I want to discuss the value and function of the personal as it has been called into service in the academy. Specifically, I want to examine the institutional function of racial identification: the place(s) of the racialized personal in scholarship. How have individuals marked by racial difference been asked, in order to enter the assumed universal mode of academic subjectivity, at certain historical points to forget the personal as it resides in them as racialized beings experiencing race and at other times not only to recognize the personal as racial but to foreground it particularly in their scholarly duties?