Zora Neal Hurston once wrote, “I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background.”1 As a Black person and a Black historian, Hurston’s words have always clung to me, like Southern humidity on a hot day. Familiar. Heavy. Oppressive.
There are few backgrounds as white as academia. Black, Indigenous, and other people of color (BIPOC) are not only thrown against that background, but are also forced to throw themselves against it. We are expected to willingly dive into a white void for funding opportunities, to network, and to advance in our profession. Whether the void swallows us whole and leaves nothing behind, or spits out our damaged bodies and psyches, is of little concern to the academy. If our bones break when we are thrown against the white background, we are seen as simply making a necessary sacrifice. The Society for Historians of the Early American Republic (SHEAR) is such a white background.
I attended my first SHEAR in 2018, when I had a panel accepted. I felt immensely lucky to be on the program, as I had heard horror stories of graduate students, adjuncts, and junior faculty who had spent years trying and failing to get into the conference. One might expect my excitement to have faded when I entered the hotel and found myself surrounded by an overwhelmingly white, and mostly male, set of scholars. But it was no surprise to me. Like most BIPOC scholars, I’m quite used to being in white spaces. The disappointment I feel in my surroundings is ever-present, like a ringing in the ears.
The next year I decided to throw myself against the white background once more, and formed a panel for the 2020 SHEAR conference. But I set out to make as diverse a panel as I could. A Black woman, a white woman, and I were the three panelists. Our chair and commenter was a field-changing scholar, and a Black woman herself. Our panel, titled “Moving Freedom: Claimants of Black Citizenship and their Deniers,” looked from various angles at the relationship between enslaved fugitivity and Black citizenship in the early republic. I was confident that our paper topics and the diverse lineup would ensure our place at the conference. I was wrong.
On December 26, 2019, I received an email from John Belohlavek and Nancy Isenberg, the co-chairs of the program committee. He informed me that while “the topic and individual papers” of our panel seemed “provocative and engaging,” there was “an issue that makes acceptance of your panel problematic.” Namely, we were “not permitted to have graduate students comprise all of the panelists.” Belohlavek encouraged us “to re-submit your proposal for the 2021 conference, and make certain that you include at least one established scholar as a presenter.”
The conference’s call for papers (CFP) had not explicitly said that all-grad-student panels were prohibited. It instead said that “attention should be given to forming panels with gendered, racial, institutional, and interpretive diversity, representing as well different professional ranks and careers.” I (and many other grad students) assumed this meant SHEAR wanted to avoid panels composed entirely of tenured faculty, given their outsized power within the field. I said as much in my response to Belohlavek and Isenberg, asking that SHEAR be more explicit in future CFPs or change this policy. They responded that they would forward my concerns to SHEAR’s president, and encouraged me “to consult with the faculty at your institution and seek their assistance in identifying senior scholars at other schools for their availability.”
The email exchange left me dumbstruck and angry. Rejection is one thing, but our panel wasn’t rejected. It was disqualified. It was never actually considered. We had “provocative” and “engaging” topics, but we weren’t “established scholars.”
There wasn’t much I could do about it, though. Eventually I went to Twitter, and made a lengthy thread describing the situation. I expanded on the issues to include the one I hadn’t felt comfortable saying in the email: diversity. How exactly can organizations expect to diversify themselves if panels are expected to be composed mostly of established scholars? The field of professional historians is as white as a cotton field, dotted with non-white bodies exerting their labor.
Composing the Twitter thread was more cathartic than anything. Many people were outraged and wanted to know what the organization was. I hadn’t named SHEAR in my thread, for the same reason I was uncomfortable confronting my disqualification email with an explicit call for diversity: academia is a vindictive institution, and there are still white backgrounds my body must be thrown against.
With COVID-19 making it impossible to hold in-person conferences, SHEAR decided to follow the route of other organizations and postpone their annual meeting. They did, however, hold a virtual plenary panel. The panel, entitled “The Politicization of Andrew Jackson,” was, to be frank, a disaster. It was centered on Daniel Feller’s paper, “Andrew Jackson in the Age of Trump,” with comments by David Waldstreicher, Harry Watson, David Heidler, and Jeanne Heidler. The chair of the panel was Jessica Lepler.2
I was immediately struck by the utter lack of diversity in this panel. All participants were white. All except for Lepler were senior scholars. Jeanne Heidler was the only woman panelist, and she spoke for less than five minutes during the nearly-two-hour panel.
Then there was the matter of Feller’s actual presentation, an open attack on journalists and other historians (particularly women), and a denunciation of anyone who would focus on Jackson’s participation in genocide. He took issue with a New York Times piece which said Andrew Jackson “annihilated” Native Americans; he preferred to say they were “evicted.” Feller complained that historians like Dawn Peterson and Laurel Clarke Shire refused to understand Jackson’s relationship with Creek “adopted son” Lyncoya as anything other than proof of Jackson’s “racial bigotry.” Feller accused Joyce Chaplin of “fantasizing” Jackson in her comparison of Jackson’s and Donald Trump’s pandemic responses.3
The Q&A session presented the opportunity to qualify and temper comments. Instead Feller doubled down. When the audience asked why Lyncoya wasn’t described as “kidnapped, stolen, or enslaved,” both Feller and David Heidler balked. Heidler went so far as to say “it was not abducted, it was actually rescued.” Neither scholar adequately acknowledged that Lyncoya was left parentless only because Jackson had his village slaughtered. The plenary came to an end with Feller and Watson casually repeating the R-word in the final minutes.4
Before the plenary was even over, historians were sharing their disappointment and anger on social media. (Rebecca Anne Goetz’s thread is especially thought-provoking.) Scholars took issue with the plenary’s lack of attention to Native history and failure to include anyone who specialized in that history. It was also pointed out that the plenary flagrantly violated SHEAR’s diversity policy, the very one which was used against my proposed panel.
To make matters worse, SHEAR president Douglas Egerton released a letter the following day, which did little to address the diversity of the panel, and nothing to actually rectify the racism on display. Egerton’s first impulse was to downplay the importance of the plenary, by claiming it was simply a “stand-alone panel, and not the opening plenary.” Egerton went on to say the “structure” of the plenary, a single paper followed by comments, “had the effect of spotlighting Professor Feller’s paper.” But was this not the whole point? This is, after all, a tried-and-true panel format.
Egerton continued by describing SHEAR’s “plans” to diversify its conference: travel grants for underrepresented graduate students, research grants for graduate and undergraduate students. Such efforts are certainly welcomed. But diversity isn’t something that waits for plans. Diversity plans are plans left unfulfilled, as many scholars of color know. And there was no reason to put such an important subject off for the future, when actions could easily have been taken earlier. No funding is needed to prioritize diverse panels. No funding is needed to reject all-white panels. No funding is needed to value the work of graduate students.
Most egregiously, Egerton claimed SHEAR is moving towards “becoming an antiracist organization,” while in the previous paragraph he said he did “not wish to silence voices with whom I personally disagree.” Instead of condemning the racist language from the plenary, not least including the use of the R-word, Egerton vaguely criticized “derogatory words” and “offensive terms.” But it is impossible to be antiracist if you are unwilling to call out racism. It is impossible to be antiracist if you push diversity to the future, instead of starting now. And it is impossible to be antiracist if you create space for a scholar to openly attack others and spew racism, under the guise of differences of opinion.
To be antiracist is, at the bare minimum, to specifically call out racist actions for what they are. To be antiracist is to destroy the white background so many BIPOC scholars keep getting thrown against. It is to protect and welcome us.
I couldn’t watch the plenary and its aftermath without thinking of all the work that never gets this kind of exposure, especially when academic organizations are run by the “established scholars.” What would the plenary have looked like had SHEAR’s leadership actually included their own program committee in the decision-making process? What would SHEAR look like? Would it be the white background I’ve come to expect?
It’s easy to blame what happened in the plenary on the actions of a few, or on a digital format that only came about because of a pandemic. But this controversy has only exposed structural problems within the wider historical profession. Diversity is not a matter for the future. Inclusion is not subject to differences of opinion. And the language of antiracism is not a fad to be embraced because of recent tragedy or public outcry. This all requires work; work that I haven’t seen from SHEAR or from many historians; work this Black historian is tired of doing while being thrown against the sharp white background.
- Zora Neal Hurston, “How It Feels to Be Colored Me,” World Tomorrow 11 (May 1928): 215–16.
- Feller’s paper can be read by clicking here and entering the password Jackson2020; the password was publicly shared by SHEAR’s conference coordinator on H-SHEAR.
- For the articles Feller was criticizing, see “Take Jackson Off the $20 Bill, Put a Woman in His Place,” New York Times, July 4, 2015; Peterson quoted in Michael S. Rosenwald, “Andrew Jackson slaughtered Indians. Then he adopted a baby boy he’d orphaned,” Washington Post, June 16, 2019; Laurel Clark Shire, “Sentimental Racism and Sympathetic Paternalism: Feeling Like a Jacksonian,” Journal of the Early Republic, 39 (Spring 2019): 111–22; and Joyce Chaplin, “Even Andrew Jackson showed more leadership than Donald Trump in a pandemic,” Washington Post, April 1, 2020.
- The R-word exchange takes place around the 1:59:00 mark in this video.