TO THE EDITOR:
As faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, we support all the students who came to the Town Hall on race and inclusion, who saw the live streaming, and particularly those who had the courage to speak out and share their experiences of racial microaggressions, institutional racism and intersectional oppression. We hear their anger and support many of their demands for change, and we recognize that their pain is real and that the administration needs to do more. To that end, we call on the leadership of UNC-CH to take a more proactive stance with regard to our students’ needs because the administration’s response, thus far, has left students feeling frustrated, unheard and vulnerable. We need our leadership to commit to and invest in real change — we need more than the rhetoric of inclusion; we need to make that inclusion happen.
We know that as faculty we are also held accountable and have a fundamental role to play in this crucial work. Many of us teach classes on racism, white supremacy, privilege, race relations and intersectional oppression; we care deeply about these issues for our students, for our larger community and for ourselves. We seek to work with students, those in activist communities and those in our classrooms to create a genuinely inclusive community at UNC, one that recognizes the reality of their intersectional lives. We want to engage with students in real change
Prof. Jennifer Ho, English and comparative literature
Prof. Maria DeGuzman, English and comparative literature
Anna Agbe-Davies, Anthropology
Neel Ahuja, English & Comparative Literature
Rita Balaban, Economics
Susan Bickford, Political Science
