[Just over a year ago, Vaughn finalized and we launched this new public scholarly website, Black & White & Read All Over. There’s a lot about the site and what it has brought out of and added to our work that I believe is worth highlighting, so this week I’ll do just that in a series of reflections. Leading up to a weekend post of requests for y’all!]
Three things I (really we, but I don’t want to speak for Vaughn) have learned through this first year with our site.
- A distinct skillset: I had started and maintained my AmericanStudier daily blog since November 2010, so I might have said that I had some experience creating and running a public scholarly website. But I would have been entirely and importantly wrong: a blog like that one and a website like B&W&RAO are different in kind, not just degree. I can’t begin to list here all the things that Vaughn had to do to create the site and (even more) has to do to maintain it, and in any case my point isn’t the number, but the skillset. Vaughn had to learn a great deal to build the site, and continues to learn a lot in order to maintain it, to troubleshoot issues, to add other things like this page featuring embeds of my podcast episodes, to do all the work that being a dedicated webhost requires. I believe there’s great value for any 21st century public scholar in having and practicing this skillset, but make no bones about it: it’s a distinct and tough challenge from those we might be used to, and it’s worth going into it (if you’re interested) with a clear-eyed sense of things.
- A frustrating challenge: I’ve written a good bit already this week (and will write more in the weekend post) about the difficulties of abandoning the communities we had built at our Substacks and attempting to rebuild such communities on the new site, and I don’t want to belabor the point here. But I do have to say this: tons of folks rightly critique Substack and resist sharing work that’s published there, but many fewer of them are apparently willing to share and support those of us who leave that space and make the (again, incredibly intense) effort to create and maintain new such spaces. As I’ve said all week and will say again this weekend, the very least everyone can do is subscribe for free to an independent site like ours! But I’d love if everyone could also help spread the word about it, so we can really build our own communities in these new spaces.
- A vital goal: Because here’s the ultimate takeaway from our first year at the new site: I now believe even more fully and strongly than I did a year ago that this work is vital for public scholarship in 2026 and beyond. Corporate spaces and platforms like Substack are not viable options at the moment; educational institutions are of course worth supporting in every way we can, but are themselves limited in what they can include and do in the age of Trump. If we want to do the public scholarly work—and I would argue that every one of us with any inclination at all should be doing that work in 2026—we are going to need places where we can do it on our own terms, and in our own communities. I’m so proud of the work Vaughn has done building and we have both done populating our website as an example and model of such new, alternative, independent spaces and communities, and I can’t wait to continue doing our work on and though it, alongside all of y’all.
Special post this weekend,
Ben
PS. What do you think?
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