On “Recent Incidents”: #DukeYouAreGuilty
Not yet halfway through the academic year, Duke University has — yet again — reminded us of the violence foundational to this institution. On October 18, a group of male students shouted racist hate speech and slurs outside the dorm room of an Asian-American woman. On October 23, a poster advertising #BlackLivesMatter event featuring Patrisse Cullors was vandalized with an anti-black racial slur. On November 5, a homophobic death threat was written on a wall in a dorm targeting a first year student. In response, Larry Moneta, the Vice President of Student Affairs, had the audacity to refer to this violence as nothing more than a series of acts of “copycat hatred.” Hate crimes are consistently labeled as mere “incidents” by the administration and little to no action is taken. These acts of terror are emblematic of the larger landscape and culture of Duke University that actively reproduce practices and expressions of violence against its marginalized students — the everyday realities many of us know too well.
When this erasure and oppression comes to a rupture, manifested in an act of phenomenal violence, the university pretends that it is an unexpected aberration, as if the university itself has not created, maintained, and continued to actively build the space that allows these antagonisms to exist. Each time a rupture of violence occurs, the people who are targeted are expected to come up with solutions to their oppression, a process that demands extraordinary emotional, physical, mental, and spiritual uncompensated labor. We denounce the exploitation of students, faculty, and staff who are called upon to perpetually reiterate and seek public validation of their experiences in the name of “discussion” — as if their pain has ever been taken into consideration by the administration. Duke has made it clear that it has no regard for the lives of marginalized peoples.
The administration’s passive, delayed reactions to these hate crimes epitomize its continuous silencing and dismissal of students’ concerns about their safety and welfare. If closed-door boardroom meetings, campus conversations, forums, and the like were effective, as the administrators wants us to believe, students would not be forced to confront racial slurs, vandalized posters, or homophobic death threats on campus — all of which happened this semester. Duke fully knows the actions it needs to take, because we, those who came before us, and those who came before them, have told them what to do, time and time again. But the university continues to ignore these demands and attempts to placate and distract us with “community conversations” and empty promises.
We are not interested in another “conversation.” We know that Duke has ignored all conventional avenues of action for change. We recognize that the creation of various institutional entities (whether task forces or diversity committees) with the sole purpose of “making recommendations” is a pacifying tactic that the administration has utilized, over and over again, to shelve the actual demands made by students over decades of student organizing. We do not have faith in the institution that has been unrelenting in its refusal to honor and fulfill our demands, while masquerading under the guise of “dialogue” that was never meant to include us.
We see through you. Administrators exploit ideals of “diversity,” “inclusivity,” and “collective responsibility” to absolve themselves of the violence that they both produce and maintain. By doing so, they try to sell us an illusion that all of us are conversing on equal terms, when truth is that they maintain a monopoly on access and resources necessary to enact transformative institutional changes. We understand that at the end of the day, Duke’s priority will always be its control of power and reputation over the well-being of non-normative members of our communities.
We carry, within us, the institutional knowledge and memory that you seek to obliterate. We know that you would love nothing more than for student coalitions to fall prey to intimidation, exhaustion, or compliance. When that fails, you wait for us to graduate and disappear. You can no longer pretend that you hold the interests of the marginalized at heart while continuing to foster an environment that only functions on the concept of temporary appeasement. These are the tactics that you have used to erase our labor, to suppress our dissent, but this time, we know better.
We know our history of resistance and your history of oppression. We remember that Duke was built on the stolen land of indigenous peoples acquired through genocide and settler colonial violence. We remember that the resources that built this institution were plundered from the backs of black and brown labor. Duke University was built with money generated by slave labor. This place was never meant to be for us, nor to serve us.
We dwell in a long tradition of resistance; we are descendants of those who refuse to be silenced. We celebrate all those who struggled and all those who dreamed of being free. We stand on the shoulders of those who have come before us, and we commit to honoring and continuing their work, for the sake of those who will come after us.
We are direct descendants of the People of Color Caucus, and we refuse to let their hard labor and truth-telling voices disappear into a quiet silence. We recognize not only the People of Color Caucus, but the countless students that led the struggle before them. We honor, lift up the forgotten names, and invoke the strength of all those who came before us: the first five Black students who in 1963 courageously stepped on this campus, still rotting with its white supremacist anti-Blackness; those who occupied the Chapel Quad en masse in 1968; Black students who fearlessly took over the Allen Building in 1969; those who protested U.S. imperialism and the cruelties of the Vietnam War in the 70’s, those who demanded the university divest from apartheid South Africa in the 80’s; those who led the demands for the hiring of Black faculty in 1988, and many countless others. Full of indignation, unwavering in our commitment to get free together, we rise up as Duke Enrage.
As we build upon the history of student movements, we recognize that we are at a momentous threshold. At this time when protests are occurring all over college campuses in the country and abroad, we embrace our collective power and our duty to fight. University leaders and administrators have lost their jobs, and we know that you fear for yours. You expect us to yield and to accept a semblance of your “efforts” as a resolution to our outrage. We will not back down. Remember, we hold the power in this movement and we are here to use it. Expect us.
