LIBERATE

Some Black Lives Matter
On my worst days here, the black community has been a source of joy and rejuvenation
that has kept me sane in a fast-paced, emotionally draining environment.
And on my best days, my black peers have celebrated me and loved me in ways
that I am not even able to account for. At a predominantly white institution where
blackness has been under threat from racist institutional violence and quotidian
microaggressions since our forebears set foot on this campus in 1963, our excellence
and happiness have always been our greatest offences against racist histories
and realities that are constantly working to displace us.
And yet it would be a lie for us to posit that the only threat to black life on this
campus exists as a result of white racism; it would be facetious for us to say
“Black lives matter” in opposition to racism, and not repeat the same for black
women and black queer, trans, poor, and disabled people in opposition to the cisheterosexism,
classism, and abelism that pervades this black community. And yet
we do not say the latter nearly as much as the former.
In the spring of 2016, the Chronicle published a statistical report on sexual violence,
which reported that 42% of black women on campus had been the victims
of some sort of sexual violence. In the aftermath of that release, I expected there
to be a wave of indignant outrage within our community. Faced with the evidence
that so many of our fellow black woman peers had been violated, I was waiting for
our community leaders to mobilize - to be angry. Instead, only a handful of women
made their outrage known in both online and physical spaces, and when I brought
up the statistics with one black man he simply replied, “don’t you know that women
will cry rape when a man so much as hugs them?”