Shame
I know shame well. As quotidian as the rise and fall of my breath, it inveigled itself into my reflection and I carried it in my step. To be a mixed-race child of the diaspora, a body conquered and policed by misogynoir and otherness, is to be student of shame. I know it and yet, the term cannot encompass how I feel about Syracuse University.
Official university communication provides an inaccurate account of the deeply white supremacist legacies that inform the recent racist, anti-black and anti- Semitic incidents, that we know of, on our campus. I say our campus, but is it? How can this inaccessible campus, built on stolen Onondaga land, sectioned off from the cash poor Black and Brown communities of this city, belong to any of us?
When Chancellor Syverud (and his administration) promise change and accountability – should this not begin at the start of this university’s history? Mustn’t transparency begin with a return to Syracuse’s origins and practices since? How can we move forward when university communications name everything but Syracuse’s racist and colonial past, present and foreseeable futures?
For those of us on the margins, these classrooms break our will, render us silent, and teach us to carry shame alongside multiple identities that begin with socio-political dehumanization. But this shame that I’ve been taught to hold within this diasporic Black body bears no resemblance to the disgust and contempt for this administration’s performance of care.
These multiple tragedies are continuations from the structural inequalities that keep Syracuse University operating – the colonial foundations of an institution ‘atop a hill’ and the racist practices that emerged as hate crimes of black face, microaggressions, macroaggressions, intimidations, and the cruel pleasure derived from feeding underserved students false truths of not belonging in this intellectual community.
This feeling coating my tongue is a deep disgust and embarrassment for being enrolled on this campus. Accountability does not include empty platitudes of solidarity, police bulletins proclaiming protection for racialized bodies, or puppeteering people of color as willful safeguards (and unconscious scapegoats), or yet another task-force that redirects the responsibility that this institution shirks every day when they do not see us. There is no integrity in threatening BIPOC students, who in this very moment, are in protest at the $5 million dollar Barnes Center, nor threatening expulsion to Black and Brown students who are seen as innate criminals.
I know shame, but I also know dignity. I know what it means to be whole in spite of the disparagement that Syracuse University projects onto its marginalized students. Those protesting empty institutional promises for justice know what is owed to us – that
Suos Cultores Scientia Coronat (knowledge crowns those who seek her) means that we enter this university already adorned with knowledge and power. I know that relocating our power means you, the administration, must confront the uncomfortable truth that your salaries are generated by our invisibility. To name these problems is not enough. Here, among those hurt by acts of anti-Black and anti-Semitic hate crimes have a common adversary, and the shame Chancellor Syverud is all yours.
