Shani Mott, a black studies scholar at Johns Hopkins University whose research on race and power in America prolonged beyond the classroom to incorporate her employer, her city and even her own residence, has died in Baltimore. She was 47 years old.
She died of adrenal cancer on March 12, said her husband, Nathan Connolly, a history professor at Johns Hopkins.
Although Dr. Mott spent her profession in some elite academia, she was firmly committed to the concept that science ought to be grounded and tangible, somewhat than succumbing to ivory abstractions. She encouraged students to take a critical look at their very own backgrounds and the realities of the world around them. In a city like Baltimore, with its complicated and sometimes cruel racial history, there was a lot to parse.
“How do we think about what we do and how does that relate to a city like Baltimore?” is how Minkah Makalani, director of the university’s Center for African Studies, described a few of the issues that guided Dr. Mott’s work. “She had this kind of challenging intellectual curiosity that she brought to everything that really pushed the conversation and required people to think about what we were doing in a more tangible way.”
Her research focused on American books, each popular and literary, and the way they revealed the sorts of conversations about race that the publishing industry and other cultural gatekeepers allowed. This work connected to a broader theme of her scholarship: how large institutions determine how race is discussed and experienced in America.
As an energetic member of the Johns Hopkins faculty, she has closely examined how the university engages, or fails to interact, with its own employees and the majority-black cities through which it’s positioned. In 2018 and 2019, Dr. Mott was the principal investigator for Covering our history project that interviewed black Johns Hopkins employees whose voices weren’t included in the campus archives.
“She had an extraordinary ability to say and remember that we were thinking about real things, not just abstract things,” said Tara Bynum, an assistant professor of English and African-American studies at the University of Iowa who received her doctorate from Johns Hopkins.
Even though Dr. Mott taught her students to know racism as a constant force in American life, the harsh reality could still be jarring. In 2021, she and Dr. Connolly hoped to refinance the mortgage on their home, which is positioned in a predominantly white historic district. However, the rating was much lower than expected and their refinance loan application was rejected.
Believing that race played a key role, they reapplied for the loan a few months later, but for this appraisal they withheld evidence of their race, similar to family photos, and when the appraiser came around, they asked a white colleague to do it. . The second rating was almost 60 percent higher than the first.
A number of months later, in 2022, they sued the mortgage company that denied the loan, the appraisal company that contracted with them, and the individual appraiser who was on the home. All parties denied bias, and the individual appraiser brought a defamation claim.
For Dr. Mott, it was a daunting illustration of what she had long studied in the real world.
“People say it all the time: It’s one thing to study something, but it’s another thing to actually experience it,” Dr. Mott said in a 2022 interview with The Times. She understood discrimination in her job, she said, but “living the life that was always a dream and then 45 minutes later someone comes in and just ruins it or tries to do it – I feel angry.” “
Shani Tahir Mott was born on March 16, 1976 in Chicago. Her mother was a teacher and her father was an Army veteran who lost his eyesight during the Vietnam War.
After graduating from Wesleyan University, she earned her master’s and doctorate degrees from the University of Michigan. Her dissertation focused on mid-century American literature, especially books in which black authors portrayed white characters and white authors portrayed black characters. She concluded that writers’ attempts to “free themselves from the racial boundaries” that the country maintained were ultimately unsuccessful.
She believed that the work she did outside of academia was consistent with her research. In Baltimore, she encouraged students to work with her as volunteers on Cross Orita Freedom School, a program that provides education and recreation for black youth while their families are at work. In 2020, with many of these children stuck at home during Covid-19, Dr. Mott and her family created a series of videos on YouTube during which they read and discussed children’s books celebrating Black history and culture. Survivors include her husband and children, two daughters and a son.
She was diagnosed with cancer in 2021, but colleagues said she still maintains a busy schedule of teaching and outside projects. Dr. Connolly said that in the days before his death, Dr. Mott gave eight hours of testimony in the appraisal case, which is still pending. He added that she refused to take painkillers so that she could answer questions clearly.
“She burned through two oxygen tanks and was in a wheelchair the entire time,” Dr. Connolly said. “And her ability to speak so powerfully, so directly and, quite frankly, with such crystal clear clarity about how real estate works and particularly the instruments within the structure of a mortgage transaction, it was a master class.”
