We show up too late

This week, I am not writing the article everyone wants me to write.

My phone has not stopped. My DMs are full. People want my take. They want my words. They want me to publicly dissect what happened to the Black autistic professor who died in London on August 14^th, nine days after resigning from Cambridge under the weight of a public campaign his own family called sustained abuse.

I hear you. I am grieving. As a sociologist. As a Black woman. As a neurodivergent person who sits in academic spaces knowing exactly what it costs to exist there. I am grieving in ways I don’t fully have words for yet, but here is why I will not write that article.

That article only matters to you now that he is gone, and that is the problem I need to address.

Everybody loves a recovery story. We share it, screenshot it, send it to group chats. We celebrate the triumph, but what about when that same person is still in the middle of the fight? Still losing weight, still despondent, still having their entire life publicly dismantled piece by piece while the world watches? The silence of the community is deafening.

We don’t show up for the crisis. We show up for the memorial.

We don’t show up for the crisis. We show up for the memorial. I need my Toronto Caribbean community to sit with that truth today.

Right now, in this city: at the University of Toronto, York, Toronto Metropolitan University, McMaster, Black scholars are doing the quiet, grueling work of simply existing in spaces that were not built for them. There are Caribbean academics, neurodivergent scholars, Black women fighting for tenure. At the same time, someone in their institution works patiently and deliberately to make them doubt their right to be in that room.

Not on a global stage. Not with headlines. Quietly. Privately. Just as dangerous.

They won’t tell you either, because the first lesson you learn as a Black scholar is that vulnerability in academic spaces becomes ammunition. You do not say “I’m struggling.” You say, “I’m fine,” until you physically cannot anymore.

You do not say “I’m struggling.”

So, when you check in (and I am asking you directly to check in) don’t just say are you okay? They will say yes. Ask them to go to dinner. Ask to read their work. Ask what they are carrying this semester. Sit with them long enough for the real answer to come up.

I know what it is to be undermined in an academic space because of the combination of who I am: Black, woman, autistic. I know that the people who do not want you at that table are organized, patient, and relentless, and I know that the difference between surviving that and not surviving it is almost never personal strength alone. It is community.

Prevention is better than cure. We say this in the Caribbean constantly. We know it in our bones when it comes to physical health. It is past time we applied it here.

Check on your Black scholars. Your Caribbean academics. Your neurodivergent friends who are navigating systems designed to exhaust them into quitting. Not because tragedy has already happened; check on them because tragedy is still preventable when community moves in time.

I am choosing to call in peace this week. I am choosing to let grief be grief, not content, but I am also choosing to use this column (this space built for healing) to say one thing plainly; we cannot keep showing up after the fact.

Our people need us now.