THREE ANTI-RACIST ACTIONS WHITE ACADEMICS CAN TAKE *THIS WEEK*

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THREE ANTI-RACIST ACTIONS WHITE ACADEMICS CAN TAKE *THIS WEEK*

“Three Anti-Racist Actions . . . “ is a joint venture with Dr. Kumari. This week, however, I’m going it alone (surprise, Ashanka!) because I want to (a) talk about “anti-racist actions white academics” can take to support academics of color, and (b) take an action. For the latter, I’d like to take up the “Advocacy Call” on behalf of international students she forwarded from nextGEN (please refer to her email below for details on that important project).    

“Equality in the academy is directly tied to the preservation and creation of knowledge because the experiences of people of color enable them to ask important questions in scholarship.”

 

I don’t think I own the topic because I’m Black,” she says. “But I can see the connections very easily across history because I live in a Black body in the 21st century.” Without faculty of color, argues Matthew, universities imperil entire lines of critical discourse.

“Revealing the Unwritten Obstacles Faced by Academics of Color”

(Book Review: Patricia A. Matthew. Written/Unwritten: Diversity and the Hidden Truths of Tenure. U of South Carolina P, 2016

 

Thus, my goal this week is to amplify her voice and her work, directly citing a scholar of color and the significant, high-profile work nextGEN has been doing in our field, an advocacy group she helped co-found as a graduate student. In other words, this “Advocacy Call” she forwarded to our listserv is more than a project she endorses and has agreed to circulate. Based on my reading of her vita and other materials, my understanding is she played a key role in creating the infrastructure and a string of momentum-building, community-building, overlapping projects that make change happen, creating a forum for voices previously silenced—access to the rhetorical spaces necessary for public deliberation. One “anti-racist action” we can always take is to find ways to AMPLIFY these voices and counterstorytelling efforts. 

 

THIS is (just part of) what Dr. Kumari has been up. I’ve pulled just the stuff on nextGEN. Check out her CV. There’s much, much more. With Dr. Pauszek and now Dr. Kumari—do we know what we’re doing when we’re hiring, or what? Yay, us! 😊

  • Co-Founder. nextGEN International Rhetoric and Writing Graduate Listserv (2018–Present); Moderator 2018-2019
  • Publications: 
    • Kumari, Ashanka et. al. “Where We Are: A Conversation Between the WPA-L Reimagining Work Group and the nextGEN Listserv.” Composition Studies. vol. 47, no. 2, 2019, pp. 203-210. 
    • Kumari, Ashanka, Sweta Baniya, and Kyle Larson. “The Necessity of Genre Disruption in Organizing an Advocacy Space for and by Graduate Students.” Xchanges: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Technical Communication, Rhetoric, and Writing Across the Curriculum, vol. 15, no. 1, 2020.
    • Baniya, Sweta, Sara Doan, Gavin P. Johnson, Ashanka Kumari, Kyle Larson, and Virginia M. Schwarz. “Building an International Coalitional Listserv for and by Graduate Students: The Critical Digital Literacies of nextGEN.”Computers and Composition. Forthcoming, 2021. 
  • National Award: Kairos Service Award for work on the nextGEN Listserv presented at the 35th Computers and Writing Conference in East Lansing, Michigan.
  • Podcast Interview with 2019 Moderators (featuring Dr. Kumari):  

 

HOW TO SUPPORT SCHOLARS OF COLOR

  1. Find out what academics of color around us (in our field, our department, our neighborhood, etc) are up to.
  2. Learn from them. Listen.
  3. Understand what it means and why it matters—not as an empty gesture of good will but because this work is wicked smart and important
  4. Make sure others hear them, know their work, cite it, build upon it. Move these voices of color from the margins of our disicplines to the center—not just by bringing their bodies into those rooms (we should do that too, yeah?) but by bringing their ideas into the center of the scholarly conversations in our fields. 

HOW TO SUPPORT INTERNATIONAL STUDENTS

1.      See Dr. Kumari’s email below.

2.      Be sure to check out the link. This project is jam packed with fantastic, vital resources including concrete, straightforward information like “Here’s How You Can Support.” This is just the first three. 

FROM: nextGEN Advocacy Call to Challenge Institutionalized Xenophobia Against International Students

 Here’s How You Can Support:

1.    Understanding Current Visa Policies:

The first step is to understand the current visa policies that international students have. There are, of course, many informational documents already available. 

Here is the official US government’s description: https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/us-visas/study.html. 

In addition to this, your university’s International Students and Scholars website also provides accurate and timely information. 

 

2.    Reaching out to International Students:

If you have an international student in your undergraduate and graduate class, and if you have international student friends or colleagues, it is time that you reach out to them and ask if they need any help and support. While there might be very little you can do, reaching out to let them know that you are thinking of them can and often will mean a lot. 

 

3.    Advocating for International Students within Your University

If you are in the position to advocate within your school and the department, then please do advocate for the international students within your department. As nextGEN previously advocated in our International Scholars Anti-Discrimination Open Letter, we again “call for faculty, organizations, and other various collectives to find and implement mechanisms of pressure on and advocate at departmental and institutional levels.” We encourage you to build campaigns and organize collective action and solidarity around expressing your concerns to university administrators, such as diversity and inclusion officers at the college level. Community organizing genres can also make your advocacy more creative and effective than if you were to rely only on academic genres.

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This work is all important, and I can continue to say and say that. However, we must also put our words into practice with our actions. We can always do better to support our own local scholars of color, our international students, graduate students, and colleagues. I’m certainly learning that, bit by bit.

 

What actions will you take this week? Who are some scholars of color we should read in your subdisciplines? How will you create space for these voices in your classrooms? In your communities?



 

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