In the spirit of America’s Shakespeare, August Wilson (1996), I have written this article as a testimony to the conditions under which I, and too many others, engage in scholarly discourse. I hope to make clear from the beginning that although the ideas presented here are not entirely my own – as they have been inherited from the minority of scholars who dared and managed to bring the most necessary, unpalatable, and unsettling truths about our discipline to the broader scientific community – I do not write for anyone but myself and those scholars who have felt similarly marginalized, oppressed, and silenced. And I write as a race scholar, meaning simply that I believe that race--and racism--affects the sociopolitical conditions in which humans, and scholars, develop their thoughts, feelings, and actions. I believe that it is important for all scholars to have a basic understanding of these conditions, as well as the landmines and pitfalls that define them, as they shape how research is conducted, reviewed, and disseminated. I also believe that to evolve one’s discipline into one that is truly robust and objective, it must first become diverse and self-aware. Any effort to suggest otherwise, no matter how scholarly it might present itself, is intellectually unsound.