By Isabel Oalican, Staff Editor and Social Media Head
I remember sitting at Taylor Hall in fall 2020, listening to the strike leaders talk about their choice to remain anonymous. They feared that their participation in the strike might affect job and graduate school applications, their personal lives, their relationships with professors and beyond. Being organizers put them under an unusual level of scrutiny and criticism, much of which was beyond their control.
The progress excuse
A couple of months later, on January 29, the Atlantic published an article “Schools must Resist Destructive Anti-Racist Demands” by contributing writer and Columbia professor John McWhorter. I noticed a tone that I can only describe as “but, we’ve gotten so far,” recalling the process made in anti-racist work in general to dismiss the specific injustices dealt against students of color today.
Throughout the article, McWhorter argues that BIPOC students dramatize the discrimination they feel, essentially making themselves victims of institutional racism that doesn’t exist. “[There is a] mismatch between actual conditions on these campuses and the nature and tone of the manifestos, as well as the protest actions usually accompanying them,” he writes.
But institutional racism does not have to be blatantly obvious to operate on a systemic level. Particularly in higher education, it manifests many forms, like granting scholarships to students of color without preparing them for the culture shock of a predominantly white institution; allowing a Black and Latinx cultural center to rot with black mold, and continuing to underfund its replacement; or siding with “concerned” parents who accuse Black strike leaders of being bullies instead of listening to those students’ anger, frustration and sadness—emotions that represent decades of complaints about how it feels to be a BIPOC student at a predominantly white institution.
Despite these injustices, nobody is saying Bryn Mawr is the “bastion of social injustice,” one of the various mocking ways in which McWhorter refers to the school. Bryn Mawr, in forms noticeable or not to the average outsider, has demonstrated enough of a racist history and current racist practices to cause a strike that ground academics to a halt for three weeks. Sure, Bryn Mawr today lacks the overt racism of, for example, former President M. Carey Thomas’ letters discussing the admission of BIPOC students. But does that mean all other injustices aren’t valid?
And yes—the strike was partially in reaction to the police killing of a Black man [that occured] “a half hour’s drive away [from campus] in Philadelphia.” But does a shooting have to happen on campus to justify outrage? In case McWhorter missed the entirety of the last year, people around the world joined the Black Lives Matter movement, marching to demand justice for the countless Black lives lost to police brutality. I would hope that any injustice, large or small, in your community or not, would be worthy of attention. Before completely dismissing the feelings of students striking against racism, perhaps one should look into the history of racism at those students’ school, empathize with BIPOC students and read the movement’s so-called “manifesto” with context in mind.
As I continued through the article, I found that the progress excuse was an excuse within itself. Often, it seems as though authors against the strike speak fondly of past change, while simultaneously criticizing any continuation of social justice. This contradiction begs the question—are you really in favor of progress, or content with the inequality of the status quo?
In an article published in Quillette in early December, “Race and Social panic at Haverford,” Jonathan Kay says that students are overreacting when they ask for trigger warnings before sensitive material or for the college to stop misrepresenting historical events for PR.
“One can only imagine what any ordinary resident of Cobbs Creek would think of the demand that Haverford students get ‘content warnings from professors for readings that include anti-Blackness, slavery, r*pe, abuse, fatphobia, etc.‘; or demand number five, which requires the college to stop exacting “profit off of the romanticized story of [the school’s] Penn Treaty Elm.”
He asks what an “ordinary resident of Cobbs Creek,” the neighborhood where Walter Wallace Jr. was murdered, would think of this “privileged milieu.” But what exactly is so privileged about demanding that the Cobbs Creek story not be romanticized? The Lenape Nation, like many other Native American tribes, were coerced into giving up their land—it was not a pact. The story is outdated, a myth at best, and should be told truthfully. Are demands for basic trigger warnings and historical accuracy in an educational institution really hallmarks of privilege? This is a bare minimum ask. I would rather one say outright that they oppose the anti-racist movement in general than so thinly veil their aversion to genuine change.
How radical is “radical”?
Throughout the article, McWhorter also depicts the process of change as radical, chaotic, immature and largely spontaneous:
“To give in to anti-intellectual, under-considered, disproportionate, or hostile demands is condescending to the signatories and the protesters. It implies that they can do no better, and that authorities must suspend their sense of logic, civility, and progress as some kind of penance for slavery, Jim Crow, redlining, and the deaths of people such as Floyd. That “penance” would hurt only the community in the end, through lower educational quality.”
Radical change is never as radical as it seems; it takes time and effort. During the strike period, organizers drafted and proposed the demands, held town halls with students, faculty and administrators for feedback, re-drafted the demands, waited for a response to the demands, re-proposed them again, negotiated the final demands and then actually began to institute them. As a student consultant directly under the president, I can attest to the immense amount of negotiation, thought, feedback and compromise put into the final decisions on demands.
By the end of the process, many of the original requests for funding had been modified by the administration to make them more realistic or more closely aligned with the opinions of the Board of Trustees and alumni donors. In negotiation, what are initially seen as radical changes are often very much overdue and far from destructive to the school’s long-term stability. It may seem “radical” that the strike demands were agreed upon in a matter of weeks, not years, but this was only possible because the strike prompted the administration to actually address the issues. The relatively short time in which the demands were approved does not diminish the effort that went into them.
And no, the administration did not “essentially give the ‘strikers’ what they wanted or shrivel in ‘cowardice’” to irrational student pressure. Painting the students as the more powerful entity in this case is just not true. Despite the widespread popularity of the strike, students needed the administration to implement the demands, or the entire movement would be pointless. Ultimately, it was the administration who held the final decisions in their hands. The strike was students’ plea for reform, and the administration making the decision to respond after years of inaction was far from forced.
Misconceptions about the strike: bullying, harassment, and single-mindedness
While reading external articles against the strike, I’ve come across many stories that paint the Bryn Mawr Strike Collective leaders, as well as students striking in solidarity, as “bullies.” A parent of a current student under the pseudonym “Minnie Doe” describes the alleged bullying in another Quillette article published in late December: “Anyone who sought to attend class, go to the dining hall, or even turn in schoolwork was denounced as a ‘scab,’ and often faced acts of bullying.” Already there are flaws in that logic. Students didn’t attack each other for getting food from the dining center, an egregious misconception that made the rounds in parent forums and even an email from President Cassidy on bullying and harassment, for which she later apologized. Strike leaders absolutely encouraged students to hold each other accountable for ignoring racism at the college, but not once during the strike did they condone bullying or harass those who did not (or could not) participate.
Doe’s article paints the strike leaders as one-minded and unwilling to compromise: “While the administration was pleading for dialogue, these students were insisting that any diversity in viewpoint was a mask for white supremacy.” Strike leaders emphasized the importance of participating in the strike in favor of the long-term outcome of their goals, but they simultaneously reminded others that participation was optional, encouraged those with differing viewpoints or concerns to speak up and publicly released a statement against bullying and harassment. It comes as no surprise to me that the leaders, mostly Black nonbinary people and Black women, were painted as far more aggressive than they were in reality—a partial result of disapproving parents villainizing these students by perpetuating Black stereotypes of being too opinionated or “having an attitude.”
It also comes to no surprise that many articles, such as Doe’s, paint the strike leaders as perpetrators of abuse. “This is a feminist women’s college, where one might think that administrators would be educated about the need to reject coercion, intimidation, and brute force as negotiating tactics. Yet here they were, apologizing to their tormentors,” she writes. “Having been married to an abusive husband, I’m sadly familiar with the temptation to justify one’s abuse by insisting the problem ‘must be me.’ I never thought I’d see that same attitude exhibited by the women charged with educating my daughter.” While students not participating in the strike may have felt valid feelings of pressure to conform, isolation and difference, and administrators felt as though they had to do something, that dynamic was far from abusive.
Rather than students bullying each other into striking to the highest degree, I observed varying levels of participation; for most students, it was a personal decision. There were instances where participation in the strike could be construed as binary: “Your participation, or the lack thereof, will not be left unnoticed and it represents your support towards the Haverford and larger Black community,” Kay’s article quotes of a Haverford striker. “You make your stance clear with your actions.” I can understand the pressure one may feel to participate, but “striking” represented many individual actions of varying significance for students to choose from, so in reality it was never black and white. Organizers also acknowledged complications to participation like risks to student visas and scholarship status, and encouraged only those who could afford to strike to do so.
Some students claimed to agree with the “principles” of the strike, but found it too chaotic, and just wanted to continue their education. While clearly disruptive, the strike’s end goal was to implement demands and therefore go back to classes as soon as possible. Nobody really wants to strike; it’s a last resort, and an exhausting one—BIPOC students only took it after being ignored by administrators and peers for decades. Participation had the capacity to negatively affect the most ardent strikers’ grades, motivation, financial stability and mental state, and took countless hours of work on behalf of organizers to negotiate the demands and plan sit-ins, teach-ins and countless other events. Yet this was something they were comfortable with in order to protect the community, not just themselves. The point was not merely to argue with administrators, but to apply pressure to negotiate. So, no, the strike was not meant to be a breezy plenary resolution that evolves (or is forgotten) over the span of a couple of years. Students are here to study, but when frustration with racism in your community comes to surface, it must be dealt with.
Final thoughts
Overall, the way the strike was painted by external observers as unorganized, radical and chaotic is something I expected. As history has shown, the most radical movements of history are often recognized as less radical once enacted. More than 100,000 workers participated in the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, at the height of which more than half of the freight on the country’s tracks had come to a halt. All this was done for the simple need of “eight hours labor, eight hours recreation, eight hours rest,” demands which are far from radical today. The UC Berkeley strikes of the 1960s demanded free speech, politics and student governance on campuses, among other things. These strikes spanned a decade and led to national coverage. Today, having political clubs and student government on campus is far from radical. One day, too, this strike will seem far less radical from even conservative viewpoints. The demands are justified, long overdue and well-thought out. McWhorter, Kay and other writers who slander the strikes, however, are part of the group that will continue to skew the perception of change as negative, destructive and radical. Time will tell that it is not.
Image credit: @bmc_bslc
