The South That Never Fell

In the wake of the Charleston Massacre, defenders of the Confederate flag have emerged en masse in an attempt to maintain the lie that the flag is a benign and significant symbol of Southern heritage. When I enter the fray to object, I am told that it isn’t my place to tell other people how to relate to their heritage. The implicit understanding behind this being that I, as a black woman, am an outsider who could never understand.

What they don’t know is that I am a biracial black woman born and raised in Georgia. Both branches of my family tree have roots that stretch back through Jim Crow, Reconstruction, and the Civil War all the way to the American Revolution.

So let’s talk about our Southern heritage.

Many people argue that the flag’s prominence is a reflective of a deep commitment to history and to being faithful to the entire history of the South. However, the Confederate flag is a prominent feature in Southern life, because for many Southerners the values of the Confederacy still resonates.

So what is the root of this resonance? Some pro-flag folks argue that they admire Confederates’ commitment to states’ rights. It is apparently irrelevant to these people that the Confederates took no pains to hide the fact that their own commitment to state’s rights stemmed primarily from their desire to continue owning slaves.

Surely people who have a more sincere theoretical commitment to limiting the power of the federal government can find a better intentioned, less fraught example in support of their ideas than the civil war.

Still, my favorite reason I’ve heard people give for why they fly the Confederate Flag is that to take down the flag is a form of historical censorship that sugar coats the past.

Personally, I am all for remembering the Confederacy, and I appreciate that so many pro-flag folks share this commitment. That’s why all of these Confederate memorial plaques include tidbits like:

The rape of female slaves was a pervasive part of plantation culture.

It was not uncommon to cut off the foot of a slave who attempted to run away.

After giving birth, female slaves were forced to leave their infants on the side of the fields where they were sometimes killed by snakes.

At this point, all that’s left is for someone to say is “You’re denying my ability to celebrate any of the history of the region I love. What’s even left?”

If you would like to celebrate an enslaved Southerner who demonstrated extraordinary bravery and whose story is related to the history of Emanuel African Methodist, I would suggest you look into Denmark Vesey.

But if flags are what really do it for you, might I suggest that the symbol of the Lowndes Country Freedom Party, a black third party alternative to the segregationist Democratic Party in Alabama, would make a good flag?

And if the thought of the above listed drum majors for justice and revolutionaries who lived and died fighting for freedom doesn’t fill you with Southern pride, and if you choose to place the Confederate flag at the centerpiece of your Southern heritage — then you’re a racist.

Because when it comes down to it, flying the Confederate flag is a racist act done by racist people. All the explanations in the world are just red herrings meant to distract people from the fact that the flag is a symptom. What we really need to fight is the underlying disease of racism that permeates every aspect of life in America, not just the South.

As a Southerner, hate is neither my inheritance nor my heritage. The will to fight injustice is. It is a potent legacy, and one that when put at the center of Southern heritage has the power to do more than displace a symbol of hate. It has the power to pull racism up by its very roots.

By Micah Jones 

The Veil: Evaluating Race Relations at Yale

“Ignorance is a cure for nothing” – W.E.B. Dubois

For the last stop on our route, we tour guides like to end with a brief anecdote about why we chose Yale. For me, the exact words of the speech change every time, but the larger theme is the same: community. That is why I chose Yale.

Yale was one of the last schools that I visited and, up until that point, it was not my first choice. When I stepped on Yale’s campus on that fateful day in October of 2013, I was stunned by the sheer beauty of campus. More compelling, however, were the people. From my very first moments on campus, the sense of community was palpable and that sensation has continued to grow with the number of Yalies I encounter. I never cease to be amazed by the complexity, authenticity and exceptional quality of the Yale student community.

A recent event on social media, however, has called my understanding of the Yale community into question and, based on conversations I have had regarding this issue, I am not the only one who has been somewhat disillusioned.

On April 9^th, a Black freshman was bullied, berated and threatened on the social media platform Yik Yak. The comments posted were backlash resulting from an exchange that occurred on Facebook earlier in the day.

The incident was sparked by a status posted to the Facebook page “Overheard at Yale” describing a mugging that occurred near campus earlier that day. The status encouraged students to be on the lookout for a suspect described by the author of the post as a, “Black male wearing black hoodie, black scarf with white “F’s” on it, and black pants headed towards Whitney near Edwards.”

The young woman, concerned about what she feared was too vague of a depiction, responded urging the author of the post to increase the specificity of his description. The author responded with a more detailed outline of the suspect’s appearance, but was certain to include his frustration at the request in light of the crime – to which his wife had been made victim – and the sensitive emotional state of both he and his family as a result.

Other Facebook users also responded criticizing the Yale freshman for her commentary on the post, stating that the original description was “reasonable” and the request to edit it, “unnecessary” and “poorly timed.”

The conversation then shifted media platforms and devolved. What resulted can only be described as a baffling mixture of social commentary featuring brief moments of rational rhetoric – both critiquing and supporting the young woman’s request – completely overshadowed by reoccurring notes of bigotry, hatred and violence. Yik Yak was overflowing with comments calling out the freshman by name, berating her, and even threatening her life on a few occasions.

All of this occurred, of course, under the veil of anonymity making it impossible to identify any of the cyber-assailants by name, gender, or race.

The popular response to this incident has been a mixed bag of horror, skepticism and (shockingly) support and understanding for the cyberbullies. Students have responded to other reports of this event basically stating that responsibility lies with the victim. That is to say, if she had not made the request or criticism of the original Facebook post, none of this would have unfolded. Other students claim “hypersensitivity” is the issue, claiming minority students, specifically Black students, are too quick to brand a comment as “racist” or “micro-aggressive.”

One Yik Yak comment even affirmed the “angry Black woman” stereotype, citing it as accurate and using this case an example.

As a Black woman myself, someone who was incredibly disturbed by this incident and an opponent of bullying in any form, I disagree. “Hypersensitivity” is not the issue. This perceived “alertness” within the Black community and all communities of color is a result of a perceived threat.

An apparent danger to our community that has been in existence since our arrival to the Americas and, just recently, dominating news headlines, air waves and social media. Today’s media platforms have brought the racial undercurrent of our country to the surface, making it ever palpable and impossible to ignore. That is a kind of droning fear that white student cannot and will not ever be able to fully understand.

by Julianna Simms

Bring Our Power Back

Between the grassroots support that emerged from #BlackLivesMatter, the student-led organizing of cultural center reform campaigns, the Fossil Free movement, financial aid reform protests, and now the project to Unite Yale, there has been an immense growth of activism on campus. Although there have always been a handful of Yalies who were willing to throw together signs or grab a bullhorn, the momentum as of late has definitely been different. The crowds have grown; the demonstrations have gone on longer. Clearly, direct action is gaining ground at Yale, and as the activism grows, one question keeps bothering me.

Where are the cries of Black/Red/Brown Power?

Now that Unite Yale has finally brought forth the bold utterance of “student power” (hearkening back to the days of Students for a Democratic Society and the growth of the New Left in the late 1960s), maybe it’s time to bring it all back.

But why should we bring it back? In 2015, there is no war in Vietnam. There is no draft. Our President is Black. The so-called “Civil Rights Era” is long behind us. What place is there for this kind of rhetoric today?

It is in reading Stokely Carmichael’s 1966 address at the University of California, Berkeley that I find the answers to these questions. This 1966 speech is entitled, “Black Power,” and it resonates intensely today.

Are we willing to be concerned about the black people who will never get to Berkeley, who will never get to Harvard, and cannot get an education, so you’ll never get a chance to rub shoulders with them and say, ‘Well, he’s almost as good as we are; he’s not like the others’?

First and foremost, these are the kinds of questions we need to start asking our fellow Yale students. Students of color at this university have the opportunity to get Carmichael’s “Well, he’s almost as good as we are; he’s not like the others.” In the eyes of privileged society, many of us have a shot at individual power, but racism was never about individual power, and there is no way that its solution can be. Carmichael reminds his audience:

“We are oppressed as a group because we are black, not because we are lazy, not because we’re apathetic, not because we’re stupid, not because we smell, not because we eat watermelon and have good rhythm. We are oppressed because we are black. And in order to get out of that oppression one must wield the group power that one has, not the individual power which this country then sets the criteria under which a man may come into it.”

And there’s the truth of the matter. Your Yale education may save you. Your ability to code switch may save you. Growing up middle class may save you. Your parents’ education may save you. Your individual status, granted to you by a system that was only designed to oppress you in the first place, will never save your people. Only power can do that.

So we must escape being remarkable individuals. We must reject the temptation to allow ourselves to be “not like the others.” After all, when we’re walking down the street, we will be perceived as little more than our race. Even at a place we might like to call home, we might get guns pulled on us because we “fit the description.”

Through our racialization, we are deprived of power. By being coded as something other than “white” in the United States, we are marginalized, and our very being is delegitimized.

In “Black Power,” Stokely Carmichael and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee find a solution to that delegitimization.

Who has power to make his or her acts legitimate?…[In] this country, that power is invested in the hands of white people, and they make their acts legitimate. It is now, therefore, for black people to make our acts legitimate.

Carmichael and SNCC did not wait to be taken seriously by the government. Carmichael and SNCC did not follow proper channels. Carmichael and SNCC simply decided that they had the ability to legitimize themselves. The power that gave Carmichael and SNCC their own legitimacy in the face of the opposition from the hegemonic state was Black Power.

For the American Indian Movement it was Red Power.

For the Chicano Movement it was Brown Power.

In 2015, it’s time to bring our power back.

The project of nation-building may be a lofty one, but it is one that can, and should begin with us. Even with the smallest of fights. Even here at Yale. After all, Carmichael didn’t believe that students should sit back and wait until graduation to make a difference:

I don’t think that we should follow what many people say that we should fight to be leaders of tomorrow. Frederick Douglass said that the youth should fight to be leaders today. And God knows we need to be leaders today, ’cause the men who run this country are sick, are sick. So that can we on a larger sense begin now, today, to start building those institutions and to fight to articulate our position, to fight to be able to control our universities–we need to be able to do that–and to fight to control the basic institutions which perpetuate racism by destroying them and building new ones?

Carmichael’s “today” was in 1966, but his charge retains its urgency. Can we rededicate ourselves to that fight?

by Javier Cienfuegos 

From Sand Creek to Ferguson

Ferguson protestors, Wikimedia

Depiction of the massacre by Howling Wolf, Wikimedia

“Our nation was born in genocide when it embraced the doctrine that the original American, the Indian, was an inferior race. Even before there were large numbers of Negroes on our shore, the scar of racial hatred had already disfigured colonial society. From the sixteenth century forward, blood flowed in battles over racial supremacy.”

– Martin Luther King, Jr., from “Why We Can’t Wait” (1963)

In recent weeks, a 15-year-old girl was assaulted by a New Haven Police Officer and just this past Tuesday, video footage surfaced of Walter Scott murdered by Officer Michael Slager over a traffic violation. Though the fire of Ferguson may have seemed to die down, its spirit lives on like burning embers, inhabiting our bodies and bodies across the nation.

A few month ago as we stood outside the Native American Cultural Center, cleansing ourselves with sage and a light rain, we could hear echoes of a Black Lives Matter demonstration flooding the streets of New Haven. While we mourned the massacre of about two hundred peaceful Cheyenne and Arapaho people that occurred 150 years ago, masses of people mourned the death of Michael Brown and Eric Garner just a few months ago.

Our chants of “We cry out” faded into “Eric Garner, Michael Brown, shut it down, shut it down.” We lit candles, sang, and prayed for the stolen lives at Sand Creek and throughout Indian country. At the same time, protesters marched and held a die-in demonstration to demand justice. The spirits of the Native American and African American communities could not have felt more connected to me than in these short moments. It was a beautiful reminder that the struggle against systemic racism and state brutality is a fight we all share. Although we are ethnically different, and although our experiences have been vastly different, our fates are linked.

On November 29^th, 1864, 700 armed Colorado militiamen attacked a peaceful Cheyenne and Arapaho village and killed about two hundred people, most of whom were women, children, and older men. The Union army, led by Colonel John Chivington, scalped, mutilated, and paraded the villagers’ lifeless bodies.

Chief Black Kettle had raised an American flag over Fort Lyon in anticipation of passing U.S. troops to signal alliance with the U.S. However, the flag was ignored and during the brutal onslaught a white flag of capitulation was raised in desperation, but the soldiers continued on their rampage. Hands up, don’t shoot.

In the years preceding the Sand Creek Massacre, the U.S. signed the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851, which recognized the traditional territories of the Arapaho, Cheyenne, Sioux, Crow, Assiniboine, Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara. The US would respect traditional land claims and give annuity to the tribes, as long as they could build forts on Indian land to ensure safe passage for Americans on the Oregon and Santa Fe trails to get to the California gold rush) and in exchange, allowed the U.S. to build forts on these territories. The Cheyenne and Arapaho were forced to cede most of their lands by 1861. With the onset of the Civil War, the U.S. forces in Colorado became more militarized, and Governor John Evans developed a harsh attitude towards Indians.

As Colin Calloway, Professor of History and Professor of Native American Studies at Dartmouth, puts it, over time “war became so common in Indian country, wars against Indians such a recurrent feature of early American history, that it was easy to assume Indians were warlike by nature and therefore merited treatments as ‘savages.’ The Indian wars also, some would say, left a more sinister mark on American culture: a nation built on conquest could not escape the legacy of its violent past.” The combination of hundreds of years of oppressive and vicious attitudes towards Native Americans and the militarization of the U.S. forces would culminate in the genocide and ethnic cleansing that took place at Sand Creek.

Simon J. Ortiz of the Acoma Pueblo published From Sand Creek to memorialize and honor the Cheyenne and Arapaho people who lost their lives in 1864. Ortiz juxtaposes historical narrative with free form poetry to grapple with the legacy of Sand Creek. His poetry works against the exclusion of Native Americans in U.S. history and challenges the master narrative of “discovery,” retracing the roots of this nation back to its indigenous population, who had inhabited Turtle Island for thousands of years.

He describes the transgenerational suffering, writing: “They crossed country / that would lay / beyond memory. / Their cells / would no longer bother / to remember. / Memory / was not to be trusted.” These lines describe the distressing issue of the American government’s denial of the mass genocide of Native peoples, an issue that has effectively made all of American society, easily forgetting to look down at its own bloodied hands,ignorant and indifferent to what its government had to do to become what it is today.

It was only fate that the uprisings catalyzed by the Michael Brown case in Ferguson fall on the 150th anniversary of the Sand Creek Massacre. There was indictment for neither Darren Wilson in the Michael Brown case, after he shot the unarmed teenager, nor Daniel Pantaleo in the Eric Garner case, after he killed the father of six with an illegal chokehold. Although the actions of Colonel Chivington were condemned, he was only forced to resign without any criminal charges being brought against him. These are stories seen repeatedly throughout history of the United States allowing the genocide of the marginalized peoples in its society. Now, more than ever, the African American and Native Americans communities, along with other minorities, are uniting over their shared pain and in the fight for equality, crying out “Idle No More” and “No Justice, No Peace.”

by Leanne Motylenski 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xWNApFxpRA0

#Blackout

Luna Beller-Tadiar

On April 3^rd, Tumblr users will once again be confronted with a mosaic of Black beauty curated using the hashtag #BlackOut.

Without a doubt, organizing coming out of Ferguson was strengthened by the broad coalition of people of different races and backgrounds who came together to stand firmly in defense of black lives. I continue to be inspired by brave solidarity organizing occurring in the name of #BlackLivesMatter.

But what makes these protests powerful and threatening to the status quo are the black masses – the extraordinary amounts of black people that comprise them, who are demanding systemic change and the right to self-determination and space.

Amidst overwhelming fear, confusion, and anger, it often felt like there was nothing else we could do but take to the streets. While the moment after the non-indictment of Officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson catapulted months of widespread protest, the protests often lacked direction and suffered from too many white people making things about themselves. But we were there. We came out of our homes, we spoke up and out, and we claimed our right to outrage, to justice, and to our own voices.

The confrontation of mass black presence, or in other words, of blackness itself, is hugely important beyond physical space, as well. Today, Friday April 3^rd, will mark the second Tumblr #BlackOut. First happening on Friday March 6^th, the purpose of the Tumblr #BlackOut is to flood the website with selfies taken by black people anywhere and everywhere as a celebration of black power, beauty, and voice. Happening the first Friday of every month, #BlackOut demands that Tumblr users see black people and blackness all day long. The backlash to #BlackOut from many non-black Tumblr users, which named the action as aggressive and contentious, is a further testament to its necessity.

Black people have internalized the need to be small and stay out of the way of white people. We have historically been told that we do not deserve space and that we do not deserve to be seen or heard. Blocking traffic, sitting in, and dominating Tumblr rejects that. It proudly states that we are here, we belong, we matter, and we will not go away – terrifying and empowering things for black people to say. It is a threat to the status quo of white supremacy. It does not matter whether white people support #BlackOut. Fighting for the rights of our people is fighting for the rights of ourselves.

By taking up space, be it in the streets, on the Internet, or beyond, we can become the fullest versions of ourselves instead of the stifled versions we are taught to be. We can push authentic survival for black people from a process of figuring out what parts of ourselves we have to limit in order to get by, to a bold demand for being everything that we can be.

by Alexandra Barlowe 

The Dangers of an Intersection: Blake Brockington’s Death and the Importance of Inclusivity

A Facebook profile photo of Blake Brockington. (Facebook)

A.  Black
B.  Black + Lesbian
C.  Black + Gay
D.  Black + Bisexual
E.  Black + Transgender

If you had to choose one letter, which would you choose? Go ahead, pick your strife.

But know that it wasn’t a fleeting decision for Blake Brockington, a powerful, 18-year-old Black trans activist from North Carolina who committed suicide just last week. In an interview with the Charlotte Observer, Brockington said, “My family thinks this is a decision I made. They think, ‘You’re already black, why would you want to draw more attention to yourself?’ But it’s not a decision. It’s who I am. I wouldn’t wish this on my worst enemy.” The blunt reality for Blake Brockington, as a Black transgender man, was that he was fighting a fight for an intensely marginalized community while being misunderstood and marginalized by one that he should have been able to call his own.

During the Civil Rights Movement, Black masculinity became tantamount to a cohesive and united Black community, and hypermasculinity, manifested through violence, became a weapon utilized to defend this community from the attacks of white America. Masculinity, as a tool for resistance, relied on women as an “other” in order to distinguish itself. So, women and non-heteronormative queers within the Black community were silenced. To be transgender or gender non-normative was to uproot the structure that the Black community relied on.

Marlon Riggs, a gay African American filmmaker, put it best when he said, “What disturbs –no, enrages – me is not so much the obstacles set before me by whites, which history has conditioned me to expect, but the traps and pitfalls planted by my so-called brothers, who because of the same history should know better.”

Even many queer communities that have fought bravely to advance the long overdue rights and civil liberties of lesbian, gay and bisexual peoples have pushed their trans brothers and sisters to the sidelines. Too many times throughout history the “T” in LGBT has been forgotten, and still is today.

However, Blake’s suicide was unprecedented because he was an incredible activist, not because he was transgender or Black. A 2012 report from the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs claimed that transgender people of color were 2.59 times more likely to experience police violence and 2.37 times more likely to experience discrimination than their white, cisgendered counterparts. The report stated, “The intersection of racism and Transphobia can make these survivors and victims more vulnerable to violence and more likely to experience discrimination and violence from first responders.”

The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention presents absolutely heartbreaking and unacceptable figures of attempted suicides by transgender or gender non-conforming people: 41 percent have self-reported a suicide attempt, compared to the overall national 4.6 percent. Furthermore, at the highest rate, 46 percent of transgender men have reported suicide attempts. Just a month before Blake’s death, two transgender individuals, Ash Haffner, and an activist, Aubrey Mariko committed suicide, only two months after the suicide of Ohio transgender youth, Leelah Alcorn.

The nation should be overwhelmed. And with the Trans Murder Monitoring Project reporting that in 2012 a trans person was slain every 72 hours despite comprising less than one percent of the world’s population, so should the world.

These were the very statistics Blake Brockington was valiantly combatting, speaking passionately about some of the country’s most polarizing problems, all the while battling his own. Stepping into the national spotlight after having been crowned North Carolina’s first transgender homecoming king, Blake used this momentum to propel himself to the foreground of the trans movement.

He spoke at the 2014 Transgender Day of Remembrance in Charlotte and even led protests of police brutality against Black people. Blake was quoted telling the Charlotte Observer, “We have to address all these problems at once – misogyny, patriarchy, LGBT issues, race issues. We have to address everything at once if we plan to change the system at all.”

Even in his most powerful moments, inspiring huge groups of people to support the cause, Blake had troubles of his own that plagued his existence: “I’m waiting on a moment when me and my darkness split from my body.” Only a week before his death, Blake posted on his Tumblr account: “being in my head is like being a quarterback playing against an entire defensive line.”

Josh Burford, assistant director for sexual and gender diversity at UNC Charlotte, who worked with Blake, told the Charlotte Observer, “What happened to Blake is part of a systemic problem, especially for trans students of color. He didn’t quit. He didn’t give up… He’s a victim of what happens every single day to these kids.”

Blake Brockington was an extraordinary human being. His memory will live on throughout countless communities and his words will reverberate throughout the nation: “We [trans individuals] need support, not people looking down at us or degrading us or overlooking us.” Now is the time to start giving the trans community what it demands.

Stop glossing over the “T” and start promoting some fucking inclusivity. Being human is hard enough. Being neglected can be fatal.

by Jamar Williams 

Come Together: Yale Unites for Justice

via Fossil Free Yale’s Facebook Page

Last Friday, Cross Campus reverberated with the cheers of hundreds of students mobilizing in a call for intersectional solidarity.

Last Friday, a moving demonstration of student power and unification cemented a historical milestone for years to come.

Last Friday, Unite Yale took place – a rally organized to affirm the tangible connections between the ongoing struggles for cultural center renovations, fossil fuel divestment, mental health policy reform, and the elimination of the student income contribution.

At the rally, marginalized voices of the student body were uplifted in a way that can only be described as unparalleled: folks involved with each movement courageously shared their personal stories and spoke of the ways in which our experiences with administrative negligence overlapped.

“Us coming together is not just about winning our campaigns more easily and building a big movement,” Lex Barlowe ’17 declared in the closing statement she gave at the rally. “But it is also about who we are, the complexities of our identities, and honoring ourselves in our struggles for justice.”

Such a premise seems unusual upon first glance. After all, how could all of these issues possibly be related?

I am a low-income Asian student on financial aid, and am working an increasing number of jobs to remain financially independent. As a result of the student income contribution, I live in fear that I will ultimately be unable to pay for my education. If this financial burden persists, I will either have to take out loans – something that Yale guaranteed would not happen, withdraw from Yale, or sacrifice everything that I am passionate about in order to make time for more work hours.

Most of what I am currently involved with at Yale is related with the Asian and Pacific American community: a community which is not only housed in a center that is physically dangerous to be inside of, but is also denied the academic opportunity to explore a discipline that encompasses our specific and diverse experiences as colonized bodies, as resistant bodies – as people who endure and create, despite our oppression.

To be invalidated in this way can prove psychologically damaging: after all, this is not the first time Asian and Pacific American students, alongside all students of color, have been subtly or explicitly told that our spaces mean little. Throughout all this, working-class people who look like me, immigrants and refugees who fled war-torn countries, are ghettoized into neighborhoods near hazardous waste facilities, exposed to dangerous air pollution and poisoned by toxins as a result.

Low-income students deserve the loan-free education we were promised. Students of color deserve better-resourced cultural centers to serve as a base for both our designated community as well as the broader Yale student body. Everyone deserves a mental health system that is fundamentally accessible and doesn’t make us question our own vulnerability, humanity, and needs. Everyone deserves a world that is not being exploited and destroyed by the fossil fuel industry for profit, a phenomenon that most detrimentally affects indigenous populations and poor communities of color – and many of us at Yale are members of these communities that are most devastated by climate change. Here, we arrive full circle.

Audre Lorde was fittingly quoted at the rally: “There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle, because we do not live single-issue lives.”

At Unite Yale, students joined hands not just in our shared indignation as a result of our demands remaining unaddressed, but also in our collective belief that Yale can do better. Our predecessors fought for the implementation of centers for all marginalized folks on campus, for divestment from South African apartheid and the prison-industrial complex, for the integration of an ethnic studies program – and they all won.

There is no reason to believe we cannot win too. Unite Yale, as an ongoing coalition of students fighting for justice, represents the beginning of a student body moving forward, together as one.

And they can’t stop us now.

by Yuni Chang 

Compiled speeches from the Unite Yale Rally for DOWN

From the Classroom to the Cell: A Deep History of Immigration and Mass Incarceration

Last Friday, Ta-Nehisi Coates closed his remarks on the case for reparations by saying that slavery isn’t a bump in the road of US history—it is the road. Prof. Kelly Lytle Hernández opened her talk, “Caged Birds: The Birth of Mexican Imprisonment in the United States,” with a similar metaphor that cuts to the quick of systemic racism and the modalities of state oppression in this country. Quoting Patrick Wolfe, Hernández reminded us that “settler-colonialism is a structure, not an event,” and invited us to think of mass incarceration as a project of genocide.

The U.S. currently has over 2 million people incarcerated—the largest prison population in the First World—and the nation’s prison complex is the second largest employer in the entire country. Imprisonment is one of the most lucrative industries in our country. Yet it is only recently that scholars have begun the hard work of understanding how the fact of imprisonment fundamentally shapes our culture, our political frame of reference—and the very way we think and act.

Hernández’s talk is the second lecture in the Ethnicity, Race and Migration Program’s Spring Lecture series in Latin@ Studies—a schedule of events that seek to account for the underrepresentation of non-white histories, philosophies, and cultures in our curriculum, and combat the epistemic oppression that comes hand-in-hand with such exclusion. Hernández spoke about the real, flesh-and-blood effects of such underrepresentation: Her lecture traced how the settler-imperialism of Anglo-America created the road to Black and Brown mass imprisonment today.

To explore both the criminalization of immigrants and the alienation of citizen offenders in the U.S., Hernández delineated how immigration control and mass incarceration emerged at the same time and place as forms of social control over who she calls a “racialized caste of outsiders in the United States today.”

To tell this story, Hernández dropped us down in California at the turn of the century. Today, the state has an incarceration industry that generates $1 billion a year. Los Angeles has the largest prison population of any city in the state, and, in a country where Blacks, Latin@s, and Native Americans make up over half of those held in detention, L.A. prisons are overwhelming Hispanic. If you were to look at L.A. in the 1860s, Hernández said, these ratios would be much the same.

In the U.S.-Mexican borderlands, mass incarceration became a tool to create, contain and consolidate white control over the most Western part of the country. This was the age of Manifest Destiny; the KKK was once again on the rise, as were Nativist groups, eugenics, and Jim Crow.

We can also see paths of immigrant labor and capital beginning to carve themselves like deep and familiar scars: At the close of the 19th century, few Mexicans lived in the United States, but American industries that demanded cheap mass labor were beginning to grow. And so by 1929, 10% of México’s population resided within U.S. borders, working and dying in factories and fields.

In a stunning attempt to both reaffirm racist and xenophobic attitudes towards Mexicans and hold on to their necessary labor, U.S. industrialists made the argument that immigrants from South of the border were “homers.” “Like a pigeon,” they said, the Mexican “goes home to roost,” meaning that L.A., the “Aryan City of the Sun,” could stay white, while maintaining a vast class of brown, “pigeon” workers—i.e., my great grandparents.

As federal prison facilities in the American borderlands expanded throughout the 1930’s, so did legislation meant to criminalize immigration. The Immigration Act of March 4, 1929 made “unlawfully” entering the U.S. a felony punishable by a fine and a prison sentence of up to one year. The majority of detainees who filled these new facilities were arrested on public order charges: that is, laws meant to deny racialized “others” the right to occupy space and live.

These are the same kinds of laws today that validate “Stop and Frisk,” killed Eric Garner, and send thousands of people each year into the hands of Immigration and Customs Enforcement—to be deported and ripped away from their families, their jobs, and their lives.

History tells us that “citizen,” like “human,” is a fundamentally exclusionary category. The simultaneous imprisonment and elimination of entire groups of people is written into the formation of this nation, just as the elimination of entire histories is written into the very way we think about the past. Lessons like these remind you of how little you’ve been taught—and why that is. One type of erasure always leads to another.

by Ava Tomasula y Garcia 

Beyond Diversity: Valerie Smith and the Importance of Intersectional Leadership in Predominantly White Institutions

Valerie Smith (princeton.edu)

July 1^st, 2015 marks an event that many students of color at predominantly white institutions could imagine only in their wildest dreams: a black feminist scholar will become the president of Swarthmore College. Valerie Smith, who has served as Princeton University’s Dean of College for the past three years, was announced president-elect of the private liberal arts college this past February.

Smith is an accomplished leader making history in more ways than one with her election. An interdisciplinary scholar of African American literature and culture, Smith brings an intersectional perspective to academe as a woman of color invested in mobilizing education for social change. While at Princeton, she founded the Center for African American Studies and led initiatives to diversify faculty members and the student body.

At Princeton, Smith also chaired a committee that examined the academic and cultural experiences of low-income and first-generation students. Without a doubt, Smith is dedicated to using her high administrative positions at predominantly white institutions to transform elite college campuses into welcoming spaces for all students.

For students from underrepresented backgrounds at prestigious colleges in particular, there are a variety of factors that can provoke sentiments of alienation. One of the most significant factors is the diversity of faculty and administration along the lines of race, ethnicity, and gender. Although the number of both students and faculty of color in predominantly white institutions has increased since the late 1960s, the highest administrative ranks are still overwhelmingly white and male. Yale’s Office of Institutional Research, for example, reveals that women make up only 39% of Yale University faculty while racial/ethnic minorities stand at 22.5%.

The statistics are even more deplorable for women of color in the academy – black female faculty total at 0.012%, Latina faculty at 0.014%, Asian women at 0.07%, and Native American women at 0.0005%. Meanwhile, data from the American Council on Education indicates that only 13% of college presidents were from ethnic minority groups in 2011 and today, only 26% of college presidents are women. Minority female college presidents are at an embarrassingly lower rate. These figures demonstrate the dearth of women of color holding higher positions of power in our country’s most prestigious academic institutions.

Smith’s list of accomplishments shows a commitment to real changes beyond diversity. In her welcome reception speech, Smith emphasized her belief in building a college environment in which all students, “regardless of socioeconomic circumstances,” may have the opportunity to thrive. Smith shows a keen awareness of the ways in which a vague conception of diversity is not enough and how the intersections of class with other aspects of our identities affect our experiences in the college.

For students like Uriel Medina, Swarthmore College ’15, a college president who privileges inclusivity as well as diversity has become a source of hope. “Many student demonstrations in the spring of 2013 and subsequent events/publications clearly showed there are issues of inclusivity, and it’s a topic I encounter a lot with many people on campus – a feeling of not belonging here,” Medina, a Latino student, says. “That’s because the driving force behind ‘diversity’ doesn’t tend to go past numbers.”

Medina also believes that a college president like Smith helps minority students feel more at home. “I’m really excited to have Dr. Smith as our next president because I think a lot of underrepresented students on campus can see themselves in her, as I do.” Her intersectional identity allows for minority students to identify with their campus’s leadership, while also highlighting the importance of university leaders who foster a sense of belonging among marginalized student communities. Moreover, as a feminist scholar, Smith challenges dominant conceptions of “legitimate” academic discipline that are often based on Eurocentricity and serve to further exclude students of color from less privileged backgrounds.

“As a leader, [Valerie Smith] is constantly thinking of how to use our intellectual and creative powers as a group to build something together, something that both honors all of those who came before us and pushes us forward into new and colorful improvisational territory,” said Yale professor Daphne Brooks in 2009 during a speech of honor for Smith, who was at the time Director of the Center for African American Studies at Princeton. “Her ecumenically infused, spiritual sense of purpose has enabled her to understand and embrace a kind of scholarship that encourages productive critical conversations and a kind of teaching and mentoring and programming that cultivates community.”

While women of color have already made large strides in diversifying the academy, we must demand more roles for leaders like Swarthmore president-elect Valerie Smith. In prioritizing inclusivity over diversity, Valerie Smith creates space for students, especially those for whom these white academic spaces were never meant to serve.

by Ivonne Gonzalez