This Columbus Day weekend, while many University students headed home to relax, thousands of Americans headed to Ferguson, Missouri to participate in the nonviolent protests sparked by the August 9th police shooting of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown. We were not among them. Instead, we wrote an essay, caught up on some reality TV, and finally won a fantasy football matchup. The Ferguson October protests blipped on our radar during a brief scan of the headlines, but we moved on.
We are all too common: ambitious, career-focused millennials who care about social justice, but are ultimately too consumed with our own lives to go to Ferguson and actively involve ourselves in this movement. This realization prompted a debate about our role and how our passion for justice did not incite us to action. Our own apathy disturbed us.
This difficult conversation brought us to an important conclusion: As the beneficiaries of white privilege we consciously and unconsciously continue to support white supremacy in the United States. White Americans benefit from the historical creation of social, political, economic and cultural structures that make life easier for us and harder for people of color. This system is deeply rooted and often invisible to those of us who reap its benefits. As a result, if we are not actively working against racist systems, we are participating in their maintenance and reproduction. Our apathy is the nefarious counterpart to federal divestment from urban centers, public schools being turned over to for-profit organizations and police violence in places like Ferguson. By silently accepting the status quo, we affirm and normalize the deeply-rooted structural inequalities that plague this campus and our society. All three of us recognize that we, individually, need to work harder in order to challenge racism. We think the University should too.
At the University, racism thrives in a variety of forms: sororities and fraternities play dress up at racially-themed parties, cuts to AccessUVa threaten to dramatically reduce the (already dwindling number) of black students on campus, and prices on the Corner, a heart of the University’s social world, are prohibitively expensive, limiting access to low income students.
These exclusions range from the social and interpersonal to the structural and institutional. The University has repeatedly affirmed a hollow rhetoric of inclusion. Just because the University’s mission statement stresses its commitment to diversity, the institution does not get a free pass from actively fostering and financing a racially and socioeconomically diverse student body. It is time the administration actively demonstrates changes in the culture of this institution and financially (re)invest in the diversity they espouse. The University has a history of introducing tokenistic change. Research conducted by Professor Claudrena Harold’s “Black Fire” course revealed that in 1980 a Black Student Alliance member warned of “get[ting] caught up in more bureaucracy. The administration can often blunt the effects of any desire for change by handing it off to another committee.” Past concerns resonate with current reality. We believe the University should act swiftly to address the low rates of black students at the university; the cuts to AccessUVa; the recruitment and retention of black faculty; and a living wage for all University employees.
White people — ourselves included — are often hesitant to identify these inequalities as “racist” because our vision of what “racism” looks like is trapped in 1950s Alabama. In the past, bigots were easily identified. They stood in schoolhouse doorways and carried signs that read: “Segregation Now, Segregation Forever.” But even in that era, like today, it was the silent consent of thousands that amplified those voices. While blatant examples of racism still exist (consider, for example, the painting of the N-word on Beta Bridge last year), they have been joined by this new post-Civil Rights Revolution form of discrimination. Racism endures and has become increasingly concealed. Compounding this problem, popular twenty-first century conceptions of activism have grown more tepid and symbolic. Just because we “like” and “share” articles about Ferguson, we are not absolved from responsibility for confronting the realities of racism in our everyday lives. It is our responsibility to hold ourselves and our community accountable to shared anti-racist values. That sometimes means, for instance, rejecting an invitation to a social event that has a racist theme. These efforts are difficult, but they are necessary. It is our responsibility as people who benefit from white privilege to engage other white people about how we can fight racism.
We are just three overworked graduate students. We do not pretend to have all the answers. But we also did not write this just to let off steam or bash an institution that means so much to so many. The University has a lot of work to do. But so do we. We hope this inspires reflection, initiates dialogue and helps illuminate the racialized structures that surround us in 2014.
Jonathan D. Cohen, Cecilia Marquez and Benji Cohen are Arts and Sciences graduate students.
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