POSTED BY MARTIN KICH
A week-long series of events from Juneteenth, Friday, June 19, to Thursday, June 25, 2020
A weeklong personal and professional development initiative for academics to honor the toll of racial trauma on Black people, resist anti-Blackness and white supremacy, and facilitate accountability and collective action.
Academics for Black Survival and Wellness was organized by a group of Black counseling psychologists and their colleagues who practice Black allyship. Guided by a Black feminist frame, we hope to foster accountability and growth for non-Black people and enhance healing and wellness for Black people.
Profiles of the faculty involved in this effort are available on the website.
Academics cannot stay silent about anti-Black racism. Academics cannot remain silent in the face of racial injustice. Everyone needs to do their part.
#Academics4BlackLives
Goals and Objectives
(1) Deepen your understanding of the history and deep-rooted nature of anti-Black racism in the U.S.
Every current disparity and statistic you see about Black people has a historical root. Those roots extend deep into our current systems, which maintain and perpetuate outcomes that act as barriers to Black wellness. We will offer opportunities for you to better understand them.
(2) Understand your personal relationship to white supremacy and anti-Black racism.
All academics in the U.S. are socialized in white supremacy. Because of this socialization, it is imperative you can recognize and lean into the psychological resistance that comes up as it relates to understanding and engaging in work related to anti-Black racism and white supremacy. We will provide material for reflection to help you understand these processes and how you may contribute to or perpetuate them.
(3) Reflect on the personal impact you have on the Black people in your immediate environmental context.
It is important to pause and center your attention on your relationships with Black people. We will provide an organizing framework for you to consider these relationships and how to be increasingly accountable within them.
(4) Develop a personalized plan to enhance the safety and wellness of Black students, staff, faculty, alums, and community members through your academic roles.
Exploring your academic roles, your academic skills, and your preparedness to address anti-Black racism using your unique skills is a key task for an academic seeking to facilitate Black wellness. We will encourage reflection and strategic planning to help you consider and develop a plan of action.
(5) Take action that includes time, energy, financial resources, and accountability until Black liberation is realized.
The group’s website includes links to ways to support Black activists and organizations, to take action and be a force for good, and to educate yourself and others with anti-racist resources.
It also includes a call to action petition.
This is why many parents aren’t sending their students back to campus. The AAUP itself perhaps said it best:
“Colleges and universities are disciplinary, not political, institutions. They exist to serve the common good in the production and distribution of expert knowledge, as well as in the pedagogical inculcation of a mature independence of mind. Research and teaching are sites of critical thinking. AAUP 2019 statement, ‘In Defense of Knowledge and Higher Education’
Judge Robert Bork from the University of Chicago went a bit deeper:
“A culture that is at once moralistic, self-righteous, alienated and in a minority will constantly be tempted to break the rules of political discourse—indeed to conduct its struggles in ways that preclude the use of the word “discourse” —and to gain its ends by deception or outright falsehood.
If they do not fully understand the extent to which the “life of the intellect” has become political rather than intellectual, many Americans do have a sense that something has gone very wrong in education.”
—Robert Bork (AB ’48, JD ’53), The Tempting of America: The Political Seduction of the Law
Regards, ’96, The University of Chicago; ’84, The University of Texas at Austin; ’83 Yale University
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