stems from discovering where you do not want to be. You’ve recognized that something about how you think and feel and show up in the world is not okay, and needs to change. You’ve hit some kind of bottom, be it big or small, and you’re finally saying, “Enough.” But the process of reconfiguring a mind is not just a turning away from—your mind also needs something glowing to grow towards. As I put it recently, “seedlings live in tension too, between the soil and the sunlight that nourish them, equally and inextricably.” In this metaphor, you are a seedling, your mind rooted in the present soil and growing towards a distant sun. You never reach the sun, and yet it shapes exactly where you go. You could ignore the sun and keep growing towards soil, wondering why you aren’t seeing more light. How you grow is going to depend on the other seedlings around you, plus the rocks and caterpillars and gardeners with an agenda of their own. Sometimes, you won’t really see the sun for days on end. And yet, you must keep growing.

To extend the metaphor, imagine, specifically, that your mind is the seedling of a vine that wants to grow towards justice. What you need is a frame to grow on. In my life, this frame has been, again, a list. Not a list of books or actions, but rather, a list of core principles and principle-driven practices. Simple statements of what I believe and who I want to be, but don’t yet fully know how to act according to. Not so vague as to be unhelpful, not so specific as to be inapplicable beyond a particular situation or moment in history.

The list around which I have built my practices of equity and justice was created by Lizzy Cooper Davis and Eleanor Craig, educators whose anti-racist values and practices have, in turn, been shaped by their work with and learning from the People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond (Lizzy and Eleanor), the Urban Bush Women (Lizzy), the Network/La Red and the Asian American Resource Workshop (Eleanor). When Lizzy and Eleanor shared this list with us participants in a workshop on Identity, Privilege, and Power in the Classroom, I knew I had to hold on to it. Most entries on it didn’t make much sense to my logical mind, but they resonated with something deeper inside, and so I kept the list and pinned it above my desk. I looked and looked and looked at the list, and slowly, these words began to emerge unbidden into my mind when I was far from my desk. Listen for understanding rather than potholes, I’d suddenly think during lab meeting or a seminar. Or I’d come back to my desk, glance at the list, and recent experiences would wholly reconfigure themselves in light of an entry on it. I read Know you, too, will be triggered with a sigh of relief, after I did a poor job of moderating a conversation on inequity in academia. In recalling these principles and practices at relevant moments, I had begun the slow, patient, unglamorous work of reconfiguring my mind towards embodying justice.

And so here’s the thing. What popped into my head and changed my actions at a crucial moment was not a treatise, not an understanding of a nuanced argument laid forth over 200 pages, but a seemingly simple little statement of my core values that I had inadvertently committed to memory. In this way, Lizzy and Eleanor’s list has been the framework that has helped me orient my life towards equity and justice. Here is the list in full:

Identity, Power & Privilege in the Classroom: Core Principles and Practices Offered

• Tend not just to the way you engage when difficult moments arise but to the way you set up the classroom environment and follow-up on the class’ work.
• Remember there is no quick fix.
• Be curious about what people bring into the room and invite your students’ whole selves to be present; No topic or classroom is neutral.
• Experiential knowledge is as valuable as book knowledge.
• Multiple truths can and do exist.
• Co-create group agreements.
• Remember that safe space is not necessarily comfortable space.
• Consider naming your interest in these issues as part of setting up your classroom environment.
• Assume best intent and separate intent from impact.
• Value dialogue over debate.
• Listen for understanding rather than potholes.
• Don’t take on more that you can hold and don’t ask the group to take on more than it can hold; Draw on your resources.
• Practice being accountable to people over institutions.
• Commit to recognizing and undoing the manifestations of your own oppression; Know you, too, will be triggered.
• Commit to continual reflection on your power and privilege as a teacher. Understand it as a process and know that you will make mistakes.
• Be generous and forgiving with your students and with yourself.

Each time I read this list, a different part of it resonates with me. I am far from feeling fully at home in any of these principles or practices, but they now furnish and color the environs of my mind. The one I think about most often in the context of science and scholarship is Multiple truths can and do exist. The one I think about most as an organizer is Practice being accountable to people over institutions. The ones I think about most often in the context of deepening relationships are Safe space is not necessarily comfortable space coupled with Be generous and forgiving with others and yourself. The ones that reminds me how far I still have to go, how much more I have to learn and practice, are Commit to recognizing and undoing the manifestations of your own oppression, Commit to continual reflection on your power and privilege, and, of course, Remember that there is no quick fix. In this way, everything I do attempts to embrace identity, analyze power, and acknowledge privilege. Most of the time, a principle will pop into my head when I just did the opposite of what it suggests, at which point its useful to remember to Understand it as a process and know that you will make mistakes.

So in this light, I hope it’s clear why I think reading all the books, or even education more broadly, does not constitute sufficient action. This resonates with something Imani Perry said the other day, “Trainings and consultations will not dismantle racism and racial inequality. In fact, we have to consider how they might prop up racism, giving participants a false sense of virtue and a tidy way to disengage from the harder work of creating new & just social arrangements.” The lists of actions could be useful nonetheless, because there’s a bunch of stuff you can do (like calling your representatives to push for policy change) where it can be helpful to do the thing you’re told to do by thoughtful, justice-minded-people, regardless of your motivation. But lists of actions can be co-opted—there will be people who work to check these boxes to assuage their own guilt or to accrue social capital, but who don’t actually commit to inner change and continued principle-driven action. These people become a better-disguised part of the problem (many thanks to Divya M. Persaud for a twitter thread that helped clarify this thought for me!).

A list of principle-driven practices is harder, perhaps impossible, to co-opt, though that makes them prone to being ignored altogether. And also, we can’t wait for everyone to have the same principles guiding their lives before we take action, because that will never happen. And there is always some room for pragmatically tempering one’s expectations. As Roxane Gay puts it, “Something about this moment feels different, but I am not sure anyone knows how to move forward in ways that will effectively eradicate racism once and for all. I am not sure that the people who most need to do that difficult work have any incentive to change.” But let’s return the focus to you—if you believe you want to do this hard work but aren’t sure how, consider making this list of principles and practices the core of your anti-racism toolkit.

P.S. So much gratitude for all of you who have helped me grow and grown with me this past decade. This essay is a capsule of my love for you–you all know who you are. Thanks, of course, to Lizzy and Eleanor for their work as educators and for permission to share and build on their list. Please cite them and the organizations they acknowledge when you use this list. Please reference this blogpost for any ideas from it (beyond the list/other references) that you may incorporate into your work.

P.P.S. I’m still offering academics the opportunity for one-on-one (or several-on-one!) conversations to brainstorm strategies for effecting change towards equity and justice in your workplace; if you’re interested, send me an email! I’ve done/plan to do about fifteen so far, I’ve found them delightful 🙂   These conversations are no longer on offer except follow-ups for those of you who have chatted with me previously.

Another important P.S. If you found this or any of my social justice work helpful, please consider donating to the following organizations–the ones mentioned above by Lizzy and Eleanor, as well as two Berkeley institutions that are near and dear to me, that help to keep me healthy, happy, and able and willing to do this work. 

Pacific Center for Human Growth

Shawl-Anderson Dance Center

The People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond

Urban Bush Women

The Network/La Red

Asian American Resource Workshop

When applying to tenure-track faculty positions, my first statement on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) simply detailed stuff I had already done in this domain. Actions speak louder than words, I thought. But when I showed it to my friends, one said, approximately, “I see what you’ve done, but I don’t know why you’ve done it!” And so I wrote the paragraph below, and came to refer to it as my “manifesto paragraph.” I’m quite happy with how true it still feels to me.

Several principles underlie my work in the domain of fostering diversity, equity, and inclusion in academia. First, I focus my efforts on equity and inclusion because I believe that it is neither ethical nor effective to recruit people from underrepresented groups into a community that has not historically been designed for them without also ensuring that they are supported and advocated for. My approach is necessarily symbiotic with efforts to increase diversity, and thus ensures that I do not suffer from the illusion that I can do this work alone. Second, I believe that, though discrimination itself is systemic, it takes principled and concerted action from individuals making up the system to change it. I therefore work with community members to build the tools and structures that support taking such action, in addition to taking action myself. Third, I view any community through the lens of power—who has it and who does not, and how the lives of the less powerful are impacted by this distribution—and use my own standing in a community to facilitate the empowerment of its marginalized members.

Since writing and submitting the job applications that included this paragraph, I’ve had a lot of time to think about how these statements engage with the daily work of making academia more equitable. And what I’ve come to realize is that in order to write and evaluate these statements we have to shift from the mindset of leadership and into the mindset of community. If we think only of leadership, we lack perspective on our capacity to influence the world and on our responsibility to do so. I want us to strive to be knowing cogs in this machine of societal change.

This idea of being a knowing cog crystallized for me in several ways. The first was the experience of seeing a fellow postdoc, a man, leverage his privilege, power, and confidence in support of me as I advocated for gender equity. His actions amounted to two extremely simple but well-timed sentences which led a group of us to make the decision that needed to be made and which I, in the circumstances, could not have made alone. It was the most tangible example I’ve seen of the work of allyship. In that moment, I felt a strong sense of solidarity with my colleage, as we pushed our community a little closer towards justice. And yet his actions were so small and context-dependent, their outcome nothing more than the absence of an awfulness. This combination is hard to explain. I have no idea how he might write about this moment—its motivations and its repercussions—in a DEI statement, or if its importance would be recognized by those evaluating these statements. I’m doubtful that the description of such actions, this work of a knowing cog, would lead his evaluators to check any boxes on their rubrics.

The second crystallization happened in a seminar on equity and inclusion. In the question-and-answer session, someone (a white man) made the predictable comment that surely one could not expect all of us to be experts in DEI work, so evaluating job applicants on such expertise was unreasonable. Someone else (a woman of color) responded carefully that if we didn’t expect everyone to do this work, it would continue to fall, over and over again, to those of us with the least power, and our efforts would not be valued, and so nothing would change. It was in this tension that the idea of being a knowing cog further solidified in me—while not all of us could be experts, all of us needed to do the straightforward and yet so difficult work of pushing against unacceptable status quos. We don’t always need creative solutions or flashy interventions. We do always need a continuous commitment to trying, and trying better, failing, and failing better, in all the little and big ways that add up to something bigger.

The third crystallization has been longer, slower, and steadier in its growth. It began when I started organizing for graduate student unionization at Harvard. I joined this effort just before the first vote on unionization, urging colleagues in my department to go vote and to vote in favor. I joined in, with no training and a slim grasp of how unions worked, after a couple of conversations in which people told me “oh, you’ve made a better case for unionizing than the people who are actually part of the union!” In other words, I joined this collective action because I was being told that I was special, that I could demonstrate superior skill. Sure, I was committed to solidarity and change, and my motives were wholesome, but I was pushed to do something potentially uncomfortable by the comfort of feeling special. Since then, two years of organizing with the University of California Postdoc and Academic Researchers Union (UAW5810) has shown me that being special is overrated. Stepping out, over and over again, to send an email, have a conversation, yell a chant, hold up a banner, knock on a door, hand out a flyer—actions that any other organizer can do with as much skill as me—has shown me that actually doing the work is so much more important than being uniquely skilled at doing it. What matters to how I effect change is my unique position in society, and not my specialness. What has made me good at this work is knowing why I do it, and using that knowledge—of my values, my politics, my goals and hopes—as the reason to do it over and over again.

Twelve-step programs speak of “being right-sized,” of our need for perspective on what we can and can’t change in this world. Nothing is more humbling, and nothing is more empowering. The work of organizing, of pushing for change, demands that we find, each in our own way but with each other’s support, how to be right-sized. Come, let’s all do this together.

Manifesto for Equity in the Academy.

1. Responsibility It is neither ethical nor effective to recruit people into a community that has historically been designed to exclude them (us) unless we ensure support for them (us). Such advocacy is distinct from, but symbiotic with, efforts to increase diversity; do not suffer the illusion that one can do this work alone. 
2. Change Discrimination is systemic but it takes concerted action by individuals to change it. Work with community members to build the tools and structures that support such action.
3. Power Always be ready to view a community through the lens of power. Who has it? Who does not? How are the lives of the less powerful impacted by this distribution? Use your standing in a community to facilitate the empowerment of its marginalized members.
4. Emotion This work is as much about feelings as about logic. Relate to one another with intention. Listen, to each other and to the voices in our heads.
5. Perspective Remind yourself constantly that this work is not glamorous; we are not special for doing it. Change your internal narratives through a combination of diligence and compassion.
6. Commitment Do the work for today, for tomorrow, and for the future. Play the long game, but never let it excuse delaying what needs to be done today.

(Many thanks to Ned Burnell—for pushing me to write the manifesto paragraph in my DEI statement and his enthusiasm for manifestoes more generally, for editing this piece, for helping me be more explicit and thoughtful about my politics and responsibilities, for deep insights into organizing, and for making all of this fun! Thanks to Didem Sarikaya, Yong Zheng, Max Lambert, Sam Hopkins, Malcolm Rosenthal, Becca Tarvin, and Cathy Rushworth for conversations that shaped these ideas. Thanks to every single organizer in UAW5810 for showing me what solidarity can mean).

“I just don’t understand the “grad school sucks” takes I see on here constantly. Only time better than GS is being a postdoc.”

A tweet from Andrew Kern that got pretty thoroughly ratioed (116 replies to 13 retweets, last I checked) keeps popping back into my twitter feed. Each time the tweet returns, I feel a lot of feelings and think a lot of thoughts. Unexpectedly, these thoughts and feelings simply have not coalesced into a straightforward narrative. But each time, they seem more and more insistent that I weigh in on this recurring debate, so here goes.

I am, thus far, a successful academic. I had a spectacular grad school experience—I got along fantastically with my famous grad school advisor at an elite institution, found a few other mentors from whom I learnt a lot, found friends who are among the next movers and shakers in biology and for whom I’m very grateful. On paper, I’m doing about as well as I could hope. I have a prestigious postdoc fellowship and a pretty kickass CV. I even won a prize that I’m super excited (and not at all humble) about!

In this period that’s supposed to be, and may well be, the best part of my career, I’m also exhausted. In the last month, I’ve crisscrossed the US for different fieldwork trips, gone on job interviews, visited my long-distance partner after a gap of more than two months, and traveled halfway across the globe to be with my parents as my father lies critically ill in hospital. Every single one of these trips has felt, has been, essential. Planning and re-planning them—amidst the necessary uncertainty of illness, the inevitable uncertainty of human emotion, and the offhand, sometimes callous uncertainty of the academic job market—has been the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do.

I’ve leveraged my jetlag to get writing done, partly because I love the collaborations I’m currently working on and partly because I can’t afford to go without publications in 2019. There’s no room to explain, in a cover letter or research statement, that life is difficult sometimes and I’m just as brilliant, just as motivated right now as when I was publishing more. And so it’s easier to forego the sleep that’s reluctant anyway. I find that those stolen hours of writing in my childhood bedroom, and a 3:30 am phone call with a collaborator, let me feel excited in way that I so badly need right now. Does it suck to be a postdoc, or am I immeasurably blessed to be a postdoc? The answer is always both.

A little while ago, I had a nervous conversation with a faculty mentor from grad school about how I seem to be doing nothing these days, even as I juggle more and more different projects than ever before. He patiently explains that this is what it feels like to transition to being a PI. It’s a bigger relief than I imagined that he understands how I’m playing the long game here, the confident game wherein I behave as though I will get a faculty job, and plan accordingly. But the relief inevitably gives way to a more practical acceptance that he understands me only because he knows me well enough to give me the benefit of the doubt.

Thing is, I can’t expect to get that benefit of the doubt. My elite education probably gets me the benefit of the doubt more often than I realize, and I know that my education is the result of an unparseable combination of privilege, hard work, and skill. I also know that my elite education leads people to expect me to be a certain way, the status quo way, and that I unsettle people when they discover that I am not. Every time I face the question of whether or not to conform, and whether my lack of conformity should be public or private, I influence whether or not I will get the benefit of the doubt. I’m lucky to have this choice.

And the advantages of an elite education somehow don’t go so far as to shield me entirely from the consequences of being, well, not the norm. My identity trumps it often…try as I might, I can’t seem to forget how men in my grad school cohort would explain statistical analyses to me that I’d been doing for years and that they had never done. Or the NSF reviewer who asked why I hadn’t specified who would teach me the statistics I would need to use to analyze my data. Being Amherst-and-Harvard educated didn’t lead them to say, “well, surely she knows this, or could figure it out.” What they saw was a woman, who couldn’t know math, a South Asian woman who could probably follow instructions but would never be creative enough to forge her own path. Does it suck to be a not-quite-the-norm grad student? Sometimes, it does. Is it a remarkable privilege that I got to do those statistical analyses, publish that paper, get that Harvard degree anyway, despite their doubt? Absolutely.

I can’t shake the weight of these moments of being denied the benefit of the doubt, moments that have added up slowly. But the weight that’s bigger, that I’ve somehow absorbed, is the weight of worse experiences of those around me. In the last several years, I have put more time and energy than you can imagine into advising, mentoring, and mediating in the face of abuses of power within academia. I do this because I believe it is the right thing to do, and because I’ve said that I believe so publicly. I am asked to do this work because I do it well, because people know I care, and because I’m a woman of colour. I do it despite not being able to talk about it publicly anymore. My current quietness is a direct consequence of committing to the academic job market—how can I talk, when I can’t know how the people who hold my career in their hands will respond to what I say and how I say it? This costs me more than I’d realized, because writing is usually how I come to terms with these experiences. I also know that writing about these experiences previously has gained me credibility on the job market, which now sometimes cares about how future professors will make academia more inclusive. I have benefitted and I have suffered, and I’m lucky that I have not yet suffered irrecoverably, from fighting against injustice. I know it’s a privilege to be able to fight at all. Does it suck to be a postdoc in this world? I can’t say.

So do I get to complain about grad school, about being a postdoc? All I know is that you can’t tell me whether or not I get to complain—things are too complicated for that. And that means I don’t get to tell you whether or not you get to complain—there are resonances, but no straight lines, between your experiences and mine. And that means I don’t get to be surprised when you say “this sucks.” There is no room for surprise when our existence breaks what is normal. We can grow forward from here only by really listening, so let’s talk.