HOW BLACK LIVES MATTER CAME TO THE ACADEMY By Krtstal Brent Zook On a Saturday night in early June, Shardé Davis, an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Connecticut, was sitting on a couch in a rented apartment in San Diego, scrolling through her Twitter feed. She was in California to do research on a project that was funded by a Ford Foundation postdoctoral fellowship— plans that had been affected somewhat by covid-19 and the widespread protests for racial justice. Davis herself had gone to a Black Lives Matter protest in La Mesa the previous weekend. The event had started out peacefully but turned ugly when California Highway Patrol officers squared off with thousands of protesters on the I-8 freeway. There were reports of bottles thrown, tear gas unleashed, arson, and looting. A week later, after attending another protest, Davis still couldn’t calm down. As she sat alone on her couch, ruminating about the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and news coverage of the La Mesa protest— the crowd had been mostly white and Latinx, she said, but the media made it seem as though Black folks were the ones destroying property—she felt more and more enraged. She asked herself repeatedly, “What can I do?” She was already thinking about what it would look like for universities to cut ties with police departments. “I think I was just drawing the very obvious connections,” she said. “Academia is seen as a very liberal and progressive place, but systemic racism is running through all of these different institutions.” Although she was not an avid Twitter user, Davis came up with the hashtag #BlackInTheIvory, thinking it might be a good way for Black people to share their stories about racism in her sphere of influence. “Folks tout the liberal ivory tower,” she told me. “They hide behind it.”
Photo by Ed Kashi/VII/Redux
having campus security constantly ask for your research-lab badge, residence-hall identification, and/or driver’s license. Marc Edwards, now an assistant professor of biology at Amherst College, recalled that, in graduate school, at another institution, a dean suggested he wear a tie to class in response to incessant profiling. #BlackInTheIvory is being thrashed in student evaluations for discussing racial injustice, Danielle Clealand, a political scientist at the University of Texas at Austin, wrote. And my personal favorite: #BlackInTheIvory is being asked to serve on endless diversity committees and write endless diversity reports, without regard for one’s labor or time, also known as the “Black tax.” To drive the point home, Woods and Davis posted Venmo bar codes on their Twitter feeds for anyone who might care to contribute.
The movement took off, with feature stories in Nature, The Chronicle of Higher Education, NBCNews.com, and the Boston Globe. Davis and Woods created a Web site, which sold branded merchandise and launched an effort to match Black graduate students in need with donors. “Not the Diversity Hire,” read She texted a friend, Joy Melody Woods, a the text on one coffee mug. doctoral student in the Moody College of Communication at the University of Texas “You’re finally seeing people opening up and at Austin, to see what she thought of the sharing these experiences,” Woods said. “We hashtag idea. “I love it,” Woods replied had been feeling like we were alone.” from her iPhone. “Already tweeted it out.” Davis followed suit, using the hashtag while When Woods and I spoke in June, she told retweeting a physician named Shaquita Bell: me the story of her own experience as an “Black individuals in the United States have incoming graduate student. In the fall of endured events in our everyday life without 2016, she was the only Black student on her an audience or validation of our experiences.” track in a master’s program in public health at the University of Iowa. The college had no The next morning, Davis and Woods Black faculty, and Woods said that professors found their notification in-boxes filled with made it clear that she didn’t belong, that she hundreds of tweets from Black academics wasn’t smart enough. One professor told her and graduate students, sharing their stories directly that she “didn’t have the skills to be of exclusion and pain. By Sunday night, a graduate student.” #BlackInTheIvory was one of the top twenty hashtags in the country. #BlackInTheIvory is “I was feeling maybe I am dumb,” she said. being asked during your first week of college “I thought I was going insane. I would just be if you’re sure you can handle it, many said, on the floor crying.” or being asked on campus if you’re in the right place or “lost.” #BlackInTheIvory is Toward the end of her first semester, Woods The Columbus African American News Journal • February 2015
31
tried reporting one faculty member to the university’s Office of Equal Opportunity and Diversity, but the complaint went nowhere. “It’s hard to prove microaggressions,” she said. “That’s why we think we’re going crazy.” In Woods’s second semester of graduate school, a private psychologist tested her for learning disabilities. She discovered that she had three: a reading impairment, a visualspatial processing disability, and a nonverbal learning disability. The psychologist told Woods that she didn’t know how she had managed to finish high school. Yet her professors refused to provide learning accommodations, as is required by law. (In response, a spokesperson from the college said that “we have made progress since 2016, but it is not enough. We are determined to do better.”) So she left. “Walked right across the bridge,” as she put it, transferring to the College of Education, where she found three Black professors, an Asian-American adviser, and far more Black students in her classes. “I was never the ‘only’ anymore,” she said. The course readings also featured more diverse authors, and, because they explicitly addressed issues of inequality, it was easier to have open conversations about racism. In her new program, Woods completed a master’s degree in Educational Policy and Leadership Studies with an emphasis on the sociology of education. But, in many ways, Woods is an exception. Both of her parents have bachelor’s degrees in electrical engineering, and her two older sisters have graduate degrees in medicine and science. Many other Black students leave graduate programs in despair, but Woods felt that her family simply wouldn’t accept her defeat. She persisted, but her education came at a cost. “These experiences are traumatic,” Woods said. They can be isolating and Continued on Page 32
The Columbus & Dayton African American • February 2021
