The murder of George Floyd in May of 2020 served as a perfect storm. Highly visible police actions that were clearly racially motivated, excessively forceful, and criminal, along with a populace forced to shelter in place often with more time on their hands to follow popular culture and react to it. The reaction was overwhelming outrage. People were moved to speak out and demand justice against a legal system steeped in systemic racism. Cries were heard to defund the police, demolish the broken carceral system, and recognize that Black lives do matter in the hopes of creating a nation where all people have the same rights, protection under the law, and access to opportunities.
In this time where much of the world has acknowledged that structural racism provides advantages to some and disadvantages to others, we have an opportunity to contribute to this ongoing conversation. We are working to share examples of how structural racism shapes the function and form of higher education and actively take steps to build equity in our hallowed halls. In a 2021 interview conducted by Sarah Brown in the Chronicles of Higher Education, Professor of History at Georgetown University, Marcia Chatelain describes the unique positionality of the university and its role:
The university can be two things at the same time. First, it is a place in which leaders have to be held accountable for their decisions by a larger public—not just students,parents, and donors, but the larger public that often subsidizes the university and feels the consequences of its choices. Second, universities are uniquely situated because of their pursuit of knowledge. So what role do they play in terms of racial justice? They should be held accountable in the same ways that we hold government entities, banks, and private businesses accountable. Their responsibilities to repair are vast, because they’ve been able to exploit certain types of inequality in our society.We can’t just be observers, saying, “There are all these movements happening, that’s interesting or novel.” We are always indicted in these cycles of history (Chatelain,2021).
However, like many social movements of the past, the urgency and attention wanes with the next attention grabbing headline. As prevalent the need for structural change is in many minds throughout America, we have begun to see diminishing support in the culture at large for the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement and a desire to “get back to normal.” In fact, support for BLM is lower now than it was prior to the 2020 murder of George Floyd (Chudy, & Jefferson,2021). So if this book feels like an urgent call for radical change, that’s because it is.
There have been multiple moments in history where it felt as if real change would come,only to find that momentum had died off and white supremacy and patriarchal social structures had once again prevailed. Humanity only has a finite amount of time on this planet. We are being called by nature to be better stewards of the Earth if we wish to make our time here habitable. But holistically, what does that look like? What are the changes we wish to see and who will benefit from them? Once we reckon with our past, we can start to put those pieces in place in order to make academia a place where we all have a comfortable seat at the table.
