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Chronicle of Higher Education, JULY 15, 2020 PREMIUM
What College Activists Want
Defunded police. Inclusive coursework. Faculty members who look like
them. Students demand radical change for racial justice, and they’re not
backing down.
By Katherine Mangan and Marc Parry
David Zentz, Andrea Morales, Dean Lavenson, and Mark Abramson for The
Chronicle
There was a time when stripping a racist’s name from a building would
have been celebrated as a breakthrough for racial justice in higher
education. Today, it’s accepted as a starting point.
As the Covid-19 pandemic and outrage over police violence converge,
college students are demanding radical change. They want Confederate
symbols toppled, police departments defunded, coursework diversified,
departments restaffed with people of color, and a host of other actions.
“We’re past the point of conversation and reforms and panels,” said
Maliya Homer, president of the Black Student Union at the University of
Louisville. “We can’t panel our way out of this oppressive system that
controls us.”
For students like Homer, these issues are personal. On a daily basis,
they face fear, frustration, judgment, and ostracism because of their
race and ethnicity, and their demands are shaped by those common
experiences.
The Chronicle spoke with four student activists, each shedding light on
a single demand.
The demand: Sever ties with the police.
The activist: Maliya Homer, president of the Black Student Union at the
University of Louisville
Dean Lavenson for The Chronicle
When Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old emergency medical technician, was
shot to death by Louisville police officers who crashed into her
apartment in the middle of the night, it was a jarring reminder for
Maliya Homer of how vulnerable she felt as a Black woman.
Homer, president of the University of Louisville’s Black Student Union,
had been disturbed for years about accounts of local police officers
questioning Black and brown students for behavior that wouldn’t have
raised suspicion if they were white. A Mexican American friend, wearing
a hoodie and walking to the library, was asked where he was heading. A
white student driving with two Black passengers said a police officer
pulled out her gun when they asked her for directions.
But Taylor’s death marked a turning point for Homer. “Breonna’s murder
was the last time I was going to even entertain ideas of reform,” she
said. It “made me feel like Black women are dispensable.”
On May 31, Homer and the Black Student Union called for the university
to sever ties with the Louisville Metro Police Department. “Nothing
about being in closer proximity to state-sanctioned violence makes us
any safer," Homer wrote in the statement.
Helping impoverished neighborhoods near the campus meet food and
affordable-housing needs would be a more equitable and effective way,
she said, to improve public safety. Policing, Homer believes,
contributes to the school-to-prison pipeline. She might have ended up
there herself if the police had been summoned during her years as a
strong-willed middle-schooler, she said.
Louisville’s president, Neeli Bendapudi, sympathized with Homer’s
concerns but wrote in a response on the university’s website that
cutting ties “would be an insufficient answer to a very complex
problem.” The university relies on the local police to help investigate
crimes, the president wrote. Its criminal-justice department houses a
police-training institute.
Bendapudi promised that campus police officers would lead most
investigations and that de-escalation or cultural-sensitivity training
would be required for all officers hired to work on campus.
To Homer, those steps fall short. “It’s a slap in the face,” she said,
“when you have Black and brown students asking you, begging you, telling
you we don’t feel safe” with the metro police department, “and you talk
about reform."
The demand: Remove symbols of oppression.
The activist: Tyler Yarbrough, student senator at the University of
Mississippi
Andrea Morales for The Chronicle
Tyler Yarbrough couldn’t believe the image in his Twitter feed.
The University of Mississippi student senator was about to drive from
his college town of Oxford to his hometown of Clarksdale for a
Juneteenth event marking the end of slavery. And his university had just
released plans to build what looked to him like a “shrine to white
supremacy.”
The picture on his phone showed an artist’s rendering of the campus
cemetery to which the university planned to relocate its statue of a
Confederate soldier. The project involved upgrading the cemetery into
what the historian Anne Twitty described as a well-lit “park-like
setting” with a path and new Confederate headstones. It wasn’t what the
student government had envisioned when it voted to banish the statue
from the campus’s front entrance to this run-down and isolated spot.
In late-night video calls, Yarbrough and other activists hashed out a
plan to fight back.
As a public-policy student, Yarbrough sees Confederate statues as
symbols of deeper systems of racial oppression: an educational system
that barred Black students from his university until 1962, a legal
system that acquitted the white men who murdered 14-year-old Emmett Till
in 1955.
Yarbrough grew up about 20 minutes from where Till was killed, in a
Mississippi Delta city so segregated, he said, it felt like “an
apartheid state.” His mother received food stamps while studying to
become a nurse. His father drove a truck. His great-grandmother could
point to the field where her family had once worked as sharecroppers.
None of the wealth generated by that land was passed down to his family.
Yarbrough became an activist in part because his campus has been
regularly plagued by what he calls “racist scandal.” Notably, a photo
emerged last year of fraternity members posing with guns in front of a
bullet-pocked memorial sign to Till.
Yarbrough and a classmate responded to that by creating an image of
their own. They placed the shot-up Till sign in front of the
university’s Confederate statue.
Yarbrough sees a parallel between the murder of Till in 1955 and the
killing of George Floyd in May. Both events ignited social movements to
tear down the racist systems represented by Confederate statues.
Last month, Yarbrough and others organized a protest at the future home
of Mississippi’s Confederate monument. The crowd faced police officers
and security guards as Yarbrough gave a speech demanding the university
work with students to come up with a new relocation plan.
Such demands will get louder. Yarbrough is creating a new group uniting
student leaders at colleges across the state. His goal: Next time
something happens, all will respond.
The demand: Hire people of color.
The activist: Ishiyihmie Burrell, student at Juniata College
When the Covid-19 pandemic forced Juniata College to send students home,
Ishiyihmie Burrell left the rural liberal-arts college in Pennsylvania
and returned to the familiar bustle of Queens, N.Y.
Mark Abramson for The Chronicle
From the ethnically diverse, historically Black neighborhood where he
grew up, Burrell spent two weeks with fellow students remotely crafting
26 pages of diversity recommendations for his majority-white college.
Among their key demands: Students need more minority faculty, staff, and
administrators they can feel comfortable confiding in and seeking advice
from.
Support for students of color, they said, had been shattered when the
college’s dean of equity, diversity, and inclusion left after being
furloughed.
Burrell, the son of a Caribbean mother and African American father, said
he was often the only Black student in his classes at Juniata and felt
that he was “either not being seen because of my race or only being seen
by my race.”
The environment was different, he said, in the classes he’s taken with
Black professors. “I felt comfortable sharing my perspective as a Black
person without feeling like it’s being looked at as the experience of
all Black people,” he said.
Burrell said he can admit to his Black professors when he’s tired from
juggling academics with social-justice activities. He’s more likely to
”sugar coat” his emotions when talking to white professors so they won’t
see him as "just another 'lazy Black person,'" he wrote in a
social-media message to The Chronicle.
“I don’t see myself as an activist,” Burrell added. “I see myself as a
Black person doing what I have to do” to get the same college experience
his white classmates enjoy.
In response to the diversity recommendations Burrell had worked on, an
anonymous student emailed college leaders, faculty, and staff last month
condemning the demands as “loathsome.”
“The problems you have aren’t because of your skin color,” the student
wrote. Instead, he said they stem from “a lack of personal
responsibility, lack of growing up in a stable two-parent household, or
a general disinclination for learning of the college variety.”
The student was suspended and issued an online apology after his
identity was traced. But Burrell would like to think that if the student
had been exposed to more diverse professors and advisers, his racist
beliefs might have been challenged.
“Even though he was in Juniata’s care,” Burrell said, “there was no one
who was able to change his views.”
The demand: Diversify the curriculum.
The activist: Martha M. Robles, senior at California State University at
Northridge
David Zentz for The Chronicle
Martha M. Robles began college as a struggling student whose high-school
teachers had dampened her ambitions and alienated her with what she
describes as a Euro-centric approach to teaching. She will graduate this
fall from California State University at Northridge as a high-achieving
student-activist who hopes to be a professor.
She traces her transformation to one Chicana/o-studies course.
Taking that night class at Pierce College, part of the Los Angeles
Community College District, “incited a fire within me,” she said. It
wasn’t just how the course upended the Mexicans-as-villains historical
narrative she’d studied growing up. It was how it made her feel: seen
and heard in class for the first time.
Lately, Robles has directed her fire at one goal: getting state
officials to adopt a law forcing students in the California State
University system to take an ethnic-studies course. That fight puts her
at the vanguard of a growing national push to diversify curricula.
Ethnic-studies classes use interdisciplinary methods to study race and
racism and to “interrogate and dismantle systems of power,” Tracy
Lachica Buenavista, a professor of Asian American studies at Northridge,
said in an email. The field takes varied forms, she said, and can
include Black studies, American Indian studies, Asian American studies,
and Chicana/o studies.
Robles’s battle for the state law is the latest in a longer struggle to
expand access to classes that changed her life.
Robles came of age in North Hollywood, raised by a single mother from
Mexico. She grew up among people who had been involved in what she calls
“the street life.” Teachers saw little potential in her.
Angelita Rovero was different.
Robles saw herself in the Pierce Chicana/o-studies professor’s dress and
demeanor. Studying with Rovero, she felt newly grounded in her Chicana
identity. She stopped working full time, to focus on college. She became
a leader in a Chicana/o-student group.
Robles’s activism sprang from frustration with the limited Chicana/o
studies courses at Pierce, which forced students to commute long
distances to take classes at other colleges. Through petitions,
protests, and meetings, Robles and her peers waged a campaign —
ultimately successful — to expand Pierce’s offerings.
Robles is now pursuing a bachelor’s in Chicana/o studies at Northridge.
Last semester, she traveled to Sacramento to lobby lawmakers for the
state ethnic-studies mandate. She sees such classes as crucial not just
for people of color but also for educating white students about their
own privilege and converting them into allies.
An ethnic-studies mandate, she added, would also solidify departments
that are vulnerable to budget cuts.
“We may not be able to see the fruits of our own labor,” Robles said.
“But the reason why we do it is so that the following generations are
able to reap those fruits.”
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