Our Hat in the Ring of UMass Boston Anti-Racism Grants

Bound for a smashing success at smashing the cis-hetero-white patriarchy

https://hikingartist.com/bird-cutting-the-branch-its-sitting-on-illustration-by-frits-ahlefeldt/

In a rare consensus, UMass Boston’s Faculty Staff Union Comrades (FSU) and the University’s Supreme Leaders agreed to jointly fund numerous anti-racist grants. Here is the call:

[E]ncourage(s) faculty/librarians to think about anti-racism initiatives in broad and innovative ways.

The Flickering Beacon team was excited. We do want to make the university an academically stronger, more rigorous, sorry… much more important - equitable and anti-racist place. We came up with three promising proposals, and they are bound to win the hearts of our Comrades and Leaders.

1. “The best thing I can ever be is to be OK with me!” - an innovative culturally sustaining counterspace designed to advance STEM persistence among womXn from BlXck, LatinX, IndigXnous, and AsiXn ethnic communities using a holistic multigenerational mentorship framework. Here, Womxn of colxr, currently enrolled in STEM academic majors at UMass Boston, are surrounded by an oasis of diverse, talented, multi-disciplinary scholars committed to affirming each other’s belongingness to STEM while honoring and uplifting their intersecting identities and giving out colorful stickers and scented candles. Scholars enrolled in the Initiative will participate in an array of activities, including: 1) STEM Equity seminars 2) Empowerment Forums and 3) Sistah Circles where scholars participate in bi-monthly support spaces designed for ‘real talk'. We will focus on how numbers make you feel, whether some numbers are “odd” or just different, and leave the “problem solving” to the hetero-cisnormative patriarchy and its toxic ways.¹

2. Saw off the branch we sit on: We propose an innovative approach to dismantle and abolish the university as it is. Agents of the US empire, universities perpetuate the carceral operations and logics of the state that criminalize and decimate Indigenous, Black, and Brown communities on campus, across the United States, and around the world. Will we need universities in the world with no prisons and no police, no nation-states and no extractive industries, no homelessness and no food insecurity? Will formal education persist as a socially elevated form of learning? Will the hierarchical separation of students, teachers, and workers disappear as we organize ourselves in alternate ways? Will learning remain confined to the humanist conception that “center[s] the human subject as the one who is educated and learns”? While we hope the answer is no, We are not certain these answers are yet fully knowable, but as we always do - we first destroy and then we’ll figure out somehow how to rebuild a world free of the modernist, colonial, capitalist, statist, white-supremacist, hetero-patriarchal norms. How exactly? Dunno. Give us the money and we’ll destroy you in order to find out. ²

3. Hush now baby, don’t you cry: The moral philosopher John Rawls defined an equitable society as (roughly) one whose members would not mind being reborn as a random other member. We take this Gedankenexperiment a step further by proposing that the quickest way to reduce inequity would be to randomly permute each year’s crop of babies, thereby harnessing the full power of a natural phenomenon, spontaneous adoptive-parental love, to counteract one of civilization’s most dangerous dysfunctions. ³

As Mark Twain said, in Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World,

Truth is stranger than fiction, but it’s because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; truth isn’t.

Never gets old.

1. Shockingly, this is almost a direct quotation, (mostly) not a parody. See here. Needless to say - Ladies, be more like Lisa Simpson.

2. This is not a parody either. See here.

3. You guessed it: this is a direct quotation as well, …but not from Karl Marx, …rather from the American Physical Society News, published four months ago.