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Opinion: St. Lawrence University professors express solidarity with BLM protestors

Posted 6/22/20

To the Editor: We, the undersigned members of our local American Association of University Professors (AAUP) chapter and other professors of St. Lawrence University, wish to express our solidarity …

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Opinion: St. Lawrence University professors express solidarity with BLM protestors

Posted

To the Editor:

We, the undersigned members of our local American Association of University Professors (AAUP) chapter and other professors of St. Lawrence University, wish to express our solidarity with the hundreds of thousands of people across the globe marching in the streets and holding vigils to protest the recent murders of Amaud Arbery, Manuel Ellis, Breonna Tayler, Maurice Gordon, George Floyd, and Tony McDade.

We condemn the police violence being unleashed upon peaceful protesters in several American cities and we mourn the deaths in police custody of countless other people of color of which we are yet unaware. We are proud of the many SLU students, alumni, staff, faculty, families, and allies who have been on the streets raising their voices and expressing their sorrow and outrage.

We are heartened that so many groups of people representing all ages, ethnicities, genders, and political adherences have come together to join the Black Lives Matter movement in demanding an end to the systemic racism and police brutality that has allowed these horrific killings to continue unabated in the U.S.—not just in the first half of this year, but since the nation’s founding.

We grieve with the families who have lost loved ones to police violence and hate crimes. We recognize the many macro and microaggressions people of color experience every day, including members of our own St. Lawrence University faculty, staff, and students. We must do better. We must dismantle the structures of white supremacy and inequality that unjustly harm and disenfranchise entire communities while bestowing unearned privileges on others.

At the same time, while we grieve with all those mourning the deaths of loved ones who have been stricken with COVID-19, we recognize that this disease disproportionately affects people of color. Systemic racism is a public health crisis that sees communities of color chronically underserved. Moreover, people of color have been disproportionately affected by the economic downturn resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic.

It has never been enough to say that we are allies to the people of color in our communities and across the globe. As Dr. Angela Davis, who spoke at St. Lawrence in April, 2017 for the Kathryn Fraser Mackay Memorial Lecture, instructs us, “You have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world. And you have to do it all the time.” We, the undersigned, vow to do more and to be better agents and allies of this radical transformation. We vow to join those members of the Saint Lawrence University community who are already on the front lines as active anti-racists in everything we do: in our pedagogy, in our creative work and scholarship, and in how we form and support our communities.

Dismantling over four centuries of white supremacy and structural inequality is not something that will be done with good intentions alone. We must listen intently to those who have been harmed by racism and by microaggressions in our communities and beyond. We must be active anti-racists in how we convene conversations in the classroom and in our homes and schools and offices and among friends. We must reconsider who is in the classroom teaching, what texts we teach, who we teach, and how we teach.

To be actively anti-racist means that we educate ourselves on how unfair and uneven structures of power have benefited some of us and excluded others historically, and continue to do so today in our university setting and beyond. It means thinking about how we got here and creating a vision and a commitment and a plan to do better. We must speak up against racist behaviors regardless of where they occur. And we must accept criticism when we fail to deliver on our promise to be active anti-racists.

We are committed to engaging in the difficult work of building an explicitly anti-racist curriculum and reconsidering the hiring practices that have failed to break the hold of white supremacy on our campus. We believe that by working purposefully to be anti-racist, we can create a St. Lawrence that is not only diverse and inclusive but is a model of how a campus, even in a remote setting like ours, can begin to dismantle those centuries-old structures of unequal power and privilege and to treat everyone with abiding respect and dignity.

We will work with those who are suffering to create a community in which each of us has a voice. Even more than this, we can equip future Laurentians with the critical tools they need to analyze and disassemble those power structures as graduates, and to be active and effective advocates for justice and equality wherever they go.

With love and in solidarity,

John Collins, professor of global studies and more than 100 SLU professors and educators