Dear all,

I wrestled with “doxing” Willis, a.k.a. Thom over the list for a while, but hesitated because I wasn’t sure what unmasking a fake name would accomplish. But after I read Farhana’s long email in which she graciously responded to rather facile provocations, I realized that in hiding behind fake names (two of them at this point) is creating real harm—a woman of color scholar had to stop what she was doing and spend time and effort defending what was a righteous campaign to uphold academic integrity and fight against the normalization of white supremacist colonialist thought.

It was not the job of Farhana (nor any other woman of color) to educate Willis. He has a PhD and Goolge and is capable of finding the many rebuttals, critiques and counter-arguments published all over the internet in response to Gilley’s piece.

Instead he confused an organized political response with a mythical authoritarian thought police of the "regressive left"; and even after reading Farhana’s email insisted, “I still do believe that some academics would like to have seen it removed for the latter reason [the point of view of the author].” That’s akin to saying, even though my provocations have been debunked, I still feel like I’m right.

While Willis signed up to the listserv using a fake name, he did so using his gmail account, which is linked to his goolge plus account displaying the name Alex Macleod. After that it’s just a simple matter of Googling Alex Macleod + geography and his academia.edu, twitter, and linkedIN profiles show up (The google plus account includes a couple youtube “vlogs” which match corresponding photos on social media). 

With respect to privacy rights, I also enjoy being anonymous on the internet sometimes. But I think this is a case where anonymity allowed a white man to continually question the work and value of scholars from the global south, in particularly the women who led this recent campaign, all the while throwing around terms like “academic freedom” and the “regressive left” to cry foul and claim censorship. I don’t think that is a kind of anonymity that should go unchallenged on this listserv.

Kind regards,

Tucker Landesman