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Say what? Students of Color Conference is ‘rooted in anti-blackness’

If you’ve ever tried to successfully navigate the maze of racial political correctness, you might want to consider the very latest bullet point.

You see, every year since 1968, the University of California Students Association and a particular UC campus has hosted the Students of Color Conference (SOCC) — which is “designed to provide a safe space for students of color to strategize statewide and campus-based actions while educating students on relevant issues faced by and within communities of color.”

However, according to the UC Santa Barbara’s Alexandra Gessesse, these goals are “consistently thwarted by anti-blackness and color-blind discourses” in conference workshops.

The term “students of color” itself, she says, is “rooted in anti-blackness.”

Come again?

Gessesse explains:

[“Students of color”] allows non-black students of color a proximity to black issues while simultaneously side-stepping their convenient positionalities in a racial hierarchy that places blacks at its foundation.

“Students of color” as a term that feigns solidarity provides non-Black students of color the ecstasy of the revolution without facing the ignorance, dismissal, degradation, exhaustion, and violence of revolutionary work, nor bearing the brunt of its political consequences.

Ah, yes … the “convenient positionalities.” How could one forget?

Anti-blackness isn’t just confined to the SOCC, Gessesse says — it’s a UC system-wide phenomenon. The system’s theme of multiculturalism “invizibilizes [sic] whiteness, and takes credit for and celebrates its anti-discriminatory progressions.”

To help combat the pervasive negativity towards those of dark hue, the men’s and women’s caucuses at the latest SOCC came up with — you guessed it — several demands of the UC Students Association. They include:

–SOCC should create space in all community spaces for the centering of vulnerable people within their community and antiBlack nature/origins of the racism that permeates communities of color (i.e politics of colorism, problem minority, criminalized migrant, etc.) because Blackness is not only universal but fundamental, and because the deconstruction of anti-blackness is absolutely necessary before we can even begin talking about building coalition and solidarity amongst people of color.

–The conference expenditures should immensely downsize and be rerouted into compensating workshop and caucus facilitators who are equipped to guide folks through the complexities and nuances of the interconnected oppressions of marginalized communities and their antiBlack, capitalist, and colonially imposed states because education on anti-Blackness should not be necessary in 2018, especially in a space like SOCC designed to promote and strengthen interracial solidarity amongst students of color. Rather facilitators should be compensated monetarily for their emotional and educational labor. …

–The UC system should generate a UC-wide Common Book, a compilation of essays, articles, book chapters and excerpts written by radical Black scholars like Angela Davis, Saidiya Hartman and Robin DG Kelley (with their consent), and furthermore promote its readership in every UC for the 2018-2019 school year. This book will be organized in collaboration with UC African-American/Black studies departments.

There are five more, and Ms. Gessesse wants you know that they are not “isolated nor irrational in nature.”

“To be black in the world is to live in a state of constant emergency,” she says. Any inaction on the part of SOCC non-black members and the UC Students Association “is complicity, [and] that complicity is violence, and that violence is the world.”

Read more.

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About the Author
Associate Editor
Dave has been writing about education, politics, and entertainment for over 20 years, including a stint at the popular media bias site Newsbusters. He is a retired educator with over 25 years of service and is a member of the National Association of Scholars. Dave holds undergraduate and graduate degrees from the University of Delaware.