Trigger: discussions of murder, death, gendered violence, doxxing
This morning, I woke up in a cold sweat. Another nightmare. I woke up from my sleep at 6:43 am. I lay there panting, trying to catch my breath, holding my chest as my heart pounded behind my rib cage. This time was similar to times before: someone was angry with me and tracked me down to my childhood home before breaking in and killing me. The only difference this time was that the person who killed me was Black.
“I am so tired,” I said out loud.
In her 1975 Keynote Address at Portland State University, canonical author and editor Toni Morrison said, “The function, the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and you spend twenty years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn’t shaped properly so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Somebody says you have no art, so you dredge that up. Somebody says you have no kingdoms, so you dredge that up. None of this is necessary. There will always be one more thing.”
Yes, there is always one more thing. And, I, for one, am tired.
As a traumatized person in the United States, I have had many nightmares about what life is like in public. However, only since entering academia and becoming a public intellectual have I had consistent and recurrent nightmares about someone harming me, stalking me, or targeting me for physical violence. This is because, though I started my public career work as a journalist in the early 2000s writing for EBONY Magazine, Marie Claire, For Harriet, and the like, I didn’t start to receive death threats and other forms of online harassment until after I shifted my career focus and applied to graduate school at the University of Chicago in 2014.
It was during my transition from Corporate America into the hallowed halls of the elite university system where I truly started to understand how a body like mine (e.g. Black, woman, queer, trans, disabled, and working-class) disrupts a white supremacist heteropatriarchal capitalist system of repression and domination like higher education.
It was at the University of Chicago where I first learned that my ideas would be questioned despite their merits, my qualifications would be ignored despite their worth, and my intellect would be undermined no matter how much I proved that I deserved to be there. There is something about these elite white spaces that requires gatekeeping and the policing of boundaries to both protect their fragility and monitor who gains entry.
…the toll of constantly having to fight would eventually burn me out and wear me down.
Because I had already experienced unrelenting racism, misogynoir, and hyper-surveillance working at both Disney and Pac Sun as a salaried professional, and as an undergraduate engineering major at the University of Southern California, I thought I understood what my attendance at an elite, predominantly white institution would feel like. I was terribly, aggressively, and utterly wrong.
When I got to grad school, I was confronted on day one (literally the first day of school) by a racist, misogynistic professor who cornered me and another Black woman for “only studying Black people.” Still rooted in a hood ethic, I puffed my chest out, stepped between the large man and my very petite colleague and asked, “Do you ask all the white students why they are studying Russia and Germany or do you only bother the Black students?”
He laughed. He seemed pleased that I decided to go toe-to-toe with him. At the time, I assumed this white man’s aggressively racist and misogynistic behavior was an outlier. I found out many times over that I was once again wrong. I also learned that the toll of constantly having to fight would eventually burn me out and wear me down.
During the early years of graduate school, I was repeatedly cut off in class by men and interrupted by white women. I was questioned when I had the correct answers in statistics class as if I was intellectually incapable of understanding mathematics despite my engineering training from a leading university and program. I was baited into theoretical arguments by graduate students who had attended Harvard, University of Michigan, and other elite universities as if I had to prove that I should be there. I found myself exhausted and ready to quit graduate school every semester, not because I struggled with the intellectual rigor, but because I was weary of having to explain and translate myself every second of every day.
One such semester, a young Pakistani man locked me in a computer lab to question me about why I was speaking to his friend, a white man. I was sitting in the lab completing a statistics homework assignment when he slammed the door and began yelling. I was startled and terrified because there was no way out of the room except through him. He yelled. I sat there, never moving. And then, he eventually opened the door and walked out. My eyes filled with tears as people had been outside the room, banging on the door, trying to enter. It was all too much.
Over the course of the following weeks, the man rallied people in the department to explain to the administrators why he was actually a great person and I somehow instigated the altercation. People turned it into an argument and implied that I participated despite my lack of engagement with the man during his confrontational tantrum. Folks chose sides and suggested that I had no reason to be afraid of him because I am larger than him. No one acknowledged that, maybe, I just didn’t want to have to fight this man at all. And, I especially didn’t want to be trapped in a room with two men I hardly knew.
Even the Black folks in my department dismissed the experience. My advisor, a Black queer woman, said of the event, “Well, Jenn, people yell.” And, that was it. And, maybe that was the first time this discipline and career truly broke my heart.
A year later, I found myself in a room full of Black and Brown graduate students building a collective to advocate for our rights as students. The primary organizers were cisgender, heterosexual Black men who beknighted themselves as our leaders. In one meeting, I complimented one of the Black male leaders as we had made community agreements about how we would speak to ourselves and to others. Immediately, he snapped at me in front of the entire room. I swallowed down tears of embarrassment. I said nothing because I didn’t want to cry. My face was hot. I was confused and hurt.
After the meeting, no one checked on me. No one asked me if I was okay. When I asked the group to take seriously how we speak to one another, they decided to remain neutral. For fear of rattling the cage of patriarchy we all found ourselves chained to, they didn’t hold the man accountable. Instead, he began spreading a slander campaign against me, warning new students not to be in community with me. I would introduce myself to new Black students and they would say, “Oh yeah, I have heard about you.” Each time, it was him who had been working to further isolate me. That was heartbreak number two.
After that experience, I didn’t leave my home for a week. I cried nearly every day. I sought support from a new therapist and began taking medication for depression. The ongoing harms and gossiping about me sent me to a place where I felt unsafe in my program and in my own body. And, no one said a single thing about it.
Nearly a decade later, me and that man have never mediated, addressed, or restored the harm that was caused. Instead, my colleagues have coddled him, pushed him along in roles he isn’t qualified for, and elevated him despite his questionable orientation to community. Meanwhile, I have struggled for support and care from these same colleagues. Often, they have simply offered a “you’ll be fine,” or, “I’m sure you’ll figure it out.” It often feels like they’re giving a high-five to a person who is drowning while making sure they never get wet.
Around this time, Twitter was taking off as a primary site for public intellectualism, community mobilization, and quilting movements across geographical locations. I, like so many journalists, bloggers, and budding intellectuals, took to Twitter each day excited to speak to comrades like Darnell Moore, Jamilah Lemieux, Brittney Cooper, and so many others. I joined social movement organizations and rallied behind the Black Lives Matter Movement. I was excited by the work being done in Black and Brown communities all over the country to create more livable wages, reduce the disparities in education and economic life outcomes, and provide access to healthcare for poor and working-class people.
I was also exposed to online trolls, harassment, and threats for the first time. Nearly every week between 2014 and 2022, I was going viral for something. Back in 2017, I went viral for critiquing Bruno Mars’ performance at the BET Awards, namely, because I felt a non-Black, pseudo Funk artist had no business opening the BET Awards. When TheGrio wrote a hit piece on me, the harassment blew up. I got death threats from other Black people who were totally fine with enacting violence against me simply because we had different music preferences.
Oddly, the article originally referred to me as “Twitter troll.” I had to ask them to remove that terminology. They later replaced it with “Twitter user.” It was almost like they intended to instigate more violence against me. Funnily, at that point, I was a recognizable journalist who was verified on Twitter and Instagram. I had been writing for the Washington Post and Teen Vogue. So, these were my colleagues who chose to not only write an article about me (without reaching out to me for comment), they made an intentional choice to reduce me to just a “Twitter user.”
At this point, I was starting to learn about critique and who is allowed to offer it. When I analyzed media or political events, I was assumed to be uninformed, a hater, or angry. It was never assumed that I was curious or invested in moving our art to a more liberatory place. If I tried to hold someone accountable, especially a man, I was called “cr*zy” or “aggressive.” It was never assumed that I wanted better for us and for our spaces to be safe and intentional. I was also learning that, in the words of Cornbread from Sinners, sometimes “it be your own peoples.”
Though I was working toward a degree that encouraged me to ask questions, pushback against the status quo, and disrupt systems of oppression and repression, I found myself frequently being told to sit down, stop talking, and be more respectable. It wasn’t just the random trolls, either. It was the men in my academic program, the other Black folks online, and the broader society that tells Black women that we are only deserving of respect, care, and protection if we behave and bend to patriarchy. Now, knowing that I am autistic, I understand why the demand that I bend to repression repelled me.
I know myself better now. But, I had to go through so much more violence before figuring any of this out. It was after graduating with my PhD in 2019 that things became much clearer for me.
Within the first two years on the academic tenure track at Syracuse University, I went viral for a Twitter post about 9-11. The conservative fringe got a hold of the post, chopped and screwed it, and sicked their flying monkeys on me. Within a few hours, I was a topic on the Bill O'Reilly and Megyn Kelly web shows. I was getting death threats on every platform. I started getting calls directly to my home and campus offices. People left voice messages detailing what they were going to do to me and my kids. People contacted Human Resources at my place of work. For protection, I was told to teach from home to reduce the likelihood that someone would come to my classes to hurt or kill me.
My dean dispatched a task force of faculty and officers to protect me. They put cameras up at my home. They worked with local police authorities on my behalf. We had daily meetings for two weeks. DPS began checking my mail on campus for chemical toxins. I had to teach from home for the remainder of the semester.
For six months, I fell into a deep depression. I recused myself from class sizes over 100 students for fear of people sneaking into my courses to harass or surveil me. For years, I was afraid of flying or going out in public. I would be paranoid when folks would look at me for too long. I changed my hair and style constantly to make myself harder to recognize. I started to shrink into myself and didn't even notice I was doing it. This is when the nightmares started.
Suddenly, it felt as though nowhere was safe for radical Black women, not the classroom, not the internet, and definitely not in broader society.
During my seven years on the tenure track at Syracuse University, I received death threats every semester. Some times were worse than others. To keep track of the harm, I was instructed to create a folder I called “harassment” in my Outlook email account at work just to store the ongoing threats of violence against me. Though I am an abolitionist, I was forced to work with law enforcement to ensure the safety of my family. I had to advocate for myself, asking my department to remove my email and phone number from the public website. I pushed for online and synchronous teaching opportunities that would allow me to curate the teaching environment. Some portion of my work day each day was dedicated to protecting and preparing myself for the warfare of being a radical Black feminist in public.
In the broader world, I was avoiding Zoom bombers at my public talks and managing security statements when I gave keynotes. Some of my speaking engagements were moved online to prevent attacks against me. I found out that I had been added to the Professor Watchlist in 2020, just months after I became a professor. Suddenly, it felt as though nowhere was safe for radical Black women, not the classroom, not the internet, and definitely not broader society.
The online and academic vitriol has only worsened since Trump’s election in 2024. The virulent threats, strategic targeting, and silencing of radical voices have been unrelenting. After my support for pro-Palestine student protestors in spring 2024, the targeting shifted toward institutional violence, threats to my job, and hyper-surveillance of my social media posts. My colleagues began infiltrating Zionist groups on Facebook who openly plotted to end my career. Groups all over the internet sprang up, dedicated to shutting me up.
After Charlie Kirk was killed in late 2025, a sitting member of the House of Representatives called for my firing. Though I was in recovery from transabdominal aortic repair surgery related to a congenital disorder called Marfan Syndrome, the harassment and attacks started right back up. It was 2021 all over again.
And, just this past July 2026, I was doxxed by a prominent Black woman content creator who shared my contact information with a violent troll on Threads. When I reached out to community for support, only a few close comrades offered help. Most, like the Black and Brown students collaborating to fight for our rights at UChicago, stayed neutral.
I.
Am.
Tired.
There is something deeply violent about the ways these online spaces leave Black women (esp. queer, fat, disabled, darker-skinned ones) unprotected. Watching other Black women disregard threats toward me after having asked me to support them in moments where they were a target has been...something. Not only that, watching Black academics in my discipline turn their backs, ignoring the threats I continue to face has taught me so much.
Public intellectualism has exposed me to violence, harm, abuse, and targeting that I simply cannot articulate to people who have not been on this side of it. Efforts to continually romanticize this work often fail to account for how persistent harm doers and abusers will be when they have their energies set on annihilating someone.
After twenty years as a public intellectual, I am deeply unsettled about where we are now. I worry about the ways we fail to protect one another and incite further violence against vulnerable people in our communities. I hate how the obsessions with clicks, clout, likes, and follows have encouraged us to abandon our core feminist and organizing principles which used to be rooted in the ethos that “we got us.”
I don’t believe it anymore. I have watched men, white women, and even Black women who are fairer-skinned than me, engage in public debate (often much more incendiary than anything I have ever said) without once being threatened with murder. I have endured people telling me that I should simply stop speaking to protect myself, all while other groups of people are invited into the public forum without question. Seriously, what does it mean that Black, queer, trans, and disabled women are left unprotected by our own communities even as we are mined for expertise and education? Who will protect us when our intellect is met with vitriol, violence, and threat? So far, as I have witnessed, the answer is no one.
Folks can have beef or disagree without putting other folks' lives in danger. If we can't all agree on that, we can never ever call this thing a community. And, until then, I can’t call myself a member of whatever this is at all.
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