When Loyola University Chicago held its first Women’s Day Conference in 2015 to celebrate women and explore the importance of race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and other intersectional identities, they asked me to deliver the keynote address. I checked off a lot of the boxes the university was looking for: I’m Black, queer, and at the time, I was a newly minted Ph.D in a one-year nonrenewable instructor position at the university. I had one publication to my name, an article that I wrote for The Feminist Wire about the prevalence of rape culture and the silencing of womenfolk. It was this first essay and first-ever academic invitation to deliver a keynote that garnered the attention of the far-right youth group Turning Point USA, resulting in my placement on their Professor Watchlist.

According to Turning Point USA, the goal of the Professor Watchlist is to unmask “radical professors” and expose and document those who “discriminate against conservative students and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom.” Notable names on the list include scholars and writers like Carnegie-award-winning writer and professor Kiese Laymon and Pulitzer-prize-winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones. Any professor who writes or speaks on social justice, diversity, equity, and inclusion issues, racial ideology, or other marginalized experiences may find themselves on the list. 

I was in stellar company, and I was utterly terrified.

Everything about the intersection of my experiences as a Black queer woman means I know— and I come from people who know—a lot about being watched. Take, for example, COINTELPRO’s surveillance of civil rights leaders, or self-appointed neighborhood watchers policing Black folk in public spaces.

In recent years, conservative watchdog organizations have taken aim at tenure for professors who write about injustice in the U.S. In one particularly high-profile case, the University of North Carolina denied Hannah-Jones tenure because of her work on the 1619 Project. 

Now, nearly a decade after being placed on the list and on the precipice of my own tenure decision, I’m revisiting what it means to be singled out and surveilled. 

How does it feel to be a problem?

Since my placement on the list a decade ago, my comedy web series Quare Life has been featured in several film festivals across the country, and I’ve published numerous essays, along with my Nautilus Award-winning novel, everyman. In the past year alone, I’ve received four media requests for comment—not about this body of work, but rather about the watchlist.

Toni Morrison famously noted that “[T]he 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.” I’ve chosen not to explain my internment on the watchlist to those who’ve shown no broader interest or basic familiarity with my work and who I am as a person.

The question being asked by the media—no matter how coy the phrasing—is the same one articulated over a century ago by W.E.B. DuBois: “Between the other world there is ever an unasked question: unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through the difficulty of rightly framing it. All, nevertheless, flutter round it. How does it feel to be a problem?”

This is not a question about having problems, as noted by writer and scholar Melissa Harris-Perry. Everyone has problems. DuBois asks how it feels to be a problem—or strongly considered one to such a degree that the political majority exercises hostile surveillance of you? So regardless of the work and art that you produce, you always have to explain over and over again, your reason for being.

Dr. Sharon Austin knows what it is like to be seen as a problem. The work that got her on the Professor Watchlist highlights the coded language that now substitutes blatant racism, sexism, and homophobia in the political arena. Conversations about “busing” and “vouchers” are racist dog whistles for Black children integrating white school districts. Poverty and crime are synonymous with race. Even “woke” has been columbused and redefined by white Republicans. The word once meant someone had an admirable social and cultural awareness, but conservatives turned it into something that must be crusaded against as part of the culture war—though most have no clue of the word’s meaning. 

In April 2017, Austin was confronted by a man in her University of Florida office, where she serves as director of the African American studies program and a professor of political science. The man, described by Austin as “an unstable white racist,” rambled and refused to leave, blocking Austin and her assistant in the office.

When speaking to the media at the time, Austin said she wasn’t “going to be distracted” because of the man “and his ignorance.” The professor recently told me in an email that she “still had to go to work” and do her job “as if it didn’t happen,” noting she received little support from the university or police after the incident.

The frightening confrontation happened years before Austin was even placed on the Professor Watchlist, and she only learned she was on the list when a reporter contacted her to ask how it felt to be included. 

“You’re simply doing the job that you were hired to do and you deal with various microaggressions from both your colleagues and your students. Then, you find that you’re listed on a professor watchlist,” she said. 

The list reads like a veritable who’s who of academic social justice writers, though their work is misconstrued in order to fuel radical conservative narratives that frame white people as victims of restorative justice practices and DEI initiatives.

Dr. Jenn M. Jackson is an assistant professor of political science at Syracuse University and has affiliate positions in African American studies, women, and gender studies and LGBT studies. They are also the author of the book Black Women Taught Us, an exploration of Black women throughout history whose movement-building and activism laid the framework for some of our most notable struggles and advances for justice.

Jackson was harassed across social media in 2021 for a series of tweets about 9/11 that went viral. Shortly after, they learned they were placed on the Professor Watchlist back in 2020 for their criticism of law enforcement in the wake of the police murder of George Floyd.

“These lists and websites are nothing more than efforts to silence and repress, methods of intimidation for cowardly people too afraid of a freer future—one that is inevitable anyway,” Jackson said in an email. “I have stopped allowing myself to be distracted.”

In the crosshairs 

Chuck D of the rap group Public Enemy designed the group’s iconic logo—a silhouette of a man in the crosshairs of a gun sight—because he said it symbolized “the Black man in America.” More broadly, the group’s name and logo recognize how Black people are watched and targeted in this country.

So how does it feel to be a problem? To be a victim of hostile surveillance? A target of voyeuristic terrorism? 

Austin and Jackson both note the inherent dangers of the watchlist, which is fed by tips from disgruntled students and conservative parents. In the case of Austin, she was placed on the list by someone who wasn’t even affiliated with the university. There’s at least one instance of a classroom recording being uploaded to the watchlist.

Black women, people of color, queer folk, and those of us at these intersections are at the greatest risk for violent incidents due to being placed on the watchlist. However, some professors view their inclusion on the list as a badge of honor.

I’ve encountered at least one professor who said they’d grown “tired” of waiting for students to report them to the Professor Watchlist, so they simply reported themself. It is quite a privilege to self-report to the list, and it’s very telling of those who chose to do so—even if it’s because of a misguided sense of solidarity.

It is difficult not to view the watchlist as anything but a hit list because of the way it falsely describes targeted professors as “discriminating against” conservative students. That said, it’s laughable how the site’s creators deploy coded language to accuse those most marginalized and faced with discrimination—BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ people in the academy—with discrimination. But hit dogs will holler.

Dr. A.D. Carson, an associate professor of hip hop and the Global South at the University of Virginia, was placed on the watchlist earlier this year. Carson’s work focuses on race, literature, history, rhetorics, and performance. His doctoral dissertation was noteworthy for its nontraditional format: a rap album. This format also seemed to garner the attention of the watchlist. 

Carson said being on the list would be flattering if he thought it meant those behind the list might actually learn something. 

“I can’t call it an insult, nor can I call it an honor, because I refuse to accept either from people I don’t respect. They’re so unserious. It would be funny if it wasn’t so sad,” Carson said in an email.

It’s been a decade since I was placed on the list, so let me tell you how it feels to be targeted. Let me explain what it’s like to have to move about your day in a space that isn’t safe. I can tell you all about how it feels to be watched.

Sometimes when we need the most, we ask for the least. We don’t want to stick out when we’ve experienced pain around our distinctions and traits. Our race. Our gender. Our sexuality. Our accents. Our bodies. Our disabilities. Our neurodiversity. So we keep our heads down—and yet we are told we are getting ahead of ourselves.

It’s not that our heads are held too high. It’s that we dare lift them at all. That we dare seek our own success. Our own empowerment. That when we are successful despite being watched and hunted and derided, we refuse to sabotage it for those who feel that our progress should benefit archaic social hierarchies that claim we are unworthy of our own success.

They watch our every move, and yet move we must. Then the media asks not about our moves—our work, our art—they ask about the watching. They de-center us in our persecution and push us to the margins of our own experiences. The persistent petulance of the white gaze is as astounding as it is menacing. It demands our attention, seeks to consume our description of it even as it violates us.

How does it feel to be watched?

It also feels like Hannah-Jones’ Pulitzer Prize. It feels like Laymon’s Carnegie Award. It feels like Jenn M. Jackson’s love letter to Black women in Black Women Taught Us. It feels like Austin’s extensive research on Black politics and Carson’s beats, rhymes, and rhetoric as a dissertation album. It feels like the tenure and promotion that I just received.

But mostly, it feels like Toni Morrison’s response to a critic who thought writing white people was a sign of maturity for Black writers. Morrison said, “As though our lives have no meaning and no depth without the white gaze, and I have spent my entire writing life trying to make sure that the white gaze was not the dominant one in any of my books.”

So let me ask you now: What does it feel like to watch us thrive?