by Student Historian in Residence Rena Yehuda Newman (They/them)

For the past three months, I’ve been working collaboratively with the UW Archives Staff to put together a Teaching Kit about the Black Student Strike of February 1969, in honor of the 50th Anniversary of the Strike, coming up in February 2019. As of the end of December, the first draft of the kit has been finished and sent out to community members for review. By the end of January, I’ll have a link up here for anyone to view the kit publicly.

I drafted the following post before winter break, and though it’s a bit late in its posting, I figure that as I enter the revision stage of the kit (having received tons of helpful, wonderful feedback from community collaborators), I want to post this bit of personal reflection.

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Mid December, 2018

I’m heading home for winter break this Sunday. But before I sign off for the break, I wanted to take a second to reflect on the experience of putting together this kit, especially as a white historian working on a public project to document black activism.

After Cat, Troy, Katie, and I had our first meeting to talk about compiling a teaching kit for the strike, I was enthusiastic about the project. These days, I think reparations through education can be an effective tool for restorative justice, revitalizing memories of upstanding community members fighting injustice. The staff was kind with entrusting me with a lot of say in the process, more or less putting me in charge of curating the primary source documents that the kit would feature.

Holding this responsibility means being transparent about my own limits: as a white student, there are limitations to my work on this project. The meanings and choices I make regarding the materials and curation of this kit will be influenced by my own identities and experiences. Whiteness impacts those choices. While it is necessary that white people also engage in anti-racist action in all spheres, at all times during this project I have wondered deeply about my ability to do justice for a project like documenting the Black Student Strike of 1969 for Students in 2018-2019.

Many of my weekly meetings with Cat Phan, my supervisor, were spent discussing this question of curation, bias, and identity. By nature, this collection will be limited (we tried to keep it to ~10 documents for accessibility’s sake). I’ve included an extra document, a placeholder entitled “Absent Materials”, highlighting omissions in curation and encouraging students to question inclusions and exclusions in the collection. We also included a set of “Modern Materials” regarding a set of demands by black students for 2016, also calling for anti-racist action on campus.

We wanted the kit to include a wide swath of voices, especially student voices. We wanted the kit to uphold the story of the black student organizers, despite the fact that our UW archival collections have enormous gaps with regards to firsthand student activist accounts. I wanted the kit to make clear the history of state violence that the UW enacted on its own students by calling in the National Guard. I wanted the kit to reaffirm the ongoing relevance of the Black People’s Alliance’s “13 Demands”, salient today. I wanted this kit to bear witness and I wanted this kit to help my peers bear witness.

But as a public, community project, the UW archives staff cannot be the only voices in constructing the kit. While my usual instinct is to bring in more student voice, especially connecting with my black peers about this project, Cat suggested that we send it out wider, including scholars from the Black Studies Department, Black Student Center, and Multicultural Student Center. Now that the first draft is done, we’re in process of sending it out to these community partners for critique. I want to be accountable for mistakes I’ve made in this process, transparent about my thinking. I want to be accountable for the work that’s being done/needs to be done. I want to document that process of accountability so that students doing similar projects in the future can learn from my mistakes and reflections.

I hope that this kit, after feedback, collaboration, and revision, can be a jumping-off point for restorative education. A small teaching kit cannot claim to tell the whole story of an event like the Black Student Strike, but it can provide an opportunity to glean old-new meanings, to give students and educators alike the chance to explore a less-commemorated event that bears enormous significance for the UW community. The process as well as the product brings lessons to questions of what it means to be a part of this strange American project, locally and nationally.