Black Alumni at Yale Weigh In With Major List of Demands
Among the more dispiriting responses to the wave of protests around racism on campus is the claim that this unrest, particularly at Yale, is the work of privileged and pampered campus crybabies. Now I cede to no one in my contempt for Yale. But I think that criticism is unfair. As I’ve pointed out a number of times, if we want to turn every conflict over social justice into the Oppression Olympics, where you can’t talk about one case of injustice until you’ve talked about every other case of worse injustice, no one in the United States is going to deserve anything. You can always find someone who is worse off and more deserving; by that definition, most people around the globe are privileged. I suppose I’m also sensitive to this charge because I heard it so often when we were organizing at Yale: you’re at Yale, you’re privileged, you don’t need a union. I hate to see students of color subjected to the same dismissive brushoff.
All the more reason that people should pay attention to this list of demands just released by a group of black alumni from Yale. Contrary to a lot of the reporting on the problems at Yale, it focuses on the real material factors that make that institution so inhospitable to people of color. The phrase “structural racism” is often tossed around without much definition; these proposals give definition and substance to it.
The proposals are all important, but four in particular deserve emphasis.
Here’s the first:
Implement and complete the $50 million diversity initiative within three years with student and alumni of color oversight. The current plan further casualizes academic labor by proposing to hire “as many as ten visiting professors each year,” funneling people of color into temporary, unstable positions and in so doing undermining the stated commitment to diversity. Instead, Yale should hire permanent tenured and tenure-track faculty of color across the University in areas that contribute to interdisciplinary understandings of racial inequality and take real measures, with faculty input, to retain professors currently in their employ.
I hadn’t realized that so much of Yale’s diversity initiative was dedicated to contingent positions. This proposal refocuses us on where we need to pay attention: the tenure-stream.
Here are the second and third:
As per the calls of the Black and Latino caucus of the New Haven Board of Alders, prioritize New Haven residents, especially those from Black and Latino neighborhoods, in hiring for all University staff positions. Create real measures for advancement in these positions rather than the racialized job compression and segregation that exists currently.
Retain the stable, union jobs that currently exist in order to preserve the rights of women of color at Yale who are concentrated in clinical positions.
Discussions around campus racism too often leave out university staff. Campuses aren’t just students and faculty; they’re also workers. I’m really glad this one brings those workers—and unions—back into the conversation. Yale is New Haven’s largest employer. Its hiring and promotion decisions have a huge effect on people of color in that city.
Here’s the last:
In recognition of the fact that precarity in graduate teaching and research disproportionately impacts people of color, recognize the Graduate Employees and Student’s Organization (GESO)—who have demonstrated a majority of graduate student support—and negotiate a contract in good faith for graduate teaching assistants and researchers.
For obvious reasons. But one of them is that some of the signatories to the statement include friends and comrades from GESO days like Michelle Stephens, Prudence Cumberbatch (who now teaches with me at Brooklyn College), Cynthia Young, Lori Brooks, and Leigh Raiford.
I hope these demands move us beyond the free speech v. racism debate, and get us talking about institutional reforms that could have a measurable effect on people’s lives at Yale, New Haven, and beyond.