GUEST SUBMISSION: “Carpentry of the Oppressed: A People’s Guide to Shutting Down Duke”
On March 9, 1960, the All-University Student Leadership Group published “An Appeal for Human Rights” in local newspapers, including the Atlanta Constitution, Atlanta Journal, and the Daily World. Making it plain, the authors criticized the “snail-like speed” by which this country ameliorates the existing conditions of Jim Crow segregation. Denouncing the innumerable inequalities in education, employment, housing, voting, hospital, law enforcement, they called out those in authority for assistance in the complete and unequivocal abolition of these injustices.
On November 20, 2015, Concerned Students, in conjunction with minority groups, released “Demands of Black Voices,” a comprehensive list ranging from racial bias, to mental health, to representation, to wages, institutional inequalities, among others.
But despite the grandiloquent language of these tireless activists, both demands fall of deaf ears. To quote Sister Ashley Benn, “Demands have been made since the 1960s, and although we just give you a list of demands, and yes I know they are a lot, and yes I know that it just doesn’t take a day…I know it takes some amount of time, it doesn’t take 50 years.” Praise is long overdue to la mujer de color.
The current generation must learn from our forbearers’ struggles. We can be as clear as day, but still, nothing will happen.
There will be those that ask, but why won’t anything happen? Because in the spirit of Brother Gil Scott Heron, the movement will not be on the starting five of the Atlantic Coastal Conference. The movement will not be on the front page for winning the Nobel Prize. The movement will not have a 20 minute harangue at commencement. The movement will not illumine in brisk evenings some obscure marketing firm in the middle of the Bryan Center Plaza. The movement especially will not dissolve in its token 15 minutes of fame, within the white noise of complacency. The movement is not a Duke conversation, sino que it is a demand.
Never mind the paternalist condescension of President Brodhead, “In a university, you have to actually think through and work them out what can be done…” Never mind the premier talking head of this university performing a micro-aggression that ridiculed all our efforts before the fact. As if we absentmindedly outcry our pain. As if our screams are impulsive. As if we never lived under the koan of white supremacy, that “If a person of color falls, does it make a sound?” If dark bodies litter the streets, does this country give a damn? The answer: no not until the sewage of our flesh clot their pocketbooks.
Hence the Mizzou Activists naked assertion, “We’re gonna be loud as fuck.”
A month prior, on February 1960, the Committee on Appeal for Human Rights (COAHR) co-spearheaded, along with the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, the desegregation of local restaurants and hotels in Atlanta, as the city hailed as supuestamente “too busy to hate.” The pragmatic mayor, William B. Hartsfield, thanked the students for “letting the white community know what others are thinking,” but took no immediate steps to address grievances.
On March 15, after a series of carefully orchestrated sit-ins at ten lunch counters and cafeterias throughout the city, students suspended the sit-ins for upcoming negotiations with representatives of the business community. The representatives showed little interest in compromise.
After a month of planning, students campaigned a new set of sit-ins targeting a number of businesses, including the Magnolia Room restaurant at Rich’s Department Store, the city’s largest retailer. After vociferous tensions, including counterdemonstrations by the Ku Klux Klan, COAHR expanded the boycott to “bankrupt the economy of segregation.” They added an additional tactic: demonstrators arrested would refuse bail, in order to crowd jails. The result: sales figures decline 13%, downtown businesses lost $10 million. And suddenly, to the stroke of the almighty dollar, white business leaders met privately for a settlement.
Students deviated from a politics of recognition, to that of siphoning, figuratively bleeding the power structure to death. The historical lesson is simple, “Hit them not in their hearts, but in their wallets.”
Ahora preguntarás, what about Duke? That same restless spirit is evident, upon historical excavation.
April 1968, in the week following Dr. King’s assassination, as the racial fabric of Amerikkka ripped itself apart, a series of events transpired on Duke’s campus known as the Silent Vigil. A cadre of students, after lengthy discussions amongst themselves and advice from some faculty and administrators, marched to Duke President Douglass M. Knight’s home. They presented a list of demands including: Knight’s endorsement of a newspaper ad stating “we are all implicated” in King’s assassination, his resignation from the segregated Hope Valley Country Club, increased pay for non-academic employees, a collective bargaining committee for workers, among other concerns.
But note Knight’s words of legacy. Given the power of the board of trustees, he proved incapable to make binding administrative decisions. He “often had no authority but no power.” Es decir, Brodhead can and will not assist in these demands, if not due to private apathy, but due to top-down puppetry. In the words of underground rapper, Immortal Technique, “my issue isn’t with the white man I see, but with the white man I don’t see.” Namely, that committed social actors, from Knight to Dean Ashby, must fight against reactionary opinions among senior administrators. “There was a great many members of the Duke constituency who didn’t care whether Martin Luther King lived or died; they felt he was disruptive.” Such is our position. We are addressing a talking wall that invests millions of dollars to see us, if not destroyed, subdued.
Conversation is damage control at best, and slow death, forestalling the movement until leaders graduate or tire themselves. President Brodhead, as Duke’s talking head, anticipates the sweeping tides calling for his resignation. Mizzou then is not so much a school, but an epicenter, a historical conjecture of the Ferguson protests–and more broadly, the BlackLivesMatter movement—catalyzed ostensibly because the Football team indefinitely boycotted playing time. For the overseers of this ivory plantation, their beloved cash crop almost disappeared.
And until we threaten this school with the same penalty for exploiting our bodies, nothing will change but the day. The businessmen will trade their suits for lab coats, the doctors hear their cue. Progress is a white lie that will be administered at inauguration ceremonies, toasted at fundraiser dinners– the melatonin of the Amerikkkan dream. Desperate and exhausted, the ethnic body will eventually the liberal prescription. Sedated, the churchgoers of the preaching choir can rest easy for a few hours.
But by nightfall that dream dies, after four hours of bleeding out on the street because ninguna pinche ambulancia ever came. It dies clinging to its detention center, on the false promise that Obama granted amnesty to all indocumentados. It dies selling loose cigarettes at Staten Island, from attending a swimming pool party in Texas, from driving with a busted tail-light, to praying in Charleston. The congregation holds steadfast to that dream, until it’s literally beaten out of them.
The diagnosis is cyclical and simple: racial insomnia. We’re woke, because we can’t sleep.
We’ve had conversations, we’ve talked about these issues. The problem is those in power choose not to act about it.
Don’t get it twisted. This whole question of diversity is a giant farce, nothing more than a power point slide for the Duke brand; where every fiscal year, I set aside my reservations and put on some cultural performance that makes you look good, while I get nothing in return. Whether Marriot workers, a one year Program in Education faculty (te extrañamos Dr. Jason Mendez), or an undergrad, to be a person of color is to always be reminded that your labor is deemed more valuable than the rights you deserve. Because we are expendable.
And to my quierida gente de color, my celebration of dark skin, I say: in this deathbed of culture, we are its fleeting heartbeats. Multiculturalism is nothing but the management of difference, one commodifed for brochures. Engaged in a futile politics of recognition, we’re hunched low, we fight for scraps. Divided amongst ourselves, we apologetically dismiss each other’s struggles. It’s not under my timetable, that resources are meager. Yes, precisely because the white pie chart allotted the very minimum to placate outbursts. Precisely because we exist only for their lamination.
To my beloved students of color, and all others silenced, as the movement ensues, I plead: in this borrowed limelight, do not confuse justice with concession. Amidst all this blinding opulence, do not forget that 50 years ago, five black American integrated this campus in large part due to economic pressure from esteemed endowments explicitly threatening to withdraw their donations unless the school admit them. Our politics does not exist in a vacuum, but within a complex matrix of supremacist hatred, liberal dismissal, and the shameless worship of capital [prestige].
Así que to Hell with respectability. A la verga con realizando mi miseria! Duke, me cansé de rogarle, nunca me quisiste. You tar and feather my culture, so quite frankly, I might Tar Heel my brown ass out of here. But no se te olvide, I ain’t no traitor, because you betrayed me before my chanclas ever stepped here. But before I leave, jamas pararé, until I knock you down a few pegs, so that you may see our unpaid labor, quietly draining our spirits. Pagados bajo la mesa.
So what now? Ahora te dejo con unas palabras: James Forman, Executive Secretary of SNCC, said, “We can present thousands and thousands of bodies in the streets if we want to. And we can have all of the soul force and the moral commitment around this world. But a lot of these problems will not be solved until that shagged-old place called the White House begins to shake and gets on the phone and says, ‘Listen George [Wallace], we’re goin’ put to in jail if you don’t stop that mess.’ It’s not just the sheriff of this country or the mayor of the police commissioner or George Wallace. This problem goes to the very bottom of the United States. And you know, I said it today, and I will say it again, ‘If we can’t sit at the table, let’s knock the fucking legs off!’”
Con Ojos al Premio (With Eyes on the Prize),
Antonio López
