Prof. Tao Leigh Goffe | 道 🐲🌋
@taoleighgoffe
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Goffe rhymes with Prof. • author of📚DARK LABORATORY a #climate history @DoubledayBooks • Associate Prof 👩🏽🏫 • LDN x NYC • 🧪 Lab Director 🧜🏾♀️ 🍉
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THE BEST NEWS! 📚📚Such a pleasure to share the first look at the cover for my NEW BOOK. It’s called DARK LABORATORY and it’s on climate crisis coming to you from
@doubledaybooks
/
@penguinrandom
/
@PenguinUKBooks
/
@HamishH1931
.
@LaboratoryDark
My dream publishing team🐧⚓️🧪
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I finished my PhD at 26. I regret this. Take time off between grad school and undergrad. Live your life. Defer, read, work, explore, party, save, make art, sleep. Don’t rush. Grad school is not the safety net you think it is. The degree will be there when you’re done. Enjoy life!
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Oprah asked Toni Morrison, "is it true that sometimes people have to read over your work in order to understand it, to get the full meaning? She replied, “That, my dear, is called reading.”
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I am a professor and as of today, I quit my position as Artist-in-Residence
#ColumbiaUniversity
which I have served for the past two years. I am an Associate Professor at Hunter College and in support of the courageous student protestors at Columbia, I cannot in good conscience..
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‘diversity’ is a white supremacist answer to a white supremacist problem
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Toni Morrison was the best teacher because she didn’t ‘teach.’ She told us stories. Each class she was twenty minutes late, strolled in & would charm us with stories. Telling a good story was the lesson. So many academics could not tell a good story to save their life. Facts.
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a reminder that not all immigrants are minorities, some were in fact the supremacists in their home countries, global elite or not
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When Toni Morrison was my prof in college, she told us students not to trust those soundtracks designed to tell the audience how to feel with little violins 🎻and orchestras. So much of storytelling is sonic and can be manipulative.
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To the immigrants who say they have never experienced racism till they came to the US, consider that you may have been part of the dominant homogenous group inflicting supremacy against minorities in your ‘home country.’
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re-reading is reading, 📖 because (hopefully) you are a different person each time. the text changes because you have changed.
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Hearing the words “I hear you” from authority figures is triggering AF. They don’t. They learned that in a diversity workshop.
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“Underrepresented” sounds like a random accident rather than what it is, the result of a deliberate plan of exclusion.
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universities have never been safe. the veil is being lifted. from sexual violence to hazing to censorship, there is so much hidden violence sanctioned and now ordered by administrators.
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climate crisis began in 1492, what is it that ppl don’t get about this?
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skin is a passport. epidermal citizenship.
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There should be a class called *Intro to Grad School* where they teach you all the things no one will tell you (and professors’ kids already know somehow)
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unfortunately in graduate school the act of reading becomes oriented as an extractive practice and thus can easily lose its potential as a ritual of pleasure. sadly, reading becomes an act of harvesting or scavenging citations to cover bases and hedge bets.
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“Diversifying” graduate student cohorts without recruiting, retaining, and promoting faculty of color who work on relevant topics who can teach and advise incoming students is unethical.
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Chattel slavery transformed modern finance into what it is, and thus every subsequent act of financialization must be understood as a racializing one.
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What’s the single author you own the most books by?
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Funny how men professors pretend they are incompetent at “administrative” work so that women professors and staff inevitably have to pick up the pieces, until it’s time to become a director or a dean. 🤦🏽♀️
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citing ‘pedagogy of the oppressed’ and then using pedagogy to oppress
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“Asian” as a banner and a term of solidarity and strategic essentialism is important, but the specificity of which Asians are being targeted and are associated w the precarity of sex work and why is also important
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I don't understand what people mean when they say a book is dense....What is light reading? Why do people expect reading to be easy?
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The history of the Caribbean Chinese is one that has been muted and mutilated. This is my
#AfroAsia
, my
#BlackPacific
told through family photo albums.
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bell hooks, 🕯2021 has taken too much from us
her essay “eating the other” truly informs me as a scholar everyday
“Within commodity culture, ethnicity becomes spice, seasoning that can liven up the dull dish that is mainstream white culture.”
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I will admit I sat in silence through most of high school and college, & as a Black girl at Princeton it was an alienating experience. Now a decade later I am a professor and teach for that student who did all the reading and is working up the courage to raise her hand. 🙋🏽♀️
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one of the problems with diversity training folks keep pushing up against, but won’t address, is that you can’t train people to care about other people. 🤷🏽♀️
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i never said my goal was equality. for me black feminist praxis is not about ‘a seat at the table’ next to a white man; it’s another galaxy where there is no concept of a table and there are others forms of communing not based on exclusion, which is what the table metaphor is btw
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when representation is the only aspiration, it ensures that all firsts will be lasts.
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what disturbs me is how quickly the world can forget centuries of anti-Asian violence, each time the cycle of forgetting is the only certain thing
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British colonialism is not the only colonialism. European colonialism is not the only colonialism.
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so often the price of inclusion is allowing yourself to be used as a pawn against your own people or those you should be in solidarity with
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Every PhD program should have a required course on the ‘Ethics and Politics of Citation’ in the first year. Empty citations, namedropping, and theft are common malpractice in academia. It’s sad, often intentional and gendered.
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Im tired of the lengths we have to go to in academic writing to prove something is “missing” from history when it was clearly violently erased. Missing is passive. “Lost histories” - “forgotten histories” are passive. All denied histories.
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for the position to charitable causes in Gaza as is the request of the students.
Both the silence and silencing of comfortable tenured and tenure-track faculty has been appalling, though not surprising. It is loud. But the student protestors are louder and being heard by..
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In the diaspora, there is always a silence between the generations, sometimes it is so loud it keeps secrets from the future.
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colonialism has no imagination; it is the annihilation of worlds, slow and fast genocide
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Some profs ask what can be done to ‘diversify’ the faculty because they have tried everything, the answer they don’t want to hear is simple *retire.*
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When we are denied permission to write critically about our families as a door into colonial histories because it is dismissed as “me-search”, it is often by the same structures who denied our ancestors’ humanity.
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don’t trust people who expect your labor without acknowledging that they are depending on you
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being a Black woman is constantly being told to walk before you can run by people who will never understand you have been running for your life, your whole life.
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Unprompted a white Ivy League professor told me to my face (a Black Ivy League professor) that Cornell, where I work, is not really an Ivy League school. Whiteness is intent on resetting the fake metrics it creates. And it should but also…leave Black people out of this. Thx.
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it’s unethical to admit PhD students to programs where there are no tenured faculty in that subject qualified or willing to advise
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Anti-Asian hate is not “un-American,” it’s the very formation of the US as a gatekeeping nation, designed to keep Chinese out, not Mexicans. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 lasted till WWII.
Abolish ICE, part of this racist immigration legacy.
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Doing Black Studies without the Caribbean? You're not, & you're a nationalist.
Theorists of Caribbean origin: Du Bois, Lorde, Malcolm X, Simone Browne, Fanon, Nella Larsen, Stokely Carmichael, Wynter, Marley, Gilroy, Robin Kelley, Dorothy Roberts, Rodney, Hall, Adrian Piper....
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Does a WOC ever get to be the charming absent-minded professor? 👩🏽🏫👩🏿🎓
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starting a new job? write a letter to yourself that is your retention plan. know what you require to stay and thrive. dont accept anything less or people will choose for you.
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the world 🌏right now. Lip service is great. What are tenured faculty willing to give up? For freedom fr Gaza to the West Bank to Congo to Haiti, this blueprint of organized dissent matters.
While I’ve personally been treated well and been generously supported by staff in my…
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If you’re starting grad school make sure you have a *support group.* There are no guarantees it will end up being your cohort. So make sure you’re not trying to do it alone. No one ever graduated doing it alone.
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some good news!! I got a fellowship for next year to write a book on race, ecology, and the Caribbean!! excited to be able to share more about it soon. 🤗
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When POC say our histories are missing from textbooks 📚 that is not an invitation to people not of color to get six figure book deals to write our histories for us. ✍🏽
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diaspora is often defined by disaster; this is why we mourn together beyond the borders of the nation-state
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if you only knew how many academics of color are on the verge of quitting from day to day. the unbearable whiteness of colonial institutions
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Capitalism loves disposability. Disposable income. Disposable goods. Disposable people. Disposable colonies.
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Spice history is global economic history.
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citation is a public declaration of who you intend to be accountable to, so the lack of citation of scholars of colors by certain white scholars writing on POC histories means exactly that
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Across the country I’ve learned about college dorms designed after 1968 specifically to preclude the possibility of students congregating for protests.
Those Columbia lawns are symbolic and pristine. They ought to be trampled and used for taking a stand.
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unit at the climate school, I am all too aware that universities depend on the 4-year cycle of graduation to quell dissent. Finals and the relentless schedule are used to suppress any sort of gathering.
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“Tonight you are all forgiven.” Oscar-winner 🇰🇷 Youn Yuh-jung on everyone who has mispronounced her name. 😅
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If you let institutions define your success, they will always have the power to take it from you.
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Being interdisciplinary is knowing that multiple disciplines use the same keywords and mean totally different things.
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This approach to production has deeply informed my sonic philosophy in the art I’m creating with attention to sound. None of it is a given. History is not a given. Ask the meta questions about who the maestro 👨🏼🏫 is 🎶
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Since I have been called ‘illegible,’ for the interdisciplinary work I do, I will be starting a writing group called ‘the illegibles’ for all those who also ‘consent not to be a single being.’ 🙋🏾♀️✍🏽
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Doxxing is commonplace as well as targeting by Fox News and vandalism in the places I have worked.
Today I am learning from the Columbia students. Divest. Refuse. Retain the right to say NO.
End the suffering in Palestine, Congo, Sudan, Haiti….
Sincerely
Tao Leigh Goffe, PhD
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black feminist thinkers like
#bellhooks
are architects of thought, giving us the words to build worlds 🌌 and universes 🪐beyond the limited and violent imagination of white supremacy. they make possibility possible. the loss is intergalactic.
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normalize being open to learning from those younger than you
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My Spring 2021, a new course “Black and Indigenous Ecologies.”
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some academics just describe things that already exist for a living, the bar is so low for certain people
meanwhile others are asked to justify their humanity and existence w an academic argument
we are not all doing the same job.
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Happy
#AAPIHeritageMonth
! May 1 is also
#IndianArrival
Day on the Caribbean island of 🏝 Grenada 🇬🇩 the spice isle. Lesser studied than the South Asian histories of Trinidad or Guyana, there are also vibrant
#AfroAsian
intimacies present, layered bitter & sweet.
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Black studies is, in part, a meta-critique of the university itself; this is why it will continue to be isolated and underfunded. Black study threatens the very structure of the university endowment in its attention to racial capitalism.
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I have been told twice in a week by copyeditors I shouldn’t use the terms that I use to describe my own identity — Afro-Asian, Jamaican Chinese — because it’s not official terminology. The gap between what they call us, and what we call ourselves. 🤦🏽♀️
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Even if you are not a poet, try writing a poem for each chapter in progress, distilling the ideas, it will tell you what sort of dissertation or book you’re writing. 📚 free verse, sonnets, haiku, slam?
poetry reveals to us so much about prose.
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how critical is your theory if someone has to be versed in critical theory to communicate with you?
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and where my dad stood up as a student against the US invasion of Grenada. He was taught AND encouraged by professors Edward Said and Amiri Baraka. I don’t see those faculty on campus today. The air of conservatism is powerful and suffocatingly normalized.
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so tired of explaining the history of racism to the people who created it
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Recognize that you cannot decolonize the curriculum if you can’t recognize that not everyone has the capacity to teach Black and Indigenous texts fully
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If the anti-racist curricular rollouts are only for students and don’t include educating the faculty AND administrators, then what is taking place but the restructuring of racism?
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it has never been more clear to me that we are all reading to save our lives
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So much of the curriculum champions these principles.
Separate from my art residency, over the past year, I have been asked to give no less than 6 talks at Columbia / Barnard (architecture, music, art, digital humanities) where in each I encouraged students to grapple with
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The students are giving a masterclass in what it means to apply to the core values. Protect privacy. Protecting one another by masking outdoors during the ongoing pandemic. Mutual aid. Leading by example. And studying for finals!
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So, you don’t have to wear a mask if there is room at your local hospital for you to die?? 😷
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If you study a group of people you have no ties to and can’t answer the simple question ‘Why?’ and this makes you defensive, then you are NOT doing the work you think you’re doing.
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what Columbia has represented for 270 years, predating the Nation. From the genocide of King George to the namesake Christopher Columbus to the Manhattan Project (Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Oppenheimer) medical school experimentation in stolen dead bodies,
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F cancel culture; it is a distraction from the true exclusion produced by the nation-state: cancelled passports, subjects, cancelled boyhoods, girlhoods, childhoods of Black citizens around the globe. This is my grandfather in the midst of Chinese Exclusion in 1934. 🇯🇲
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I can be paid an honorarium to say the radical but really obvious things about the university’s role in genocide, historic and present. Where is the ethical commitment to change?
I grew up knowing a Columbia with the tradition of protest in 1968, against South African Apartheid,
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Black study is not extra reading; it is the argument. The reading is not optional. The history is not supplemental. The Haitian 🇭🇹 Revolution is not separable from the unraveling of the word right now because the definition of value and who is considered human is in crisis.
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the labs named for the Caribbean island Nevis where Alexander Hamilton was born. Displacement and gentrification ongoing in the architecture of that campus.
I’m aware my labor as a Black woman and a Professor is outsourced, as a bandaid. Without structural commitment to change,
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if you are just beginning to connect the dots of racial capitalism and it's leading you to the genesis of ecological crisis, YOU don't actually have to write the book or dissertation on this, Black feminists already did long ago...
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The world needs more anticapitalist histories.
C.L.R. James told us - The only place where Black people did not revolt is in the pages of capitalist historians.
Born on this day Jan 4, 1901 in Tunapuna, Trinidad and Tobago. 🇹🇹
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Finishing your PhD shouldn’t depend on winning external fellowships. Universities should provide funding for what they know is avg time to degree based on decades of data.
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One day I will write a book on how the Ivy League is ruining the world. This is my conclusion after 15 years being taught in or teaching for Ivy League institutions (Princeton/Yale/Cornell). I am happy to be employed at a state institution, CUNY,
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👋🏽 Hi, Im looking for a couple of remote part-time research assistants, PhD program enrolled. Please email your cv to my Cornell email address if you think you might be right for the job. 🧪🎮📀
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European colonialism is a centuries-long campaign of discrediting knowledge systems and then repackaging them for profit.
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Hi, new followers! 👋 Toni Morrison was my prof in undergrad; she was transformative. Tony Blair was my prof in grad school, not so much. I'm a prof now myself. Years ago I wrote an essay on the gems I learned from being her student. Editors weren't interested then. One day?
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