Because we had such a good time nerding out together—and because examples just don’t stop—Lurie’s team had me back to continue our discussion. The show has now started a YouTube page, so clips appear there so people can actually SEE how this went. (Below) However, the full discussion is via audio here.
Talking White Mediocrity & Know-Your-Place Aggression with Lurie Daniel Favors
On February 1st, I had the honor of starting Black History Month on Sirius XM’s Lurie Daniel Favors Show. Black History Month also started with bomb threats at HBCUs around the country. The USA is nothing if not consistent! Delving into white mediocrity and know-your-place aggression is therefore always relevant.
My conversation with Lurie was urgent but also a delight. You can hear the full audio here.
How Reading Queer Authors Improved My Relationships
Many (kind) people have said they wish they could enroll in one of my courses. This essay gives a sense of the intellectual work my students and I do in class. It’s also the first time I’ve published something so personal about my life partner. Doing this is scary, so doing it with a rigorous editor was a tremendous gift!!!
Whoever you are, I hope you’ll read and share widely!
How Reading Queer Authors Improved My Relationships
And I hope students who have taken these classes recognize our discussions: Major Author: James Baldwin; Baldwin, Lorde, & LGBT Liberation; Womanhood in Black & White; and Introduction to Fiction.
Resources Related to My Keynote for the 2021 Conference of Ford Foundation Fellows
My dear fellow Fordies!
Thank you again for letting me address you! Thank you for attending and engaging the ideas I shared! It was a remarkable honor! ENDLESS THANKS to conference co-chairs Dr. Joseph Flipper and Dr. Teresa Ramirez and the entire conference planning committee for the invitation, to the Fellowships Office staff for making our gathering possible, and to the Ford Foundation and National Academies for their steadfast support of the fellowships program.
Here are some resources related to what I shared in my keynote address for the 2021 Conference of Ford Fellows:
I spoke in terms of self-care. For more, please see, “Identifying White Mediocrity and Know-Your-Place Aggression: A Form of Self-Care” https://muse.jhu.edu/article/715439
Here’s a video clip on white mediocrity and why I published the above essay: https://youtu.be/yq6w_9Eugqs
Here’s one example of my take on how whiteness is overvalued for no good reason and without legitimate justification: https://tmsnrt.rs/3i7KjVG
I spoke of giving yourself the gifts that only you can give. I published on that topic in April 2021 in TIME magazine online, and it was revised and published in the double print issue for July 19/July 26, 2021. Here’s the online version: https://bit.ly/3dScJ54
As is far too common, my (then) department chair told me that my 2007 Ford postdoc was basically financial aid: https://koritha.blogspot.com/2011/07/american-way-mediocrity-when-white.html
I suggested that figuring out your purpose is part of the work, so it’s always worthwhile to do that work and give yourself credit for doing it. For more, see “Should-ing All Over Ourselves.” http://thefeministwire.com/2012/11/should-ing-all-over-ourselves/
When you recognize know-your-place aggression, you see that Black culture is “Not about Protest” (5-minute video): https://youtu.be/Abud9brDKgc
I ended on the note of finding your way and finding your ways. This is a piece from long ago about why I think that’s so important: “Never-Ending Battles Require Sustainable Energy” http://koritha.blogspot.com/2012/06/never-ending-battles-require.html
I also spoke of my investment in making spaces less hostile for more people. Here are a couple examples of my attempts: “Never Supported a Trans Youth Organization? Now is the Time” https://bit.ly/KYCoped and “Love in Action: Noting Similarities between Lynching Then and Anti-LGBT Violence Now” https://muse.jhu.edu/article/521535
I hope these resources are helpful, and I look forward to witnessing all you do!
With every good wish,
Paperback Release!
From Slave Cabins to the White House is now in paperback! This is a good time to revisit this amazing conversation with Brittney Cooper!
Also, enjoy 30% off when ordering directly from the University of Illinois Press by using code F21UIP at check out. Offer valid through December 2022. Share widely!
Democracy in Peril and Juneteenth Diluted, Too. Thanks, Fellow Americans
The United States is far from finished with the consequences of empowering Donald Trump, and I am tired of ordinary Americans acting as if they don’t know how we got here. First, both political leaders and ordinary citizens tolerated, enabled, and encouraged Trump’s efforts to delegitimize President Barack Obama. Birtherism gained traction because white people use standards to judge everyone but themselves and each other. Americans who consider themselves “good” and “decent” allowed a campaign of suspicion about Obama’s credentials while the accuser’s credentials did not matter, because whiteness was the only qualification needed.
The country is still paying the price. With 600K deaths and counting, we continue to deal with how the Trump administration allowed COVID-19 to ravage the nation. Also still circulating because Trump’s influence remains: the disinformation fueling mask protests and vaccine refusals among white conservatives. Then, there’s the big lie that inspired the January 6th attack on the capitol. Trump’s hold on the GOP and the nation has been challenged more by Twitter and Facebook policies than by senators who swore to prioritize democracy.
My disappointment does not end with senators, though, because ordinary Americans allowed Trump to ride the wave of birtherism into the White House. The majority of “good” and “decent” Americans failed to mobilize when he launched his presidential campaign by calling Mexicans “rapists.” The “good” and “decent” did not launch organized opposition when he mocked the reporter with disabilities. Larger numbers of ordinary Americans were organizing by the time the “grab ‘em by the p—-” recording emerged, but much of that action was private and certainly too little too late. My sluggish fellow Americans finally began to feel some urgency after 3 years of watching a president embody what they reluctantly recognized as incompetence and villain-level narcissism and callousness.
Only at this point did ordinary Americans begin demanding fewer unchecked lies from the nation’s seat of power. That’s when the media’s go-to strategy became fact-checking, sometimes in real time.
This is how the unanimous passing of the Juneteenth bill became more evidence of Trump’s reverberating impact.

I respect Representative Sheila Jackson Lee’s role in the Juneteenth federal holiday bill. She’s one of my hometown heroes, and I’ll never forget that she took the time to present me with a Congressional Certificate of Recognition after my 2014 lecture at the Library of Congress. As Dr. Ebony Elizabeth Thomas (@Ebonyteach) put it on Twitter: “We can deeply respect our Black elders and also have principled critiques of US federal policy…”
Bills on this issue were introduced last summer by Senator Ed Markey and one of my hometown heroes, Houston’s Sheila Jackson Lee. Neither got a floor vote, so the bills were re-introduced this year.
I don’t discount their work. Nevertheless, the consequences of my fellow citizens emboldening Trump from the early days of birtherism are all over the passage of this bill.
In summer 2020, as the nation grappled with the killings of George Floyd, Breanna Taylor, and others, Trump claimed that no one knew about Juneteenth until he talked about it. Media outlets immediately began proving that Juneteenth had been commemorated for generations. As had become a pattern, Trump lied and then the media poured energy into showing that it was a lie. I was annoyed watching it because it repeated the cycle of Black people’s actual truths getting lost because the entire (well meaning) approach was defensive. That is, the goal was proving that a basic fact was a fact, so everything became about that—not about Juneteenth and Black people’s lives, experiences, and culture.
To prove that something that has existed for generations does, in fact, exist is to meet an incredibly impoverished standard, so the national conversation was necessarily basic and missed the point. The point should have been that Juneteenth celebrations demonstrate African Americans’ investment in honoring their ancestors’ resiliency while facing injustices heaped on them in the only home they’ve known. And these celebrations represent Black Americans’ refusal to let white lies replace their own cultural knowledge.
I grew up in a small community: Thompson Chapel in Sugar Land, just outside of Houston. My neighbor, Harold “Peto” Williams, sponsored a Juneteenth celebration every year from 1980, when it became a state holiday, to 2003. I attended from the age of 5 to 18, when I went away to college in 1992. Those commemorations helped make me who I am today. American culture never tires of diminishing, denigrating, and demonizing Black people, but on June 19th, I encountered life-affirming messages that school and nearly every powerful institution withheld from me.
Being affirmed by the community cultivated by Juneteenth helped me develop in ways that have saved me from believing the death-dealing lies routinely told about who I am and who my people have been. I see how shamelessly American culture (not only news and popular entertainment but also laws and public policies) must lie in order to convince citizens that white folk deserve to be the main people who enjoy anything society deems desirable.
Likewise, I see how much lying and withholding of information is required for today’s conservatives to be happy. The disingenuous claims that schools teach critical race theory and must therefore be reined in strike me as similar to the lying and withholding that Texas enslavers were invested in upon learning of the Emancipation Proclamation.
Symbolic gestures like this new federal holiday matter, but I can’t ignore the limits. American culture is so steeped in white domination that everything is seen as being granted by white people—including ordinary ones. Do white people approve of a change that tangentially acknowledges Black people’s right to belong? That question consistently, even if implicitly, shapes countless news stories.
Last summer, people of color and white allies called for defunding police departments and funding social services in communities of color in the same way that white neighborhoods enjoy an abundance of public services and a scarcity of surveillance.
What gets granted instead? The Juneteenth holiday.
Could an outcome be any more American than that?
It is the American way to remind Black people of their “proper” (subordinate) place in society while insisting that crumbs be celebrated. After all, this victory 1) does not necessarily build understanding of, or appreciation for, what Black people experience, and 2) does not benefit Black people specifically. Everyone potentially gets a day off. Hooray. Who cares if you use it to go to your neo-Nazi meeting. That’s not the Senate’s concern, given that they won’t even investigate January 6th.
Processing the Election, the Capitol Mob, and the Inauguration
What an honor to join sister scholars of the Association of Black Women Historians to process this ongoing moment!
Talking White Mediocrity with Michael Harriot
As we’ve watched Donald Trump disregard the 300,000+ Americans who have died from COVID but still get support in trying to steal the election, brash villainy can make white mediocrity seem like a non-issue. However, white mediocrity has always been extremely dangerous. Trump became president because ordinary white people held themselves (and each other) to LOW standards, thereby failing to mobilize to stop him as soon as he called Mexicans “rapists.”
I’ve been highlighting the danger of white mediocrity for years, including here and here and here. This clarity puts me in conversation with people like Michael Harriot and Ijeoma Oluo, who just published Mediocre. Harriot and I caught up on camera around these issues. It was an honor, but the clarity is also important.
Recording: Book Launch with Brittney Cooper

Watch the book launch! It was a VERY GOOD TIME!!! And please share widely! https://youtu.be/R_qkBy5jmuw
Pygmalion Literary Festival

I took this opportunity to read a bit from my book’s Coda, “From Mom-in-Chief to Predator-in-Chief.” The recording is less than 15 minutes. Please enjoy and share widely! https://youtu.be/T22qBlt_fYs?t=9569