The Truth We Must Tell

I just left #AARSBL with a full heart. There is something profoundly enlivening about walking into a space filled with scholars established, emerging, and everything in between doing the work their souls must have. Every corridor felt like a reunion of callings. Every hallway carried the residue of someone’s becoming. I arrived with an ambitious schedule, but Spirit had her own itinerary.

Instead of racing from panel to panel, I found myself drifting toward the sacred work of presence offering the same care, connection, and affirmation that so many elders and co-conspirators once offered to me. There is a ministry in those in-between spaces: the quiet check-ins, the whispered encouragements, the knowing nods between people fighting similar battles within different institutions. Sometimes the most transformative panels aren’t printed in the program book; they happen around the edges of the academic machine.

And then came the book exhibit. I walked those aisles slowly, touching spines, listening for the whispers of future possibility. I could almost see The Pink Robe Chronicles on display next year—courageous, bold, womanist, steeped in sacred memory and insurgent love. I imagined readers picking it up, feeling the warmth of the stories, sensing the tension between vulnerability and resistance that animates every page. That moment of seeing one’s work among the works that shaped you is a kind of ritual, a ceremony of arrival.

But the truth is: joy was not the only thing stirring in me.

The Shadow in the Room

Academic gatherings like AAR/SBL are always double-edged. They illuminate what we love about our guilds and expose what we refuse to confront. And this year, the refusal felt louder than usual.

Because the Black theological and Africana religious academy our academy has its own Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell dynamics. We know this. We whisper about it. We warn certain students privately. We tell one another to “be careful,” “be vigilant,” “don’t be alone with him,” “watch out for her.” We trade cautionary anecdotes like survival notes in an under-resourced school system.

We have built a whole ecosystem around what we cannot say out loud.

And yet, so many harm-doers are rewarded with public daps, hugs, invitations, glowing introductions, and prestigious appointments. Institutions protect them. Committees nominate them. Boards approve them. Publishers court them. And conferences platform them.

Meanwhile, the people who endure the harassment, the targeting, the stalking, the academic sabotage, or the professional threats are left to navigate a labyrinth of silence, fear, and disappointment often without support, without recourse, without repair.

The Complicity We Refuse to Name

There is another layer we rarely talk about: the women who collude with this violence.

Some collude through silence because speaking up would threaten their mobility in the industrial complex we politely call “the guild.”

Some collude because they benefit from proximity to powerful men and know their careers rise when they play the game.

Some collude because they have convinced themselves that the wounds of others are not severe enough to compromise their own access.

But silence is not neutral.

Silence is an endorsement.

Silence is a currency in corrupt ecosystems.

And we cannot build Womanist, Black feminist, Afrocentric, or liberative futures on the backs of women and femmes we allow to be harmed while we pretend not to see.

A Call Toward Accountability as Sacred Practice

I look forward to the day when:

• Black men—and those who protect them—are no longer rewarded for behavior that harms our intellectual and spiritual communities.

• Institutions take seriously the testimonies of those harmed, instead of treating them like inconvenient disruptions.

• Conferences proactively refuse to platform people with patterns of abuse, exploitation, or manipulation.

• Silence is no longer the price of admission into “the room.”

• Women and femmes who collude with silence come forward and choose accountability over access, integrity over proximity.

This is not vindictiveness.

This is not bitterness.

This is the work of liberation.

If sacred memory teaches us anything, it is that the stories we are afraid to tell become the patterns that destroy us. Womanist ethics has always reminded us that survival is communal. And Afrocentric/Afrofuturist imagination insists that the world we hope for cannot be built with the same tools that harm us now.

Tending the Future We Deserve

As I left the conference, I held both truths in my hands:

• the beauty of connection, imagination, and lineage and

• the urgency of confronting the violence that hides beneath our institutions’ polished veneers

We cannot keep building altars to brilliance while ignoring the bodies left behind.

We cannot preach liberation while protecting predators.

We cannot call ourselves a community if the price of belonging is someone else’s suffering.

I am committed to a future where we tell the truth.

A future where we believe the people harmed.

A future where accountability is not seen as destruction but as care.

A future where our guild is as free, just, and life-giving as the scholarship we say we value.

May we have the courage to create that future—together, out loud, and without apology.