How one Tweet reveals the mixed ethnic experience
On the 27th of January, I reached a major academic milestone: I submitted my thesis entitled: The Architecture of Whiteness: How Institutional Whiteness Shapes Academic Careers in the UK. I shared this milestone on X (formerly Twitter) on February 12th [ See the post here ]. As a result, my post received over 9 million views and nearly 3,000 comments. It is safe to say that the main issue people had with the post was not the content (which is not available to literally anyone but me, my supervisors, and my examiners), but my use of the word "Whiteness". To understand why this reaction occurred, we need to examine what I mean by ‘Whiteness’… A deconstruction of 'Whiteness' requires a reading of my thesis and multiple future blogs, but as a quick summary, I take Sara Ahmed's description of what institutional "Whiteness" means: "When we talk of “white men” we are describing an institution. “White men” is an institution... An institution typically r...