Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?

by Beverly Daniel Tatum

  On October 21, ten days after the homecoming incident, Concerned Student 1950 issued a statement of eight demands, including enforcement of mandatory campus-wide racial awareness training, increased hiring of Black faculty and staff, an increase in mental health support with counselors of color, and more staff for social-justice centers on campus. Among the demands was a call for a formal apology from President Wolfe for his lack of responsiveness to the students and a call for his removal from office. Just a few days later, a swastika made from human feces was found on a bathroom wall in a residence hall. The vandalism, recognized on campus as an “act of hate,” added to the sense of urgency for campus leadership to respond. On October 27, representatives of Concerned Student 1950 met with Wolfe, but without resolution. On November 2, Jonathan Butler, one of the founders of Concerned Student 1950 and a graduate student at Mizzou, announced that he would go on a hunger strike until President Wolfe was removed. That evening student activists set up an encampment on the campus quadrangle in support of Butler’s hunger strike, announcing their intention to stay until the end of the semester, if necessary. More students and faculty began to rally around the protesters and their call for Wolfe’s removal.123 A Mizzou sociology professor, Scott Brooks, said, “It’s been a long boil. Students felt like they weren’t being heard and the university wasn’t taking them seriously. And in a post-Ferguson world, increasingly the students felt the mantra of ‘all deliberate speed.’”124

  In an unprecedented turn of events, the Mizzou football team asked to meet with Jonathan Butler to better understand why he was on his hunger strike. He shared with them his undergrad experiences with racial harassment going back to 2008, and his frustration that years later “nothing has changed.” By the time the meeting ended, the football players were on board with the protest. Though only 60 of the 124 players were Black, the entire team took action as a collective. With the support of their coach, on Sunday, November 8, they announced, “We will no longer participate in any football related activities until President Tim Wolfe resigns or is removed due to his negligence toward marginalized students’ experiences.” On Monday morning, in an emergency meeting of the University of Missouri System Board of Curators, Tim Wolfe resigned as president of the University of Missouri System. Later the same day, Chancellor R. Bowen Loftin also resigned, and Jonathan Butler ended his hunger strike.125

  To observers of higher education, the speed with which the events at Mizzou, culminating in the resignation of the two top campus leaders, unfolded was breathtaking, as was the wave of activism that swept across other campuses in solidarity with Concerned Student 1950 and in protest of their own campus concerns about racism and other social-justice issues. Again, social media played a critical role. “A protest on a single college campus can go viral within minutes. Shared photos of a particularly powerful demonstration might embolden others to take similar stands.”126 Indeed, a new website, TheDemands.org, was created to compile the growing list of institutions where student demands had been made, along with links to the demands on each campus, providing templates for student leaders at other institutions as they drafted their own demands. The website creators declared on the home page of the website, “Across the nation, students have risen up to demand an end to systemic and structural racism on campus.”127 As of December 8, 2015, student demands had been posted for eighty colleges and universities (including three in Canada)—ranging from small private liberal arts colleges like Amherst, Ithaca, Grinnell, and Wesleyan, to Ivy League universities like Harvard, Yale, and Dartmouth, to large flagship public universities like the University of California, Berkeley, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Alabama.

  In an analysis of what students were demanding, researchers from the American Council on Education (ACE) found considerable commonality, identifying seven major themes. Most of the lists (91 percent) called for changes in institutional policies and practices affecting campus climate and diversity; 89 percent called on campus presidents to take specific actions, such as acknowledging institutional histories of racism, and demonstrate their leadership on behalf of marginalized students; 88 percent emphasized the need for greater allocation of resources (e.g., staff, programming, facilities) for the support of marginalized students; 86 percent demanded increases in diversity among faculty, staff, and students; 71 percent called for new or improved diversity training for all campus constituents (faculty, staff, students, administrators, campus police); 68 percent called for revising the curriculum to include more diverse perspectives and requiring students to take such courses; and 61 percent petitioned for increasing support services, including mental health support, for marginalized students. The researchers conclude, “These students are petitioning institutions to consider expansive shifts to institutional culture rather than merely stand-alone programs or add-on policies. The demands are calling for a change in how marginalized student groups access, experience, and are represented in higher education.”128

  Just days before his resignation, Tim Wolfe issued this statement: “I regret my reaction at the MU homecoming parade when the Concerned Student 1950 group approached my car. I am sorry and my apology is long overdue. My behavior seemed like I did not care. That was not my intention. I was caught off guard in that moment. Nonetheless, had I gotten out of the car to acknowledge the students and talk with them perhaps we wouldn’t be where we are today.”129 His words are a cautionary tale for current campus leaders. Indeed, in a January 2016 anonymous online survey of college presidents conducted by the ACE Center for Policy Research and Strategy, of the 567 presidents who responded, nearly half said that students on their campuses had organized around concerns about racial diversity, the vast majority (86 percent of those leading four-year campuses) had met with student organizers more than once, and the majority (55 percent) indicated that addressing racial climate on campus had become a higher priority for them compared to three years ago.130

  Not everyone is sympathetic to the cause of the student protesters at Mizzou and elsewhere. The pushback has come from all corners—from fellow students, from faculty, from administrators, from alumni, from trustees, from state legislators—people who say the students are “overreacting,” “whining,” “need to get over it,” are “making things up,” that “being the only Black person in the room is no big deal.”131 Often, though not always, those critics are White. Failure to empathize with the outrage of Ferguson protesters in the streets or the sense of isolation or threat students of color report around the country may be due in large part to the racially insulated lives many White people lead, the result of persistent school and residential segregation. According to a 2013 American Values Survey conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), the social networks of White people in the United States are very homogeneous. Indeed, the PRRI researchers found that 75 percent of Whites have entirely White social networks, without any minority presence. This degree of social-network racial homogeneity is significantly higher than among Black Americans (65 percent) or Hispanic Americans (46 percent). Robert P. Jones, the CEO of PRRI, writes, “The chief obstacle to having an intelligent, or even intelligible, conversation across the racial divide is that on average white Americans… talk mostly to other white people.” The result is that most Whites are not “socially positioned” to understand the experiences of people of color—with the police or on predominantly White campuses—because they are not part of their social networks.132

  Marcia Chatelain, class of 2001 alumna of Mizzou and now tenured professor at Georgetown University, tried to explain to those who might not know firsthand what the visceral experience of being marginalized at a school like Mizzou was like in her Chronicle of Higher Education essay “What Mizzou Taught Me.” She writes, “I adored my time at Mizzou—my instructors, my friends, my experiences, all treasures that I find any excuse to talk about. But there was a lot of fear during those years.” On entering as a first-year student in the fall of 1997, she says,

  The fear set in later, when
I became a part of a student movement that focused on holding the administration accountable for a rash of hate crimes on campus, the lack of resources for LGBTQ students, and a chilling climate for students who often existed at the margins of campus culture. This was before Twitter, GroupMe, Instagram. We printed T-shirts with the logo INCLUSION NOW! We passed out leaflets. We wore armbands. We disrupted a Board of Curators meeting. We wrote editorials in the school newspaper. We published a report on all the insulting graffiti on campus and first-hand accounts of bias. We felt we were slowly changing the campus climate.

  Conjuring up those memories makes my stomach churn. We student activists received threatening letters in our mailboxes and, in the days of landlines, strange phone calls to our apartments. E-mail, still a novelty, delivered messages about who needed to shut up and die.

  Pranks or promises? You never knew. Will someone follow me into a parking garage? Will I meet the authors of the strange letter I found at my doorstep in a dark corner of the library or an unattended bathroom? Will the man in the truck yelling “nigger” at us drive off—or will he hit the brakes, pull over, and teach us a lesson?

  You sink into a hypervigilance that some read as paranoia. But the humiliation and fear become part of you. Every cell of your 19-year-old body holds the anxiety of the moments when you are put in your place because you dared to come into someone else’s home and thought you could make it yours, too.…

  When critics mock students for wanting safe spaces, they often argue that political correctness is undermining education and that students today are “too sensitive.” Rarely do I ever hear any curiosity about what students are seeking shelter from; when my friends and I peered around the corners of our sprawling campus, dissenting opinions were the least of our worries.133

  Not Just a Black Matter

  Perhaps because so much of the national media attention has been on the lethal encounters between Black people and police, especially since Ferguson, the national conversation about race, to the extent that it has occurred, has been focused on anti-Black racism, and the same has been true of many campus protests, where Black students, inspired by Ferguson, have been taking the lead. However, it is important to recognize that lethal police violence is not just a problem for Black communities. In fact, a special investigative report by Stephanie Woodward for In These Times highlights two aspects of the problem for Native Americans in the US. The first is the high rate of police shootings per capita in Native communities. The second is the invisibility of the problem in the mainstream media.

  Citing a Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice analysis of data collected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Woodward reports that “when compared to their percentage of the U.S. population, Natives were more likely to be killed by police than any other group, including African Americans.… Analysis of CDC data from 1999 to 2014 shows that Native Americans are 3.1 times more likely to be killed by police than white Americans.”134 Yet there is very little news coverage when the victim is an Indian. In a study by Claremont Graduate University researchers Roger Chin, Jean Schroedel, and Lily Rowen in which they reviewed articles about lethal police shootings published between May 1, 2014, and October 31, 2015, in the top ten US newspapers, they found that while there were hundreds of articles about 413 African Americans killed by police during that period, there was virtually no coverage of the 29 Native men and women killed during that same period. Of the twenty-nine, only one, Paul Castaway, a Rosebud Sioux man shot dead in Denver while threatening suicide, received sustained coverage (six articles) in the Denver Post. Though they were not critical of the news coverage regarding Black lives, the Claremont researchers concluded that the disparity in media coverage highlights the fact that issues of racial discrimination in the United States are typically framed in terms of Black-White race relations, while the experiences of other groups of color are overlooked. Yet there are particular parallels between the contemporary experiences of Native peoples and African Americans, as is discussed in the In These Times report:

  Federal investigations have found that on the borders of reservations, Native Americans are treated as second-class citizens by police and public agencies in ways that echo the experience of black Americans in towns like Ferguson.… Over the past 40 years, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights (USCCR), an independent government agency, has held numerous hearings on discrimination in border towns surrounding reservations.… In South Dakota, the commission heard testimony about a police department that found reasons to fine Natives hundreds of dollars, then “allowed” them to work off the debt on a ranch. USCCR Rocky Mountain director Malee Craft described the situation as “slave labor.” 135

  Inspired by the Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests, a grassroots Native Lives Matter (NLM) movement was started in late 2014 by Lakota People’s Law Project attorney Chase Iron Eyes to bring attention not only to the deaths but to other issues affecting Native Americans, such as child welfare and incarceration disparities.136 Just as BLM spread through social media, so too is the use of the Native Lives Matter slogan expanding across indigenous communities, becoming an umbrella term for advocacy for environmental and social causes.137

  In the same way that the problem of police violence extends beyond African Americans to other marginalized populations of color, so too does the problem of isolation and marginalization on historically White campuses extend beyond Black students to other underrepresented students. Indeed, while 13 percent of the student-demand statements found on TheDemands.org focus specifically on the concerns of Black students, over half have a more general focus on campus diversity, broadly defined.138 For example, the Amherst College student demands begin in this wide-ranging way:

  President Martin must issue a statement of apology to students, alumni and former students, faculty, administration and staff who have been victims of several injustices including but not limited to our institutional legacy of white supremacy, colonialism, anti-black racism, anti-Latin@ racism, anti-Native American racism, anti-Native/indigenous racism, anti-Asian racism, anti-Middle Eastern racism, heterosexism, cis-sexism, xenophobia, anti-Semitism, ableism, mental health stigma, and classism. Also include that marginalized communities and their allies should feel safe at Amherst College.139

  The submission of the Amherst demands was the spontaneous outcome of a sit-in at the campus library that drew a diverse crowd—hundreds of students as well as faculty, staff, and administrators—on the afternoon of November 12, 2015. Originally conceived to show support for student protesters at Mizzou and elsewhere, the focus of the sit-in shifted when someone said, “Let’s not pretend that the things that happen here at Amherst College aren’t similar to the things that are happening in other places,” opening the door for conversation about how people at Amherst treat each other, about things that happen in classrooms, in residence halls, and in lots of other places on campus.140

  Reflecting on what happened in the library that day, the chair of the Amherst College Board of Trustees and member of the class of 1974, Cullen Murphy, writes:

  Students talked about their lives at Amherst but also their lives before and outside of Amherst. They said out loud what they had perhaps never said before, or had said individually to one another or to trusted advisers but not in such a large setting. They talked about the relatively small number of faces like theirs among the ranks of faculty and staff. About feeling excluded at social events. About distinctions of class that are all too visible when seen from one side but may be given little thought by those on the other. About casual remarks and behaviors that cause anger and pain, and whose residue inexorably accumulates. About the widespread ignorance of the path that many students of color travel as they make their way to Amherst. About legacies of personal history that other students can scarcely imagine and could never infer. About the exhaustion sometimes involved in juggling college life and family needs at home. About the utter disorientation that may occur when arriving at an idyllic spot with alien folkw
ays that others take for granted. About having few people to talk with about any of this, and classmates who may be unaware that these issues loom as large as they do.141

  That afternoon, after several hours of both speaking intensely and listening intensely, a group of student representatives from fifty-four different affinity groups, clubs, and other student organizations gathered to create their list of immediate demands in anticipation of presenting them to the president later that evening, giving themselves the name Amherst Uprising.142 When the sit-in began, President Biddy Martin was away on college business, about to embark on an international flight. Learning of the campus protest, she canceled her trip and returned to campus to meet with the students in the library that night. She listened as the students read their demands and promised a timely response, which she provided that Sunday afternoon, sending an e-mail to the campus community as well as speaking directly to the students still engaged in the library sit-in.143

  President Martin’s response provides a useful counterpoint to what happened at Mizzou. She began by acknowledging the students’ pain, letting them know that they had been heard. She wrote, “Over the course of several days, a significant number of students have spoken eloquently and movingly about their experiences of racism and prejudice on and off campus. The depth and intensity of their pain and exhaustion are evident. That pain is real. Their expressions of loneliness and sense of invisibility is heartrending. No attempt to minimize or trivialize those feelings will be convincing to those of us who have listened.… What we have heard requires a concerted, rigorous, and sustained response.”