REFUSE THE WHITE SUPREMACIST ANTIBLACK UNIVERSITY
Imagine, if you will, that one murder, which carries the weight of countless other murders, both past and future, makes the fact of antiblackness undeniably clear.
Imagine, if you will, that uprisings and protests explode worldwide, police precincts are burned down, streets everywhere are seized for weeks, the right to the city is reclaimed, it’s a protest not a party, parties are protests because they have been made revolutionary, mutual aid is everywhere, performance has power, demands are met, and racists are made afraid again.
Imagine, if you will, that universities are forced to identify their place in all this and that they cannot not attempt to prove that they are on the right side of history. Imagine, if you will, that when they desperately call upon everyone who has been ignored, silenced, marginalized, whitesplained, gaslit, targeted, unprotected, exploited, disrespected, and devalued, we were to respond with one big collective: NO.
NO—We will not share the knowledge that we have been sharing all along because it has been devalued every single time our calls for decision-making power were met with empty platitudes about listening to us;
NO—We will not share our voices to make campus seem like a paragon for social justice while people of color remain afraid and unsafe in the classroom, in the library, in the dorms and dining halls;
NO—We will not accept the funding that we had been requesting all along and that has now magically appeared because it shows that funding was not absent but that specific people intentionally withheld it;
NO—We will not contribute to “diversity and inclusion” initiatives that merely bring people of color into unsafe spaces;
NO—We will not bring a “Black perspective” to events while the institution maintains ties with campus police, city police, and private security forces that target, harass, violate, brutalize, and jail our communities;
NO—We will not bring a “Native perspective” to events when the institution still refuses to acknowledge that it is on stolen lands;
NO—We will not bring an “International perspective” to events when the institution is grossly negligent of the legal needs of international faculty and students and all undocumented peoples, is involved in weapons research and development that supports wars in foreign lands, and recruits international students as capital while not taking great strides to curb xenophobia;
NO—We will not participate in greening and composting efforts until the university divests from the fossil fuel industry;
NO—We will not cede to the designs of disaster capitalists who exploit the pandemic as a golden opportunity for institutionalizing online education;
NO—We will not do the emotional labor of centering white feelings and contorting our demands to be human to fit the parameters of whiteness;
NO—We will not settle for a calculus of “Better late than never” or “At least we’re doing x…” because our demands to be human should be immediately recognized, not dispersed across an indefinite timeline with crude benchmarks of “progress.”
Imagine, if you will, that collective refusal would confront the university with a huge existential crisis and, worse, a PR problem. How might it recover without the very people who are well qualified to do so?
Imagine, if you will, that while university leadership, marketing, and legal teams scratch their heads raw about what to do without us, we went under, I mean way down under. To the undercommons that had been there all along. We have felt the undercommons in every bit of pain, shame, and frustration because we know things can be and already are otherwise. It had been calling us all along, and now we are finally heeding it. Our last tie to the university—“The only reason I’m still doing x is for the students”—may be finally severed once we see that students were already in the undercommons, in fact they opened it, waited for us, held space for us, were the noise we did not hear as speech. We might realize that the struggle is not choosing between the university and community but how we might find each other in the ruins and how to see behind all our NOs a big collective YES which is, first and foremost, to ourselves and the worlds we need.
Imagine now. Imagine big. Imagine otherwise.
10 June 2020