#saehatesme

On Sunday, March 22, 2015, around 2:30 AM, a group of white male students targeted and taunted a young black female student with the racist Sigma Alpha Epsilon chant.

The People of Color Caucus at Duke University understands that this is no isolated incident. This cannot be treated as singular nor spontaneous. We are cognizant of the ways in which the past is no fixed other-world but is instead something that we carry with us and reproduce in this present moment.

What happened to the young Black woman on Sunday, March 22, 2015, is intimately connected to the conditions that necessitated the takeover of the Allen Building on February 13, 1969, by Black students. What happened to the young Black woman on Sunday, March 22, 2015, is intimately connected to the the Kappa Sigma Fraternity’s Asia Prime / International Relations party in Spring 2013 that treated yellowface as an occasion of celebration. What happened to the young black woman is intimately connected to Duke’s Education Department participating in brownface and yellowface while claiming to be invested in serving black and brown youth in Durham. It is intimately tied to the dearth of faculty of color as well as the attrition rate of faculty of color. It is tied to the state-sanctioned extrajuridical killings and brutalization of black bodies: Trayvon Martin, Aiyana Jones, Rekia Boyd, Tanesha Anderson, Jesus Huerta, Pearlie Golden, Carlos Riley, Jr., Deshawnda Sanchez and countless others—tragedies which have only received glaring silence from the administration. In other words, the racist terror to which the young black woman was subjected is symptomatic of systematized racism.

The POC Caucus at Duke University understands that racism is not about individual behavior nor about being a “good” or “bad” person. Racism is a system of oppression that pervades our quotidian experiences through institutional, structural, and individual reproduction. It poisons the water that we drink, the food that we eat to sustain our bodies, and the air that we breathe.

We know that racism does not exist as a lone system of oppression. We know that what happened to the young black woman on March 22 is connected to the institution’s decision to include a LGTBQ box for high school students to check on admission applications without addressing the gay bashing, absence of gender neutral accommodations, and general psychological violence that LGBTQ people confront as students upon arrival. We know that the racism entrenched in the institution is connected to the institution’s failure to make accommodations of accessibility actually accessible as the institution often makes deliberate decisions to invisibilize people with disabilities, such as making ramps difficult to find by placing them in the back of buildings. We know that the institutionalized racism that we face is connected to the victim-blaming and other mechanisms of silence that further traumatize survivors of sexual assault. We know that the institution’s racism is connected to the university’s failure to financially support the Office of Access and Outreach that was supposedly formed out of a commitment to support first generation and low-income college students.

Thus, we understand that struggle against racism is connected to and reinforced by other systems of oppression such as sexism, heterosexism, cissexism, ableism, and classism. We cannot stand against racial injustice without acknowledging that all systems intersect to perpetrate violence against marginalized bodies. The same racial oppression that affects Black bodies is connected to the cis-heteropatriarchy that variably oppresses any and everyone whose masculinity is not fully accepted. The same racial oppression that affects Black bodies is connected to the systematic exclusion and invisibilization of non-able bodied or non-neurotypical peoples.The same racial oppression that affects Black bodies affects other minority bodies, including racial and religious minorities.  The same racial oppression that affects Black bodies is connected to the displacement and erasure of queer and non-normative bodied people.

Why We Are Here

First and foremost, we are here to stand in support and in solidarity with the young woman. We acknowledge and honor her experiences. We are also here to equip ourselves with the necessary knowledge so that we may dismantle the oppressive institutions that have never served us and create ones that do, thereby transforming the spaces in which we find ourselves. We are here to boldly and unapologetically take up the space we need as not simply a means of survival but as a means of thriving. We are here because we refuse to be complacent with inclusion in the brochures that we receive as prospective students when we continue to face violent exclusion on a daily basis as actual students on this campus.

We are not interested in “restoring” the institutions nor restoring our faith in the institutions, which presumes that there has been a moment in which the institutions had our safety and interests in mind. We have not come together to negotiate with the administration behind closed doors on their territory. We are not interested in the administration asking us for solutions to institutional inequities that we did not create—especially, when we have time and time again provided them undue access to our mental and physical energies to right their wrongs.

As a community of marginalized peoples and allies, we will no longer ask the administration and the larger Duke community for a seat at the table with them. We are committed to doing the work to maintain a community in which all of our siblings in the struggle are seen as their whole selves and feel protected, affirmed, and loved. Indeed, we are compelled by the radical possibilities of love in a world that tries to convince us through an array of mechanisms of violence and silence that we are condemned as people who cannot be loved, who cannot love, who cannot matter, and who cannot breathe.  In the face of our incredulous “peers,” more time is spent continually justifying our anger, hurt, and pain than caring and loving ourselves. We will no longer practice declaring humanity that is self-evident. We have exhausted all “respectable” avenues, and they have not served us. Therefore, we state the following:

We demand justice for our sister as well as change in the communities in which we live and work. We will not be treated as second-class students or people any longer. Our lives matter. They do not matter because we make Duke more “diverse”; they matter because we are human beings.

We will no longer remain silent about the oppression we face on this campus at the hands and mouths of other students and faculty/staff members.

We will no longer remain passive when we see a Duke student mistreat a non-academic employee. We will celebrate and support all employees as members of our community, rather than dismissing any as “other” or “underclass”.

We will no longer remain silent when the administration decides not to acknowledge the pain of its marginalized students. By not acknowledging our pain, they continue to delegitimize our humanity.

We propose to create spaces that celebrate our lives, our art, our experiences, our minds, and all other aspects of our identity. Through our radical dedication to loving ourselves and our community, we will advocate for change on our campus and in our world.

We will unapologetically live and act as free human beings while fighting to dismantle the systems that oppress us.

As a collective of students intent on dismantling the imperialist, colonialist, capitalist, white supremacist cis-heteropatriarchy, we will declare that we are loved, that we can love, that we matter, and that we will breathe. We will live!

The Duke POCC is a group of marginalized students who have come together to be in solidarity in struggles toward social justice while creating space to support and learn from each other. We acknowledge that while racism affects us all as people of color, it does so variably based on the ways in which we are racialized in society and has different manifestations dependent on other socially constructed categorizations.