I was recently interviewed for a public scholarship project and shared some of my (slightly edited) thoughts in this newsletter. Rereading these comments helped me turn towards a period of exhaustion and reassess my priorities and commitments.
I have been thinking a lot about accountability, as a scholar and a writer. While working on my first book, Racial Purity and Dangerous Bodies: Moral Pollution, Black Lives, and the Struggle for Justice (Fortress Press, 2017), I was thinking about on-the-ground activists. I was thinking about people I knew, people with whom I was in community, people I respected through and through.
My commitment to being accountable to them wasn’t thinking about funders or peer reviewers. I didn’t have a sense of people external to the movement. That was really important for sustaining a kind of energy around something as big as writing a book.
And that was true, too, with my second book, Black Buddhists and the Black Radical Tradition: The Practice of Stillness in the Movement for Liberation (NYU Press, 2022). I didn’t know any Buddhist Studies scholars. I reviewed some literature as I wrote a chapter, which became my first chapter on Buddhism, but I wasn’t in the mix in a certain way, which also meant I didn’t internalize their critiques. I was accountable to the dharma teachers and practitioners that I was interviewing. I was accountable to the community to which I was talking, a community of Black activists.
And this is what I communicate to rising scholars and writers: “Know the community to which you’re accountable.” Be very, very clear about the “why” of your work. Come back to that, feel the urgency of that. Know that your work is meaningful and important; know that the people to whom you are accountable need your work. They need your wisdom, they need your stamina and your insight, your perseverance. Your work is necessary work.
I think if we as writer, artists, visionaries, healers, can hold that sense of purpose in front of us, we can “make a way out of no way.” Because sometimes it feels like we’re scaling a mountain, and we’ll never reach the top. But if we can keep in mind that commitment, that accountability, I think we will make a way forward. And by doing so, that scholarship, which could just sit on a shelf indefinitely, will actually become meaningful. It will be useful.
Protecting the most vulnerable members of our society is the work of justice. What scholars add is nuance and depth and complication, and the capacity to ask hard questions, to read difficult texts and to bring those texts to peoples’ and make them relevant.
Scholars have a very important role. Sometimes we are not the loudest people in the room, and it can feel like we’re not the most important, and that’s okay. Our work is meant to serve the community more broadly. We don’t have to have ego around it, but we do have to feel like what we do, what we offer, is valuable. And we do have to understand that we offer a particular role, and that we’re not just meant to get accolades or grants or awards.
We are really meant to serve the people who are doing hard work on the ground and by offering our scholarship, we’re doing hard work as well. It’s not an either/or.
So this is what I’ve told my students: “Know to whom you are accountable, and keep those voices in your head, and make relationships, and keep those relationships. And then your scholarship will inevitably be useful.”