“As if the problem of racism outside of the academy isn’t enough,” the author says, “try thinking about the ways it has informed the very notion of academy and maintains a presence in our academic institutions.” He reflects on his own position in the academy as racialized subject, educand, and educator, departing from Mary Louise Pratt’s notion of an “autoethnography” to engage in a “selfiography,” in the process interrogating not only notions of “blackness” but also the too-often-naturalized assumptions of whiteness.

[T]he Africans, Asians, and Latin Americans .[. .1 are news today because of their nationalism [. ..] examples the black [people] in this country should use in [our] struggle for independence. (And that is what the struggle remains, for independence-from the political, economic, social, spiritual and psychological domination of the white man). The struggle is not simply for equality, or betterjobs, or better schools, and the rest of those half-hearted liberal cliches; it is to completely free the black [people]from the domination of the white man. Nothing else. -LeRoi Jones