How can Blackademics and Blacktivists best support each other? One obvious way is for Blackademics to produce research Blacktivists can use for advocacy. El Jones, who is a full time Blackademic and Blacktivist, did this when she co-authored the report Defunding the Police: Defining the Way Forward for HRM. Carl James of York University has been producing research for decades that Blacktivists have used. James’ work covers intersectionality of race with ethnicity, gender, class and citizenship, accessibility and equity in education and employment and the complementary and contradictory nature of sports in the schooling and educational attainments of racialized students.
Producing research on systemic racism in institutions outside academia is important but so is doing research that exposes it in academia. Kanika Samuels-Wortley of Toronto Metropolitan University (formerly Ryerson) did this with her paper exposing the gatekeeper system that blocks effective police research: Black On Blue, Will Not Do: Navigating Canada’s Evidence Based Policing Community as a Black Academic – A Personal Counter Story.
While initiating research, or having some role in its initiation, is great, making sure important research initiated by other means is done right is also important. Lorne Foster was one of two York University human rights experts who collected and analyzed the Ottawa Police Service’s use-of-force race data after the Province of Ontario ordered all Ontario police forces to collect the data starting in January 2020. The data showed that the OPS used force disproportionately on Black, Middle Eastern and Indigenous people.
Helping Blacktivists groups understand and use data is another way Blackademics can help. Disaggregated race data – that separates out the data on Black folks in particular – is both crucial to Blacktivism and very complicated to do right. That complexity gives those resisting equity a ready excuse not to collect data. Having Blackademics join data advisory groups with Blacktivists or advise Blacktivist reps on such groups helps groups turn data into tools for advocacy.
Hiring activist minded staff is another way the academy can support Blacktivists. Queens University launched a Minor in Black Studies program in spring 2022 and hired a promising group of Blackademics specializing in radical Black ecologies, Black health and social change, Black religions, Black creative writing and cultural production, Black political thought, and surveillance, anticolonial and gender studies. One of the program’s leads, Professor and Canada Research Chair in Black Studies Katherine McKittrick, says one of the new hires, Vanessa Thompson, is an abolitionist. McKittrick says, “Black Studies does not reside solely with the University. It’s also a field that’s inflected with protest, resistance and activism. The field and scholars are committed to non-academic forms of social change and often pair their research with practical on-the-ground struggles”. Another one of the program leads, Daniel McNeil, the Queens National Scholar Chair in Black Studies, says he went into Black Studies, “To hold our institutions accountable and to scrutinize how they do, or do not, live up to their rhetorical commitments to equity.” He says he was inspired by the work of people like Canadian Richard Iton who wrote In Search of the Black Fantastic: Politics and Popular Culture in the Post-Civil Rights Era. McNeil says, “What I took from this type of work is not that we should translate Black cultures for academics to make them a little bit less exotic or a little bit easier for mainstream consumption but how can we open up spaces in the academy for the knowledge of communities? How can we resist the idea that we’re here to help people outside the academy speak or tell them what to say? And how can we push and struggle and demand that we need to learn from their political and moral intelligence?”
This highlights an important issue. Blackademics, being middle class, have the same challenges as middle class Blacktivists: connecting with lower income Black folks to ensure their work is informed by those most impacted by systemic anti-Black racism. And they have the same challenge as all Blacktivists, inside or outside the academy – not losing their jobs by pushing for fundamental change.
Employees challenging systemic anti-Black racism at work usually meet anything from passive aggressive to very aggressive resistance. It’s risky business and must be done carefully, sometimes covertly. One way for Blackademics to do this is to anonymously tip off activists if they become aware of any of their colleagues doing problematic research. My group, the 613-819 Black Hub, had a case about a year ago where this would have been very helpful.
Purely by accident, we found out that the Ottawa Police Service had hired a local professor to evaluate the latest OPS community policing initiative called the Neighborhood Resource Team program. The professor had done some very flawed research on the school resource officer program (that has cops in schools) in another part of the province. Once we found out, we pushed the prof to do proper research but, instead of doing that, she and the OPS cancelled the entire three year, $260,000 project. If we hadn’t found out about the evaluation, the prof and the OPS would have proceeded and produced yet another false justification for increasing the police budget. We don’t know if this prof has any Black colleagues but we raise this to say that Blackademics – and allies – being on the lookout for cases like this, and giving Blacktivists a clandestine heads up, is a relatively low risk way to support the struggle for equity. (We obviously recommend people raising the issues with their colleagues first to see if they’ll make adjustments before contacting Blacktivists.) What would be better, though, is for academic institutions to remove the risk to academics by having policies mandating researchers to report colleagues doing harmful research. This would be similar to the policy that helped greatly reduce use-of-force complaints against Camden New Jersey’s new regional force.
In 2012, long before George Floyd’s murder, Camden disbanded its local police force and replaced it with a regional county force. After Floyd’s death, many people cited Camden as a defunding success story. However, the reality was that excessive force complaints actually went up after the new force was created and only reduced after local activists pushed the new force to adopt a use of force policy requiring officers to intercede if another officer was using force inappropriately. Academic institutions could adopt similar policies regarding research as such policies reduce the risk to people speaking out.
This is why it’s so important for Blackademics to get tenure so they can be free to speak and act without fear of being fired at any moment. Few, if any, Blacktivists have achieved this status without also being Blackademics.
Blacktivists can support Blackademics by telling them what data we need, hiring them to produce it, where appropriate – and taking risks they can’t afford to.
La lutta continua.