Mahalo.ne.Trash

My self-directed, community-supported (re)education about US-American society has fueled my focus on, and pursuit of, social justice. I believe that a just society allows all members to have equal opportunities for success in life, and equal access to social, political and economic opportunities and power. This should be regardless of race, gender, sexuality, religion—and sadly that's where these statements of social justice too often end. What is often missing, even in my own thinking until relatively recently, is an acknowledgement that physical and mental dis ability must  be included in this list . 

In what follows I provide some background and setup for a strong Mahalo.ne.Trash endorsement of Prof. Katie Hinde's exemplary, pitch-perfect, framework-shifting essay " Work in Progress: Changing Academic Culture. " It's arguments and lessons will stay with me for a lifetime. And just in case that's not enough of an endorsement, here's my intro, in which I,  among other things,  brag about knowing the author :-) Prof Katie Hinde in the field in Namibia When I arrived at Harvard, I was contacted by a Prof. Katie Hinde from the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology (HEB). It turned out that one of her students was partnered with one of my students. Small world! She had also read my blog post on The simple power of presence in even modest numbers , which really resonated with her. She invited me to coffee and we quickly figured out that we were kindred spirits.  I am honored to have Prof. Hinde as one of my true friends, and given all the amazing ...

In the title, I use the word "prioritize" purposefully. Most, if not all educational institutions have statements on their webpages that say that they value diversity, while assigning themselves the label "equal-opportunity employer," or some such. But among the most important lessons I've learned in my academic career is that words are less than cheap. What are less than rare are actions that would increase diversity by addressing barriers to it, backed by funding and effort.  This shortfall of actual effort is nothing short of a crisis of leadership so extensive , so old , and so well-practiced that it is institutionalized (James Baldwin  wrote on it  in 1984). Indeed, this crisis is a key pillar of institutional *isms; inaction as action that supports the status quo.  Where we can find vibrant leadership—actual active leading instead of labels—is among the voices of color in academia. They (we) have a vantage point, a perspective borne of daily e...