Colleagues, none of our institutions are prepared for what our Black students, staff, and faculty are going to bring back to them in the fall. Not a damn one. Everything happening in our streets is going to be into our classrooms, in our committee rooms, our departments. (1/n)
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The usual responses (e.x. form a committee) will be inadequate when what's happening in our streets comes home to our institutions. The faculty, staff, and students who're out in the streets, being arrested, drafting statements will not accept institutional handouts. (6/n)
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They won't accept "listening sessions" or "open forums" or "meetings with the Dean/Provots/President" or the other mechanisms that are deployed to disempower them, because they're the higher-ed equivalent of police reforms: incremental change that keeps whiteness in place. (7/n)
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They won't accept any of the ususal responses because they're out in the streets: it's our faculty, staff, and students who're, organizing marching, protesting, speaking up, providing aid, and working to dismantle a system that enables inequality in higher-ed. (8/n)
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And this is something that the structures of institutional whiteness that organize many of our institutions fail to see: when our students, faculty, and staff are done with institutional racism as represented by the police, who do you think they'll come for next? (9/n)
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And who will higher-ed institutions turn to for help? Not the departments of Ethnic Studies, African American Studies, Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, whose existence they've resented and resisted for decades, and who they've undermined through resource deprivation. (10/n)
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Not the multi-cultural or other marginalized resource center, whose existence they saw as unnecessary or frivolous, or as a means to satisfy student demands without actually engaging in meaningful structural change, and then relegated to diversity month programming. (11/n)
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Definitely not the Black faculty, staff, and students who have tried endlessly to warn and to educate through our service commitments, through our committee work, through our participation in your diversity efforts only to see those efforts rendered impotent by whiteness. (12/n)
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None of these resources will be available because they'll likely be out in the streets protesting, in classes educating, or generally disrupting the ongoing "business as usual" of institutional racism and oppression within our institutions. (13/n)
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To be clear, this is less of a threat and more of a prediction: if we've learned anything from the wave of post-Ferguson student protests, and the escalating student responses to institutional oppression on their campuses, it's that higher-ed will not be immune from this. (14/n)
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And, given the way that COVID-19 has made us all precarious, has made available access to spaces typically denied to students and faculty (e.g. public university reliance on governance via zoom), I expect that we'll see more disruption of business as usual in higher-ed. (fin)
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