We Been Knew: Black Student Activists Respond
What the past month has proven is what Black students at UNC-Chapel Hill already knew: this University does not care about you. Yet for us, it didn’t take jarring headlines and a pandemic to understand the “clusterfuck” that is Carolina. We’ve been living through it, experiencing it from day one.
“Last year, I remember looking in some GroupMe chats and then someone's like, ‘Join the anti-racist text alert chain,’” said sophomore Deborah Uzokwe. “I saw the notification and I said, ‘Why are neo-confederates toting guns on Franklin Street?’ First day out, and I already have to worry about this shit? Great.”
There was no Twitter uproar when your Black classmates were hiding in their dorms on South as neo-nazis populated North campus, or when we were getting pepper-sprayed, body-slammed or followed by campus police. When members of white supremacist group ACTBAC visited UNC 10 days ago, on the anniversary of Silent Sam’s falling, it was merely business as usual.
UNC’s gross mishandling of COVID-19 elicited a rude awakening for many, but it has only further revealed how normalized Black trauma is at Carolina — and how desensitized the non-Black community is to our pain.
left to right: Tamiya Troy ‘21, UNC alumna Tamia Sanders ‘20, Deborah Uzokwe ‘23, and Julia Clark ‘23
“Black people have always been ignored as far as their issues and their problems. With [the University] deciding to not include Rams in their meal plan...or the fact that they put both quarantine dorms on South campus, where it's predominantly Black, these decisions that they make almost always impact Black students the most,” said Uzokwe, Black Congress’ political education chair.
Despite never seeing its presence on campus, Black Congress taught Uzokwe about the legacy of Silent Sam and institutional anti-Blackness that administration hopes we forget every four years. Black Congress organizer and class of 2020 alumna Tamia Sanders remembers a painful first year at Carolina.
The Durham native said, “In 2016, I landed on campus, and from the very beginning, I was met with and exposed to extreme amounts of violence inflicted upon women, Black women specifically. When people normally get here, they learn about different organizations. We [Black women] do too, but we also learn about the pain, violence, and how much UNC endangers students.”
Black students can recall the University’s lackluster response to the student-led die-in after the murder of Keith Lamont Scott in Charlotte. We can recall the attacks on the UNC Center for Civil Rights. We can recall the attempt to move Silent Sam to South campus, which led us to protest in the middle of exam season. We can recall the anti-abortion group that visited campus and compared abortions to lynchings, showing graphic images of mutilated Black bodies on the quad. Can you?
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Created by “Black people for Black liberation,” Black Congress has been one of few collectives leading the way since fall 2016. With new, emerging voices on social media, it’s difficult to sift through performative, clout-chasing displays of concern from non-Black individuals and questionable groups, such as the former @demands4unc on Instagram.
“Organizing and ‘activism’ work is consumed in a way that’s parasitic, to the point where somehow that work is aestheticized, so not in a way that we would love to have people become inspired,” Sanders said.
Historically, campus activism has been led by Black women and Black LGBTQIA+ folk. This is not a fad for Black students. Our summers, which should be spent resting, have been marred by grief, unnecessary virtual meetings about racism, and marching in nightly demonstrations in the streets, while our non-Black peers sit at home tweeting and reposting Canva-made infographics at their convenience.
“With everything happening at UNC and racial tension around the country, we’ve seen an increase in white students deciding to create petitions and list demands to the University. That’s cute and all, but who told you this is what we wanted? Did you even read any history about what has happened? It really shows a white savior complex,” said the Black Student Movement’s President Tamiya Troy.
In March, BSM Vice President Julia Clark returned home to Washington D.C. and immediately became involved with the Black Lives Matter Movement there, enduring death threats online.
Clark said, “My summer was filled with brutalization by police departments and white supremacists. At the same time, I had to advocate for Black voices on our campus, calling for [UNC] to give us the things Black students have been asking for to have a safe experience, which we have never been given. This includes mental health resources, finding out the university's process for paying the housekeeping staff and keeping them safe, and how they were going to let students back on campus.”
Her father, UNC alumnus Keith Clark ‘88, was a prominent activist on campus during the anti-apartheid protests at Carolina. Little did his daughter know that decades later, she would be fighting some of the same issues her father was in the 1980s.
At a university that claims to be an inclusive environment and to advocate for all students, the institution’s cognitive dissonance is glaringly evident through its mistreatment of Black students. 19-year-old Clark said that we've dealt with this for so long that it's expected.
“The relationship between UNC and Black students is exemplary of a toxic relationship. Many Black students have positive experiences at UNC, but the experiences aren't ones formed by UNC,” sophomore Clark said. “The only thing the University has been able to do for Black students is hurt us, traumatize us, put us as secondary, and never listen to us, while putting us on diversity posters and we give them our intellect, money, and time.”
Throughout the summer, Clark and Troy were brought into several meetings with administration regarding the “roadmap,” police presence during move-in, and more. Troy knew the University wasn’t listening.
Troy said, “They made their minds up, and they were really fixated on getting their money regardless of the timeline. In the past three months, I had 20+ meetings, not including the ones that I was invited to and declined. At a certain point, you really do have to say no, I’m not going to continue not only doing free labor but putting myself in a position where I’m basically wasting my breath.”
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Between the jokes and the memes, there is this false notion that UNC is suddenly “so embarrassing” and “humiliating” when the University has always been this way. Its dogged refusal to listen to students’ voices, specifically Black students’ voices, is not novel to us.
On campus and at large, there’s a level of neoliberal respectability and proximity to whiteness that one must have in order to be heard.
“UNC has always been a clusterfuck, and will always be a clusterfuck. This is something that Black students, activists, & journalists have been saying for decades, but it's much easier for people to accept this reality when it comes from a non-Black or white voice. In the past, when UNC has made negative decisions that specifically affect and are detrimental to Black students, this wording has never been used by [the Daily Tar Heel],” Clark said.
The Daily Tar Heel, UNC’s predominantly white flagship publication, has a contentious history with Black students and Black student organizations. Tamia Sanders describes their relationship with Black Congress as “extremely violent, intrusive and inappropriate.”
“They leverage the fact that they have a big platform and people will hear what they have to say, and they say, ‘We’re going to write it anyway even if we don’t get your word in,’” Sanders said. “We have been in the lowest of lows as far as emotional wellness and grieving Black people, and they will force an interview out of us in such a manipulative gross way.”
For Uzokwe, Sanders, Troy and Clark, it’s unsurprising seeing how this unfolded over one word instead of it being over the issues that students presented from the beginning. For Black students overall, UNC’s disregard for our emotional wellness, our safety, and access to resources took place long before COVID-19.
Black students have been fighting Carolina’s negligence for ages, and we were doomed from the start. So if you’re privileged enough to experience the proverbial veil ripping that many of us were never afforded to begin with, welcome to the club.