CRITICAL ANGLE
Design by Rebecca Goldberg
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NOTES TO A STUDENT ORGANIZER A former member of Black Students for Disarmament at Yale reflects on its trajectory over the past year and a half.
BRANSON RIDEAUX
n early June, Instagram stories were filled with blackedout screens and never-ending instructions on how to be “a good activist.” Yet while students scrambled for ways to get involved in the Black Lives Matter movement, Black Students for Disarmament at Yale (BSDY) continued what they had been doing for the past year—marching on the streets of New Haven for justice and accountability with community organizers. On June 13, BSDY joined eight other organizations and over 600 students and residents in a march on the Yale Police Department, in connection with the recent murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery, but more specifically to call out Yale for the shooting of Stephanie Washington and Paul Witherspoon in April 2019. Created in response to the April shooting, the organization was still standing a year later to protest with the New Haven community amid a pandemic. Tiegist Tay ’22 stood in the sea of socially distanced activists who filled the streets outside of the YPD. Articulate and confident, Tay spoke through a megaphone to the crowd, despite the fact that she, like many Yale students this summer, was new to organizing. As an international student from Kenya, she was uncertain about her position in the movement; moreover, she admitted to feeling only part of the Yale community, and not New Haven, in her previous years. She was nervous and felt she didn’t know how to approach New Haven organizers. But within moments of meeting them, Tay felt overwhelmingly safe and cared for. “It felt like I had six mothers...I found a community of black people that felt real and tangible to me, and it was the first time I had been a part of that since I left home.” said Tay. “When I joined Yale they [painted] New Haven as if any time I step out of Yale’s campus it’s some danger to me... but I have seen nothing but love and care and attention...I am sorry if for even a second I bought the racist and classist lies that were fed to me when I joined this institution“.” By listening to and learning from New Haven Community organizers, BSDY is setting a new precedent for organizing at Yale, one that centers the voices of dedicated organizers, recreates their spaces of love and care, and challenges Yale’s responsibility to their entire community. BSDY follows the lead of New Haven organizers and passes on the knowledge and language they have gained from entering “into community” with New Haven. Ala Ochumare, a co-founder of Black Lives Matter New Haven, and an organizer in New Haven since 2012, holds ideas of care and family at the center of her organizing. “I see in the African tradition, the diaspora of us and our culture, that, in our best instances, we move very familially.” Ochumare continued, “Community is made up of the people that I love and like and
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