“Building the Infrastructure for Your Own Liberation:” Educational Equity in the Era post-Affirmative Action
By Marissa Sasso
American University’s Antiracism Research and Policy Center hosted their first Lunch and Learn of the semester on November 1st. The event was focused on educational equity in the era of “anti-wokeness” and the Supreme Court’s overturning of affirmative action.
The event was hosted by the founder of AU’s new club Brave Spaces, Gabriella Hoard, who interviewed the three panelists: education professor Dr. Kenjus Watson, law professor Dr. Leah Epperson, and student Josiah Carolina.
Below is an abridged version of the topics discussed in the panel. This transcript is intended to provide an archive for those involved and anyone who is interested in this subject.
GH: Over the past several years, cultural competence; culturally responsive language; teaching diversity, equity, and inclusion; and anti-racism have become buzzwords in discussions surrounding both K -12 and higher education. So, in the context of the overturning of affirmative action, can you all talk about what these terms mean now and whether they are still relevant?
KW: All these terms, to me, speak to a compromise or attempt to continue a compromise… These spaces are never for our wellness– always for control, compliance, or incorporation, but never for our wellness or for our liberation. They're relevant because the aspects of them that were intended for our harm have never been abolished. And so the need for centering the possibilities of life within [the educational world] is important.
JC: I think these words come into play because they're also systems or vehicles that we use to function as “normal.” We use concepts like “antiracism” or “cultural competency” to create our own “normal,” but at the same time it's still violently oppressive. Like today we're all expected to get out of our beds, come to work, and go to class while there’s a genocide that has never before been as accessible to the world's public as it is today.
GH: Are there other emerging frameworks that might be more beneficial to marginalized students and educators?
KW: I'll mention decolonization, conversations around women, sovereignty of indigenous folks, giving life itself back to Black people.
GH: So we already know that BIPOC students at PWIs are already under a certain level of stress. But on top of that, BIPOC students in the humanities pursuing studies having to do with race, critical race, gender, and culture have an increasingly added layer of struggle as it happens already now that these departments are being questioned and diminished across the country. So what kind of protections do BIPOC students have who are doing this work as students, if any, and what can students and faculty do to support BIPOC students who are in these fields of study right now?
JC: Dr. Wong famously and brilliantly told me once that I was “building the infrastructure for my own liberation,” and I will never forget those words. What I'm trying to get to is that Dr. Wong said those words to me, as a faculty member. I think amidst all of this, the institution will absolutely fail us. Higher administration has already failed many students in the wake of October 7th. However, our faculty members and our professors often do not. I think that as far as protections go, I think building a strong coalition of faculty and building relationships with faculty members is probably our best bet. I definitely want to shout out amazing faculty and staff who have been phenomenal to their students and it's the insanity of this world lately and it's not lost on your students at all.
LE: I think for those of us who are educators, it is helpful to hear where we are falling short and where there needs to be more of something, whether that's more offerings, whether it's more faculty, whether it's more spaces that allow for things. And there's a couple of things that I think help, like constant dialogue and thinking with respect to students and faculty around that.
GH: With the Supreme Court's ruling on affirmative action, these spaces have become even more difficult to navigate. Given these events, how are justice-oriented students and faculty navigating the intersection of scholarship, censorship, law, and policy while also having to develop their own scholarship in careers?
LE: I'll start by saying the Supreme Court decision is about the legality of policies that take account of race in considering admissions to colleges and universities. It is significant, but that is it… However, universities are not at all prohibited soliciting and engaging with the ways in which race has been a significant part of a student's experience as they talk about that in the admissions process, in an essay or in talking about the work that they may have done as an aspiring college student or graduate school student. So it's not a time to cow. It's time to be clear about what is the mission of an institution that purports to be in favor of and passionate about issues of inclusion and issues of equity.
Again, not that it is an inconsequential decision, but that is one piece of a decision about admissions and it is not, we are not a position or a place where we're going to be erasing the discussion of this. We are at a place where we need to be building up and having more students who are engaged in this work, students who are charting their own path in terms of their study in this and seeking out those people who are supporting that mission.
GH: How can the current academic atmosphere contribute to the bio-, psycho-, and social wellbeing of students with marginal identities as we persist in systems not built for our success?
KW: When I came to do work at UCLA I studied racial microaggressions, which was developed by Dr. Chester Pierce as a concept at Harvard in the 1950s and 60s to describe what it was like to be inside a place like Cambridge as a Black person at that time. Pearson studied what it was like for human beings as a psychiatrist to go into spaces that could kill you. He applied that to Black people in Cambridge, which is to say: what does it look like to be a Black person inside of an environment that can kill you. That's the term microaggressions as an everyday mechanism of harm or violence.
We applied that same thinking or framework to what was going on for black cis men at UCLA. One of the students used a novel biomarker called telomeres. Those are protective caps at the ends of our chromosomes. You know aglets on the tip of your shoelaces? They’re like the aglets of your chromosomes. Telomeres are these protective caps at the ends of our chromosomes, and each time our cells divide, those caps take on damage, and those caps, just like an aglet that frays, gets shorter and shorter. These Black students, ages 18 to 24, had telomere lengths that were similar to a group of breast cancer survivors who were two times, sometimes 20 times their age.
My colleague Tiffany Green did this study where she just said: we're not going to school them anymore. No more schooling. So we looked at what was schooling, how much of schooling is involved in our current education spaces— grades, test scores— and how much time you spend inside versus outside. Can you get to speak your language or other languages? What other epistemologies are on board, or is it all Western with our vitriol equating our own culture?
When they centered that in abolished schooling, they found that these young people's telomeres grew within one year’s time. Part of that is because, of course, when you're loved unconditionally, you tend to feel better. What I'm arguing is that these spaces do not love you. They don't love you. And that's going to harm you. So if you transform a space into a place that might love you more, you'll feel better.
As an educator, my primary goal when students come in or when they leave is are they more well leaving than they were coming in. That's the metric of success for me.Education is a life generating transmission process. Schooling is one that's intended to support and maintain the existing status quo. So if I lean into education and I release schooling, I know that there will be some benefits for people going on.
GH: Josiah, as a student who has been through this higher education system at a very specific time from 2020 to now and is studying history and education through the lens of race, gender, and culture, what support have you gotten from faculty at the university? And what would you have liked more of?
JC: I think that if I could tell every new undergrad or every high schooler one thing, it's to be intentional about the fact that you choose. Look into your faculty members, use critical thinking. Where have they published? What have they published? What did they do? Where did they go to school? We need to make sure that we're getting every dime worth of our education.
I was in a class this semester with a professor who held deeply problematic beliefs. I put the W on my transcript. And now I'm developing an independent study with another faculty member. That's because I'm intentional about my time. I often talk about the fact that students of color often feel, at least in my particular scenario, that we are responsible for maintaining and restoring the relationships that we have with our faculty members. If a professor does something wrong, it feels like the onus is on us. We need to fix it, because that's just how it is, especially when the faculty member is a white person. I told the co-Deans in the School of Education, I said, I’m engaging in a liberatory act by refusing to subject myself to violence in the classroom.
I will not engage, and I refuse to engage in any attempts to redefine things like white supremacy, settler colonialism, or racism. Why? Because not only is that what I've built my academic study trying to understand, but that is also my lived experience. And it has been so profound for me to have faculty members in my life of color and not of color who have supported me throughout this.