Harvard Needs More Than Words to be Anti-Racist

To sign onto the statement, please click here.

A protest sign at a HESC action that reads “Free People Free Minds.”

*To sign onto the statement, please click here. Anyone is welcome to sign. *

We are in the middle of two global pandemics. One, COVID-19, has wrought over 120,000 deaths in the U.S. alone, disproportionately affecting Black, Indigenous, and Latinx communities. The second, centuries-old anti-Black systemic racism, continues devastating communities through police brutality, mass incarceration, and unequal healthcare and treatment access. Thousands of people have taken to the streets to protest the many injustices that pervade every corner of this country. Police and prison abolition has been thrust from the so-called “radical” margins of discourse to the center of the public imaginary and active political debate. Students around the country are desperately urging higher education institutions to dismantle the anti-Black rhetoric from which they were built. We are living in a moment of both unprecedented anguish and possibility.

As members of the Harvard community, we demand that the university stand on the right side of history. Harvard must recognize and grapple with its deep historical and ongoing entanglements with white supremacy, including its history of formal education rooted in slavery and imperialism, perpetuating the systemic racism that marginalizes fields of study dedicated to dismantling white supremacy, such as Indigenous Studies and Ethnic Studies.

We urge that Harvard embrace demands made by the Harvard Prison Divestment Campaign and The Harvard Coalition for Black Lives, and establish, fund, and support an Ethnic Studies Department.

Ethnic Studies teaches us how to dedicate ourselves to anti-racism, uplift the narratives of subjugated histories, understand the place of racialization in the colonial world order, and how it intersects with social and political power structures. Moreover, it prepares us to be effective and active allies in our society. Ethnic Studies and anti-racism represent twin sides of the same coin in their joint rejection of individual racism and their emphasis on the structural and intersectional components of racialization. To combat anti-Blackness, Harvard needs to rescind their resistance to Black and Latinx radical scholarship that aligns with Ethnic Studies pedagogical principles.

Dr. Lorgia García-Peña’s recent interview on decolonizing the university. We encourage you to read and share.

Harvard’s immediate response to the ongoing revolutionary moment indicates negligence of institutional accountability and responsibility. Many members of the Harvard community have received mass emails from administrators addressing police brutality that simultaneously refused to substantively mention race or state that “Black Lives Matter.” Other emails rhetorically criticized the brokenness of our political, economic, and social systems, even when the Harvard administration consistently fails to protect their own students, staff, and faculty of color. For example, the denial of tenure to Professor García-Peña, one of the only Black Latina scholars at the University, underscores Harvard’s disinvestment to the knowledge production of Black scholars and Black communities on campus. The presence and work of scholars like Prof. García-Peña, whose scholarship actively dismantles the settler-colonialist structures that undergird anti-Blackness and misogyny, are critical to understanding the present.

Regardless of Harvard’s current or previously declared commitments to anti-racist work, its approach to racial justice has historically been one of gross carelessness. HESC and many others have publicly spoken numerous times about Harvard’s continued negligence of demands for the formation of a robust department for critical race and Ethnic Studies, as well as its intransigence surrounding the establishment of a multicultural center. What is less blatant but just as powerful, however, is how Harvard’s institutional mechanisms and administrative treatment of faculty of color preclude any serious commitment to anti-racism. Community members seeking to create positive action through Harvard’s formal initiatives and guidelines are constantly met with bureaucratic red tape and inaction. Members who resort to direct action, like protest, are often met with public derision and contempt, and harassment from HUPD. Therefore, Harvard actively refuses to be a site where students and faculty can critically interrogate the canonical frameworks of scholarship to further advance knowledge production in various fields, especially the humanities and social sciences.

If Harvard is going to publicly commit itself in any way to anti-racist pedagogy and institutional action, Harvard cannot pretend that small, ineffective reforms like more “Diversity and Inclusion” committees or “inclusive” graphic design of brochures will a) solve its historically deleterious treatment of faculty, staff, and students of color or b) address the intensely structural problems of Harvard’s practices that have perpetuated and continue to entrench racism in the University. Instead of symbolic and intellectual gestures, Harvard must commit to battle anti-Blackness by:

1. Taking all actions demanded by the Harvard Coalition for Black Lives and the Harvard Prison Divestment Campaign.
2. Reversing the tenure denial of Dr. García-Peña and appointing her not only as director of the Latinx Studies secondary field in Romance Languages and Literatures but also as the head of a newly established Ethnic Studies Department.
3. Recruiting and retaining Ethnic Studies faculty by dedicating tenured, tenure-track, and visiting professorships for Ethnic Studies and its allied disciplines such as Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality, AAAS, and History and Literature.
4. Determining ways to supplement payment for unpaid labor that faculty of color, particularly womxn of color, often perform to support and/or uplift students of color in areas of study that are not supported by the University (i.e. Ethnic Studies).
5. Abolishing the capability of the President and/or Provost to initiate and utilize an ad hoc committee during the FAS tenure review and decision process.

Additionally, if the University intends to dedicate itself to anti-racism, we demand that Harvard follow through by legitimately and financially investing in the future of Ethnic Studies at Harvard. The University must demonstrate this commitment by:

1. Again, taking all actions demanded by the Harvard Coalition for Black Lives letter linked here. Specifically, as it relates to pedagogy and academic labor, Harvard must institute points (7) and (8) of the letter.
2. Making a written public and financial commitment to the creation of a Department of Ethnic Studies at Harvard University, which would offer both a concentration and secondary field for undergraduate students, Ph.D. degrees and graduate-level secondary fields in Ethnic Studies.
3. Mandatorily including the voices of students invested in the project of Ethnic Studies within spaces of imagining and constructing an Ethnic Studies department, not just through the Committee on Undergraduate Education Policy. For example, formal committees dedicated to the creation of a proposal must have student members currently attending the College, who have equal say in the content produced by the committee. The project of Ethnic Studies has inextricable links to the production of knowledge by students of color; exclusion of those voices neglects the critical intellectual contributions that students can lend both experientially and pedagogically to the overall project of anti-racism.
4. Establishing a physical center that would be a national and international hub for community building and research in critical Ethnic Studies in comparative, national, transnational, and global frameworks, providing much-needed intellectual space for students, scholars, and faculty on campus.

Perhaps we might be wrong even to assume an institution like Harvard could serve as a space for that sort of powerful anti-racist critique. Black and Brown professors at Harvard regularly face racist hate crimes from multiple sources. The unjust firing of Dr. García-Peña highlights the lack of transparency of the tenure process and exposes Harvard’s racist history of blatant mistreatment toward their faculty of color.

However, now is not the time for kind words, mere proclamations of values, or empty thoughts and prayers. Now is the time for structural change and substantive action. Harvard must be held accountable for the systematic racism it has been built upon. It must proactively examine the structural and administrative barriers that make the thriving faculty of color, especially those committed to studies of race and racialization, impossible to pursue. It must commit to rigorous self-interrogation and wield its resources to wage war against systemic racism, instead of upholding racism’s contemporary manifestations. We know it is capable of this. We hope it is brave enough to do so. Anything else, especially in this moment, would represent a moral and systemic failure.

Hoping for solidarity,

Harvard Ethnic Studies Coalition

To sign onto the statement, please click here.