An Open Letter to Faculty
First and foremost, it is very important I locate myself within this discussion and clearly state my position. Everything I'm about to say is not a representation of what all black and POC students at Reed believe in and it would be dangerous to label this as a mission statement or a collective belief shared by the organizers and activists on campus. I am a low SES non-black Latinx nonbinary femme at Reed College AKA a poor brown woman who has managed to get herself into higher education at an institution full of white people in one of the whitest cities of one of the whitest states in the United States. Also, I unequivocally believe that based on the history of colonialism, imperialism, chattel slavery, systemic and institutional racism, as well as the prevalence of anti-black thought and sentiment in the development of multiple academic disciplines that black students at Reed, and black people across cultures in general, are the most underrepresented, undervalued, and underprotected. Based on my own personal values, I unequivocally believe that when a person tells you that you are hurting them, you should stop. Black students and other marginalized identities in this school, as members of our community and as people, deserve to go to class and attend a school that doesn’t force them to fight emotionally and mentally just to make it through four years of classes that implicitly uphold and gently reinforce imperialist capitalist white cisheteronormative patriarchy.
Second, I am aware that there are faculty members attempting to positively contribute to the current issues students are attempting to fix on campus. There are faculty members who are attempting to show support by sending out emails, vocalizing support, volunteering time and energy, or even dedicating classes and lectures in order to foster some of these discussions. I am in no way attempting to diminish the efforts of those faculty members. You are appreciated. Your support also means that you, more than most, can understand why this critique is necessary to the ongoing dialogue on campus. This critique can only better the ability of the faculty and school to see and understand the issues in a nuanced and emphatic way. I understand that identity politics have a way of polarizing people like nothing else and I would kindly remind you that pride and ego are impediments on the path to self-awareness.
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About two weeks ago I went to a faculty meeting that took place to discuss, amongst other things, the September 26th boycott, the demands made by students, and the Hum syllabus. I walked out before the meeting was over. There has yet to be a clear explanation of what transpired on that day and the implications thereof relayed to the community. General descriptions and reporting on the meeting have so far failed to communicate the extent to which the deflection, gaslighting, and respectability politics subsumed in these discussions was violent.
Members of the faculty were interested to know not only why John Kroger defamed the syllabus, but why he felt that it was appropriate to say anything in the first place. In response to the former, Kroger alluded to a lack of sleep, general exhaustion and tensions running high as a possible reason for his criticism of Hum – mind you, he didn’t say that his criticism was based on his own conviction that the syllabus as it stands is as exclusionary as students say it is. This backtracking minimized the strength of Kroger’s initial critique and shows that just because he said it, doesn’t mean he’ll defend it or that he even believes it. In response to the latter part of the faculty’s inquiry, all he said was, “there are some questions [you] can’t avoid.” The issue of autonomy is interesting because I personally made it a priority at the meeting between hum faculty and student organizers to clarify that the desire to change or expand the syllabus was in no way sanctioning infringement on faculty autonomy by the administration. That is to say we don’t want the bureaucracy of the school to weaponize discussions on campus as a way to control or police the teaching methods of faculty. At the same time, the administration has an obligation to its students, not just its faculty, and when it comes to issues that affect the wellbeing of students the administration has to take a clear position.
Ultimately, every person has an ethical obligation to denounce and condemn oppression, faculty and administration included. Especially when that person is a powerful and privileged white man who is the face of an institution, and that institution is being oppressive. By expecting Kroger to be silent in the face of black students and other students of color who are clamoring for fair representation and equal protection, by expecting him to refuse to answer or answer in a way that does not commit him- you are inadvertently supporting an institution that remains silent and unaccountable. You are also attempting to create a false neutrality between the institution and the student, and the institution and the faculty. By expecting silence from Kroger in this particular situation- you are actually expecting that the institution value you over the students. When it comes to issues concerning oppression and injustice, there is no such thing as a neutral position: silence is a tool of the oppressor.
Let’s be clear about what denouncing the hum syllabus did – it finally created an impetus for conversations about the exclusionary and insensitive ways that faculty teach and engage the material, and it finally put the students who mattered in the middle of the conversation. Denouncing the syllabus forced faculty to come the SU, meet, and listen to students whose opinion have not been collectively sought out before. So yes the self-governing body that is the faculty was ultimately forced to hold themselves accountable as a result of the institution’s condemnation of a particular syllabus. Is that an infringement on autonomy? If our mostly white faculty is actually invested in engaging every student, being better teachers, and teaching material that doesn’t reinforce systems of oppression – then denouncing the syllabus should have been met with relief and agreement. The faculty should have denounced its own syllabus publicly, not just to one another, a long time ago. But you didn’t. And you haven’t. The faculty has dragged its feet, and has shut down attempts by some its own members to include more diverse material. It has continued to tokenize black, poc, and femme authors and scholars. The denouncement of the syllabus is actually only a problem because it threatens how faculty members view themselves. It created a space where their authority and teaching practices could be questioned and challenged.
At some point conversations about autonomy gave way to members of the faculty airing their grievances with the protest. Various teachers, almost all of them white, spoke about feeling like their time and energy were being underappreciated, feeling disrespected, or feeling demoralized. An email was cited where a professor said that the interaction between students felt like “a flaying,” “assault,” and “abuse.” Someone mentioned that the conversations from the protests made them feel like the past thirty years of their life had been a waste. When Kris Anderson presented a memo that, pending the faculty’s approval, would address the protests in an email sent out to the whole campus, a motion was put forth to remove the descriptors “respectful and polite” as it was applied to black students and their allies. A political science professor mentioned that protests had made him feel like students thought he was a “bigot” and a “white supremacist” as a way to justify why he felt that the protesters were not respectful or polite. Someone else cited the lack of dialogue during the meeting between hum faculty and students as a sign of disrespect, even though students initially opened up the floor for a back and forth but Mary James insisted that faculty were mainly there to listen. The motion was seconded, put up to a vote, passed, and the memo was changed to exclude the words “respectful and polite.”
The implications of a mostly white faculty refusing to characterize black students that are protesting institutional racism as respectful or polite, and the implications of a mostly white faculty expecting black students that are protesting institutional racism to be respectful and polite, are the same. Mainly that the faculty will only support students and conversations about institutional racism that coddle them and don’t jeopardize their ego. There have been some discussions about the “shaming” of faculty on campus, and I want to be clear that there is a crucial difference between critiquing the ways in which a professor is complicit in racism and "shaming". If you say something that is perceived to be racist, calling you out your name is not shaming – it is holding you accountable. Since racism is supported through institutions and interpersonal microaggressions, it is imperative that we don't just attack the institution but also the rhetoric of those who are a part of it. The inability to be critiqued, and the refusal to let racism be openly called out are just some of the ways in which students are gaslit, so faculty members can avoid the discomfort of confronting their own racism and anti-blackness.
For those unfamiliar with the term, “gaslighting” is a psychological tool commonly used by abusers to make someone question their perception and memory. When faculty adamantly insists that there is nary a racist, homophobe, or sexist amongst them - like a white woman and head of the committee for institutional diversity, claimed during the meeting after explaining that she had walked around and talked to various people on campus - they are implying that the claims made by students about experiencing racism are not accurate or true, that those perceptions are mistakes. It implies that students do not actually understand the things that they are experiencing. This is a form of violence.
Before the memo could be put to a vote, I walked out. I refused to stay in that room a minute longer. Look, spending thirty years on anything is indeed a waste of time if you allow yourself to become comfortable and stagnant to the point that you would inhibit critical discussion based on the need to protect your feelings and by extension your need to avoid existential crises’. Does your role as a teacher preclude you from being a student? Because black students and students of color are attempting to teach you how to treat and teach us better. Thirty years is a waste if you are only interested in knowing one side of the story. Thirty years is a waste if you don’t care that your teaching is lost on some of your students. If faculty are feeling underappreciated, know that students are feeling invisible. If faculty are feeling demoralized, know that students are having a hard time getting out of bed in the morning. If faculty are feeling as if their time and energy are not valued, know that some students feel like their lives and the lives of their family are in physical jeopardy.
If you as a professor cannot decenter your personal feelings from conversations regarding institutional and systemic anti-blackness and racism then I, as a student of color, do not trust you. I do not trust you to teach me. I do not trust in your ability to handle conversations about race and racism. I do not trust you to teach other white members of our community how to not perpetuate and uphold white supremacy through implicit biases. These biases are confirmed by syllabi and educational materials that place whiteness as the origin of intelligence and civilized thought, that relegate black and brown voices within academia as reactionary and never as innovators, and by professors’ refusals to provide models of responsible engagement with white privilege while also working to dismantle it through critical thinking and analysis. And no, providing models of how to deal with internalized racism and anti-blackness and any other form of bigotry is not an issue of ideology or conditioning people to think a certain way, it is an issue of fundamental human rights.
There is nothing you do or say as an individual that isn't backed by a few hundred years of institutional and societal antiblackness. At the end of the day Reed College is in a city with a population of black people that is less than 7% of the total population. A city that has aggressively zoned out black residents and gentrified black neighborhoods. A city where black people are being pepper sprayed in the streets while they protest a backdoor contract between a highly militarized and racist police force and a mayor who refuses to listen to his most vulnerable constituency. A city in a state that prohibited black people from living, working, or owning property there until 1926. A state that at one point legally allowed the whipping of black people as a way to make them leave. If a relatively small liberal arts college full of educated and privileged individuals cannot hold themselves accountable and make this community safe for everyone that participates in it, than what does that mean for the possibility of a national accountability? If we at Reed cannot see that a syllabus primarily focused on the foundational literature for Western civilization - but presented as the foundation for humanity and intelligent thought - erases whole societies and identities and implies the supremacy of the western, white world in academia as it is currently taught. The hum syllabus is by no means the most important concern or demand in the fight against racism in this school. However, the response to it has been the most publicly contentious and as such it is the perfect place to analyze how microaggressions and rhetoric the institution employs to discount the fights and struggles that black students and students of color are engaged in on campus.
So I have a few questions for you: do you care about the black people at Reed? The ones that are here now and the ones who are yet to come? Do you care about their minds, their spirit, their health? Do you care about them more than your care about your own ego? Do you care about them enough to push through your reactionary defensiveness? Are you willing to be uncomfortable so that black students and other marginalized identities can feel safe? Are you willing to give up privilege and be held accountable? Or is your support conditional? Do you only support students who protest their oppression in ways that do not inconvenience you? Will you only support of black students and other students of color as long as they measure up to your standards of respectability and behavior?
P.S. Trump was overwhelmingly elected by white people. This country now has a Republican President, House, and Senate. The electorate college has remained relatively unchanged since its inception. If we don’t count all the people who can’t vote - citizens in Puerto Rico, those who are or have been incarcerated, immigrants, black people whose votes were purged in the south, people who couldn’t get to polls because over 800 poll locations were closed, and whoever was restricted from voting after the appeal of the Voting Rights Act - minorities still showed up to vote for Clinton. This system has been broken.
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