Duke University’s administration and its police department have been engaged in a cover up for two years.
In August 2014, Executive Vice President Tallman Trask III hit contracted parking attendant Shelvia Underwood with his car and, Underwood claims, yelled, “stupid n*****” as he drove off. Trask has denied using the slur. The police report regarding the incident made no mention of a hit-and-run or Trask.
When Underwood asked for an apology, she says Vice President of Administration Kyle Cavanaugh delivered a note to her on Trask’s behalf. It so happens that Trask is superior to Cavanaugh, who in turn oversees not only parking and transportation at Duke, but also campus police.
However, the problem is not isolated to just a hit-and-run. It encompasses entire institutions of higher education that actively operate as enterprises of exploitation. Whether on this campus or at Duke, universities have maintained a rich tradition of abusing, discriminating and displacing their workers.
Duke’s Black Parking and Transportation Services staff have been working in an environment of “racism, harassment, retaliation and bullying,” according to former employee Renee Adkins. Under PTS Director Carl DePinto, Black employees have reported being targeted for citations and layoffs and receiving poorer performance evaluations and less overtime pay than their white coworkers.
The blatant racial discrimination faced by the Duke PTS workers reminded me of the experiences of Black and Brown food service and housekeeping workers at UNC. Food service employees have been protesting inadequate pay and racial discrimination since 1969. In 2015, a former UNC worker alleged that he was fired for exposing sexual harassment and abuse in a sex-for-hire scheme in which Black housekeepers were replaced by Asian refugees for sexual favors in the housekeeping department.
The reality is that exploited labor undergirds every aspect of our university — its bricks, its color and its pride. Our campus was built by Black people who were enslaved. Our apparel has been sourced from sweatshops with fatal working conditions. Our athletic industry is sustained by predominantly Black, unpaid athletes whom our university has failed scholastically. Even our prized academic departments are comprised of adjunct faculty whose academic labor comes with meager pay and limited job security.
Organizers with Duke Students and Workers in Solidarity occupied the Allen Building, Duke’s administrative headquarters, for two weeks. On Friday, they moved their fight to Abele-Ville, a space the activists named after Julian Abele, the Black architect of Duke’s campus whose labor went unrecognized for decades.
We must think critically about how our institutions operate through modes of racist and capitalist accumulation. We must stand in solidarity with Duke students and workers who are resilient in their demands for justice by demanding the same from our administration.
