Nice White Ladies and Other White Lies: Author Spotlight on Jessie Daniels

In this post: Author and activist Jessie Daniels joins us to talk about dismantling white supremacy, leaving academia, and more.
Next week: As Fred Moten and Stefano Harney make clear: the only ethical relationship to the university today is a criminal one.
Last week: The real story of what happened after I left academia, on the loss of my academic career and feeling adrift.

Dear co-conspirators,

Thanks for your patience as Post-PhD as a newsletter gets its sea legs. I now have a small team helping me push what Post-PhD can be (y’all know who you are <3), as a community of dialog and critical exchange. I’m proud of what Post-PhD is evolving into, and if you aren’t already following along, subscribe to stay tuned. And, if you’re free at 10:00 AM EST today, you can hear me speak live about what Post-PhD’s community will look like at the Open Publishing Fest.

Today, I’m really excited to share with y’all this post about the author and activist Jessie Daniels, who began in academia as a sociologist with her shocking dissertation (and subsequent book) White Lies.

Here is the video of our conversation about dismantling white supremacy, leaving academia, and finding peace in the community and a spiritual practice rooted in abolition. I love the conversation we had, and am excited to share it with you (after what seemed like an excessive amount of time feeling like a neophyte with video editing software).

Post Ph.D. began as a single scream into the void of neoliberalized academia, where the abuse of power comes as no surprise (to quote artist, Jenny Holtzer).

When my chances of an academic career were obliterated because someone with more power wanted my research just two months shy of my doctoral defense, I knew I was not the only one. So, I decided to make a blog to spill the tea (as it were). I also knew the risks inherent to not remaining an anonymous whistleblower, but in the cold hard light of day, I was a thirty-year-old Art Historian with a Ph.D. that even Obama (wrongly) mocked as useless.  And the career I spent my twenties building at poverty wages and mentally breaking time commitment, was over. In short, I had nothing left to lose, not even my pride. So, I posted my own story of how a series of unfortunate events expelled me from my chosen profession. 

Within 24 hours, “Why I Left Academia” went nerd-viral. Everyone in academia, certainly in my niche field of art history, wanted to know exactly who I was talking about. And the emails began pouring in. What I had thought would be a small cry in the dark (I fantasized about having maybe 500 people read it), a warning cry to the existing graduate students in my former department, turned out to have struck a nerve in our brand new Trumpian reality. And in keeping with this predictable brave new order, I was to be stopped in my tracks. Right as my little blog reached 100k hits in its earliest days, my former advisor filed a personal lawsuit against me. I’ll admit now that I was prepared for this to happen.

What I was not prepared for was how much Post-PhD meant to so many others. 

At this point, Post-PhD was becoming a repository of people, Charlotte's web of quiet and not-so-quiet resisters. I was speaking regularly at universities about research ethics, graduate student rights, and the power of unionization. Somewhere along the way, I realized I went from an art historian to an on-the-ground educational activist. I decided to fight for my words, because to settle was to give everything up, including my credibility as a writer. 

The legal fight doled out in filings, emails about filings, and court dates bankrupted me (though I do love the post I wrote about the experience, it was still horrible nonetheless). But, I had never made more than 30k in my entire adult life. I didn’t even own a car. So, bankruptcy was not a big loss. 

But the psychological fight this required nearly killed me. By the time it was over, my advisor folded, and I had won in what was very much a pyrrhic victory. I was allowed to keep Post-PhD. My name. And my words. But, I was spiritually exhausted. I felt isolated, and most of all, I had to focus on financially supporting myself.  This is something that I think Jessie Daniels beautifully explains in our conversation because the single most important battle we do with white supremacy is within our own minds. 

I grew resentful. Burnout is more of a permanent state of being for scholars, writers, and educators than it is a phase that one goes through after working too hard. What I now understand as “compassion fatigue” set in, the me-too emails simply became triggering, reminders of my failure to succeed as an academic or beyond. 

In my re-invention, I met fellow ex-academic Jillian Powers, who introduced me to the work of Daniels. In the preface to her first academic book (which was first her dissertation), White Lies: Race, Class, and Sexuality in White Supremacist Discourse, I found solidarity and a path. Most of all, I discovered two books that now have formed the backbone of how I think of myself as a public intellectual, educator, and writer: Teaching to Transgress and The Undercommons. But that’s for the next post. 

Jessie Daniels on her recent book project and dismantling white supremacy:

In the preface to her dissertation turned first book White Lies, Jessie Daniels made a confession that stood as a lighthouse in a storm for me. In 1997, Daniels wrote:

“During the course of researching for this book, I learned that my paternal grandfather was, for a brief period of time, a member of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s...The debate I was having with myself involved whether or not I should publicly “disclose” that he had been a Klan member. On the one hand, this fact constituted part of my standpoint. On the other hand, his membership was very brief…. [If I wrote about it] I would risk being dismissed by critics as either a white liberal, consumed by guilt, trying to atone for the sins of my grandfather; or, worse still, I would somehow be labeled an apologist for white supremacist ideology.”

At the time, I was working on a story about the discovery, cover-up, and re-discovery of a KKK robe that belonged to my great grandfather. While it didn’t end up making the cut for my book about teaching at a corrupt and deeply racist charter school, it nonetheless has been an issue I’ve been grappling with my entire academic career. The issue of white saviorism runs through my veins, my activism, and my identity (and something that I talk about in my other free newsletter NSFS if you’re interested in this topic). 

In my much-fought over dissertation, in the very same chapter that was the subject of much conjecture in the early days of Post Ph.D., I wrote that white scholars should not be writing about the nonwestern cultural productions, simply because we would always be missing the complex nuances of a culture which is foreign to us. Yes, I’m oversimplifying the argument here, and yes that meant I wrote myself out of a discipline. From an ethical standpoint, encounters with a difference are what push and challenge us as humans and as writers. 

But at the core of this issue? 

It is what to do with one’s white privilege. This question has infinite layers, contradictions, and deep-seated angst that too few white people acknowledge exists. Guilt. 

That’s what I felt as I researched the origin of my great-grandfather’s KKK robe. I heard justifications that made me balk at how overtly dehumanizing they were to Black people. The racism was no longer the possession of a KKK robe, but rather, the way in which we as a family rationalized it.

But you cannot rationalize the irrational. You cannot rationalize racism. 

What you do, then, is to shed light on the dark corners of our psyches and family trees. We grapple with it, we understand the privilege it gave us, and then, we pay reparations. 

While I have no money, I do have time, teaching skills, and a way with words. So I use all of those. Reparations mean paying it forward to the next generation of Black and brown people. They need our help fixing what they did not break. They were never the problem. In a classic case of Freudian projection, or a schoolyard taunt about rubber and glue, the problem has always already been those who identify as the mythical ‘race’ of white. 

In our interview a few weeks ago,  Jessie Daniels explained the perilous path of denouncing your own people. I loved our conversation, where Daniels describes what it was like denouncing white supremacy in academia in the 1990s, her decision to leave academia, and her personal evolution. We spoke about anger, the role it has in both shaping and destroying you, and how important it was to have a community and spirituality centered around abolishing white supremacy. 

I hope you enjoy it! And of course, buy Jessie Daniel’s book Nice White Ladies! Author Kiese Laymon, the author of the memoir Heavy, says of Daniel’s book: “I’d love to live in a world where every white woman on earth reads this book. It could change everything.” Can I get a (wo)men

Until next time,

A