Sakénya McDonald, PhD
@sakenyamcdonaldphd.bsky.social
45 followers 47 following 34 posts
Recovering academic ✍🏿 Slytherin 🐍 Black Feminist 🖤♀️Grand Empress of FAFO 👀 LinkedIn: @sakenyamcdonald
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"I can no longer justify my presence in academia, for example, with words that exist in the English language.

The moment I find some symbol of my presence in the rarefied halls of elite institutions, it gets stolen, co-opted, filled with negative meaning". - Patricia Williams
This 👇🏾

Piss poor planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part.

Request denied.
There’s nothing I hate more than having to organize last minute when I’ve been asking about something for weeks. I need to visualize the task and get mentally ready for it before hand so I feel confident /1
Fact.
one of the hardest truths I've had to learn
Several years ago I bought cards from @tressiemcphd.bsky.social that read "The Institution Cannot Love You" and boy oh boy do academics need to relearn that one every five minutes.
👇🏾
We live in a rogue and dangerous country.

Do what you need to do to maintain your internal peace. Hold the core of your spirit. Pray for peace. Commit yourself to justice. And just rest.
Reposted by Sakénya McDonald, PhD
According to the New York Times, roughly 0.5% of recorded history over the past 3,500 years is about women. That's only 17.5 years.

This (and many other issues) is why I spend every day speaking up and out for Black women. It's why I fight for us to tell our stories.

I want more folks to join me.
Brilliant scholarship, congrats!
This is hot.
What are the African values and ethical theories that can inform responsible data science practices in Africa?...We conduct a thematic analysis [and]...derived an ethical framework consisting of six major principles rooted in the realities of data science work in Africa arxiv.org/html/2502.16...
African Data Ethics: A Discursive Framework for Black Decolonial Data Science
arxiv.org
Reposted by Sakénya McDonald, PhD
They colonized her people's land. The bill was breaking a treaty. Decorum does not apply here.

But colonizers gonna colonize. Every time.
I saw this disruption. And it's NOT acceptable. It's not noble or brave or decent or chic. Legislatures are where we go to solve our problems. From my perspective, this isn't any different from a Jan 6 situation on a smaller scale.
www.theguardian.com/world/2025/m...
#NZPol #Auspol #PAHouse
New Zealand MPs who performed haka in parliament given unprecedented punishment
Co-leaders of Te Pāti Māori and its youngest member to be temporarily suspended from parliament after performance protesting controversial bill
www.theguardian.com
👇🏿
I envy all of you who mosquitoes don't like.
"If you are free, you are not predictable and you are not controllable" - June Jordan
👇🏿!!!

Refusal. Withdrawal. Assertion.

This IS the movement.
“What then, is the responsible course of action? For me, the answer now lies in refusal, the withdrawal of participation from systems that require dishonesty as the price of belonging. My resignation represents such a refusal, not a surrender of responsibility but an assertion of it.”
"I have encountered barriers to the exercise of honest counsel. These repeated obstacles of procedural circumvention, particularly insidious to those of us who have advocated for more democratic and inclusive knowledge systems, represent not just personal frustration, but institutional regression"
Why I’m Resigning from the NSF and Library of Congress
I cannot participate in systems that require dishonesty as the price of belonging.
time.com
"Contemporary mammies should be completely committed to their jobs" - P. Hill Collins

In the workplace, though, Black women are (daily) confronted with unrealistic expectations and coded messages reminding them they are expendable.

Make it, make sense.

#iconoclast
#feministphilosophy
And we ALL saw what our Mayor is capable of so...move on up from 'round us 🎯
You mean to tell me that Chicago gets to claim Michael Jordan, the first Black President AND the first American Pope? Good lord you ain't going to be able to tell them NOTHING.
That moment when you realize your gifts are too big to fit in the life-sized container you are painfully trying to squeeze into.

When it becomes clear that that your function is to do that ONE thing.

Better.

I feel like Michael Jordan, circa 1990.

#blackfeminist
#iconoclast
"I can no longer justify my presence in academia, for example, with words that exist in the English language.

The moment I find some symbol of my presence in the rarefied halls of elite institutions, it gets stolen, co-opted, filled with negative meaning". - Patricia Williams
Reposted by Sakénya McDonald, PhD
Reposted by Sakénya McDonald, PhD
‪Liette Gidlow‬ ‪@profgidlow.bsky.social‬

@jwomenshistory.bsky.social welcomes applications for 2025 Scholars Research Grants to support travel, research, or writing in women's and gender history. Deadline 23 May 25. 🗃️

See jwomenshistory.org/announcements/ for more information.

Please repost.
Reposted by Sakénya McDonald, PhD
Love this from Rebecca Solnit in The Guardian today on how deep social change is non-linear, and takes faith and creative persistence and eyes to see.
Reposted by Sakénya McDonald, PhD
We are in an interesting point in understanding whiteness and American politics. How much shit are white folks willing to eat from Trump in order to uphold the racial hierarchy? Are the wages of whiteness getting too high? 🙃
"Coloniality and its relations of domination, she claims, are also reproduced in the knowledge production of academic scholars of decoloniality, primarily from the global North".

👀

#blackademics
Just... weird.
Hating women and then being angry that they hate you back is weird af.