My job (in the wake of George Floyd), part 1*

*On Monday, June 1, 2020, on the heels of a broad message from the leadership about the then recent events, I shared a more personal note with the faculty, staff, students, and board of trustees of UNC Asheville. The note below is that message. It was expanded a couple of weeks later. That second half can be found in part 2.

“And O my people they do not love your hands. Those they only use, tie, bind, chop off and leave empty. Love your hands! Love them. Raise them up and kiss them. Touch others with them, pat them together, stroke them on your face 'cause they don't love that either. You got to love it, you!”

Toni Morrison

from “Beloved”

One of my critically important responsibilities is to communicate appropriately and effectively to the university community in times of crisis. It is my job to cut through the morass to offer a well-reasoned pathway forward. In some moments, it means acknowledging pain and sorrow and anguish and, at the same time, offering something hopeful. Ideally, I would find the words that focus our community of teachers and scholars and learners on a productive and healing response. Ultimately, it is my role to help the university translate those words into meaningful, cogent action.

Having served as an academic leader for over a decade now, I think of myself as being well-practiced at this. It is a practice that has been put to the test since mid-March. But, that practice feels insufficient for today.

Recent events have been called a protest over the death of George Floyd. They are indeed that, but to limit what we are seeing to just Floyd would be like saying the Civil Rights Movement was solely about Emmet Till. When Mamie Till-Mobley made the decision to let the world see what had been done to her only son, she held a mirror up to the country; she bravely used her son’s murder to speak to a larger truth about being black in America. And as Tamika Mallory has shared, Floyd’s case is yet another reflective moment.

There is an assault woven into the fabric of the black experience in this country. Physical, mental, emotional, economic, spiritual, it is an ever-present accomplice to a racism that goes far beyond any single incident, racism that permeates our culture. Today’s reality is a direct descendant of Jim Crow, itself a product of the chattel slavery that is a foundation of this country, and both are deeply rooted in a much older history. It would be, as Carol Anderson and Eddie Glaude argued, a myth to think that these assaults have not been steady and relentless and barbaric throughout four centuries of colonial and American history.

Breonna Taylor. Botham Jean. Alton Sterling. Sandra Bland. Philando Castile. Tamir Rice. Eric Garner. Michael Brown. Sadly, these are just a handful of the individuals whose deaths in the last five years make this point. Since the Washington Post started tracking police shootings in 2015, there has been a consistent rate of approximately 1,000 deaths per year. Adjusting for population size, African Americans are killed at about 2½ times the rate of white people.

Ahmaud Arbery. Trayvon Martin. The six women and three men of Emmanuel AME Church. Racism is structural, baked into the way America sees, engages, polices, and treats black people. And it has been leading to murder and death long before we could easily record the incidents. The NAACP reports that there were over 4,700 documented lynchings between 1882 and 1968, nearly three quarters of them black.

Modern-day technology has given us new, disturbing, and important visibility into today’s version of these atrocities. I forced myself to watch the full video of George Floyd being murdered. After watching over five minutes of three men pressing the life out of a man pleading “I can’t breathe,” it was important, I thought, not to turn away for the three additional minutes a knee was kept pressed on the neck of Floyd’s clearly inert black body.

Floyd’s death is the latest in over 400 years of a white person exacting mortality over a black person in America—unjustly and inhumanely.

I can’t help but think about how little it takes for this to be my fate, the fate of my brothers, the fate of so many of my friends and their families, the fate of my sons. Those outraged over the recent encounter in Central Park have a deep understanding of how narrow these margins are for black people.

At eight years old, I along with two similarly-aged friends were thrown behind bars in an adult holding cell for jaywalking, heading to play at the neighborhood park. As I did my outdoor chores, I saw the police pull up and draw their guns on my father cutting the front shrubs, questioning why he was in his own yard. And there is the time my college roommate forgot to turn on his lights as we pulled out of the movie theater parking lot, got pulled over, and had one of the policeman approach the car with gun drawn.

For me, my sons, those in my circle of friends and family, and for just about any black person in America, life is a single wrong encounter away from being ended.

Over the last 50 years, over my lifetime, many have given their voices to this struggle. Fannie Lou Hamer and James Baldwin spoke to these issues in the 60s. Sadly, Richard Pryor’s jokes remain resonant with the current moment. And Angela Davis could be speaking to a reporter about the recent protests instead of the Watts Rebellion. “When someone asks me about violence,” she says, “I just find it incredible because what it means is that the person who is asking that question has absolutely no idea what black people have gone through, what black people have experienced in this country since the time the first black person was kidnapped from the shores of Africa.”

DuBois developed the language of the double consciousness; Baldwin noted that to be black and conscious in America is to live in a constant state of rage; and Maya Angelou extended Paul Laurence Dunbar’s We wear the Mask. Each was a way to speak to the constant inner struggle when this kind of assault is woven into your experience.

My own mask has been slipping away. Only one consciousness is coming through. And lately, it has felt like rage is all I have.

And this may be true for anyone—student, alum, faculty, staff, board member, friend of the University—who shares this double consciousness, who has been living with this ever-present fury long before Floyd. Each may want a different kind of response—leave me the heck alone; put me to work; let’s talk. All are possible. I have heard from folks in each category.

It will be critical for us to ensure that our institutions listen to and honor whichever response is needed. It will be especially important to meet folks where they are.

As provost, I must deliver on my responsibilities as an academic leader. My attention over the last few days has been singularly focused on one question—how I can make a meaningful contribution and help guide us toward real progress in this moment?

As my wife and I talked with our boys, one common thread has been the thoroughly inadequate job done by much of education in developing an honest understanding of the role of race in our society and the impact of the near ubiquity of racism. The Southern Poverty Law Center reported that “schools are failing to teach the hard history of African enslavement.” One of my sons noted that his economic history course focusing on colonial America sequestered slavery into one week of a fifteen week course. And the Equal Justice Initiative notes that “we are haunted by our history of racial injustice in America because we don’t talk about it.” Achieving justice, they argue, “starts with learning and sharing the truth about our past.”

My mention of Till, Hamer, Baldwin, Dunbar, Angelou, Davis, and DuBois is deliberate. My links to Mallory, Anderson, Glaude, Washington Post, NAACP, SPLC and EJI are intentional. This is, of course, a tremendously abbreviated list, but the point is that there are many whose ideas we can study and those from whom we can learn.

There is absolutely no question that there is an educational failure that contributes to the persistence of racism. Higher education needs to seize this moment to pay special attention to how we engage racism and the inhumanities levied against men and women. It is vital that we think strategically, plan carefully, and invest in curricula that ensure that the students in our institutions graduate with a deep understanding of the ways power, race, authority, and privilege intersect—now, but just as importantly, over time.

This is work that will be made harder by our current climate of operating in a pandemic. It will be challenged by those who don’t understand why this is necessary. It will be difficult for those like me who are still raw with emotion and not yet fully in the “put me to work; let’s talk” camp. And it will require extending the work to include gender, class, sexuality, and more. But, it is necessary work. It is essential.

There is much more to be said, and even more to be done. But, this is all that I can offer right now.

My mask is off, in solidarity with all those genuinely protesting.

**

Cover art: "Say their names" by Kadir Nelson.