The violence of good intentions: A queer of color critique of institutionalized scholar activism in the governance of Black queer life

This article advances a queer of color critique of institutionally sanctioned scholar activism by examining how equity-oriented applied research operates as technologies of institutional incorporation within racial capitalism. Across education, health, and social services, participatory, community-based, DEI-oriented, disparities-focused, and intervention-driven research are framed as ethical correctives to historical violence. Reading institutional artifacts such as surveys, indices, diagnostic instruments, administrative datasets, eligibility forms, performance measures, and compliance reports, the paper analyzes how Black queer life is misrecognized, regulated, and harmed by interventions undertaken in its name. This analysis demonstrates how such scholar activism gains institutional legitimacy through metrics, evidentiary standards, participatory legitimacy, and assertions of neutrality that translate structural violence into administrable forms of care. These processes flatten Black queer life into objects of intervention while displacing questions of political economy, redistribution, and power. In response, the article theorizes refusal as an ethical limit on participation when equity-oriented scholarship reproduces the relations of power it claims to contest.