Racial Consciousness 101 reflection essay

Evan R. Ash

EDL 629 – Dr. Kate Rousmaniere

In March 2016, near the end of my junior year of college, MSNBC’s Hardball with Chris

Matthews held a town hall event with then-candidate Donald Trump at the Weidner Center,,

UW-Green Bay’s performing arts center. That day, as well as the events that transpired, are

imprinted firmly into my memory. Not just the talk itself--this is where Trump professed a belief

that abortion providers should somehow be punished--or the national broadcast where I

appeared to be asleep while Trump spoke (I was seated in the row directly behind Trump and

Matthews), but also the campus experience.

As I rounded the corner into the corridor that connected UWGB’s theatre building with its

art and music building, the campus map that greeted students as they entered the Studio Arts

building looked radically different. Rather than the building plan and room list that typically

occupied these map boxes, there was instead a large white piece of paper placed inside the

frame covering the map, reading in simple black letters: STUDENT ACTIVISM IS DEAD.

“Maybe it is,” I thought to myself. After all, UW-Green Bay’s campus, with its tight corridors,

brutalist buildings, and lack of large open spaces for crowds to gather very much reflected the

political climate in which most of the campus was constructed during the late 1960s and early

1970s--a fear of raucous student protests.

On that day in March, student activism sure seemed dead. Campus life did not stop, and

only a medium-sized group of students protested the town hall from remote parking lot at the

Weidner Center, with the blessing and supervision of UW-Green Bay’s ubiquitous and widely-

despised Public Safety officers. The town hall went on without incident, and after that day, life

returned to normal for UW-Green Bay. Student activism may have been dead that day, but

viewing the Racial Consciousness 101 panel proved to me that student activism elsewhere is
far from dead. While the topical variety of panelists pushed the scope of the discussion further

than the promotional materials for the talks let on, that did little to change the overall importance

or necessity of these talks.

To clarify the criticism offered above, I envisioned the talks being a direct revival of the

efforts of the BSAA from the 1980s, stemming from anti-Black incidents and sentiment on

campus and using student voices to respond to these incidences and disprove the stereotypes

and notions of Black individuals that Miami’s student body held. Along those lines, I found some

of the talks offered to be direly important, namely the powerful anecdotes about racial incidents

shared by some of the presenters, as well as Jannie Kamara’s presentation on the follies of the

“colorblindness” idea. Some of the other presenters I felt detracted from the overall power of the

talk to confront anti-Black tendencies on campus, even veering at points into self-indulgent

performative gesturing.

As I reasoned above, the true impact of the panel came from the presentations by Black

students--two of whom (Jannie and Austin) I am very proud to call my friends. To me, they best

carried the original mission of the BSAA, a critical response to racial incidents on this campus.

They had a most perfect synergy with Aonesti Williams, whose “It Starts With You” discussion

highlighted not just the candor with which privileged students at Miami engaged in racialized

commentary, but also of the greater, perhaps more unforgivable ill of bystanders who witnessed

these events and said nothing.

Most disturbing to me, I think, was reading through the archival document from the

1980s and seeing both the responses of students and of Lawrence W. Young to the freshman

English class discussions, particularly with regard to both the racial myths professed by the

students and their “almost universal unwillingness” to confront their preconceived notions and

realize they are false. I agree with Young’s assertion that there few opportunities for Miami

students to confront these social ills.

 At a school like Miami, however, the institutional frameworks and student body

perpetuate a campus experience that is very much detrimental to black students. Only three

percent of Miami’s over 17,000 students here in Oxford are Black, a number far below even the

percentage of Black Ohioans (12%). Conversely, demographic data backs up assertions of

Miami as a rich white school. 54% of Miami’s students come from families in the top fifth of

income distribution, and Miami has the third highest share of students from the 1%, as well as

the fourth-highest share of Ohio students who come from families that make over $630,000.

Couple these income disparities with the majority of Miami’s admissions coming from areas on

the periphery of the nation’s worst economic and residential segregation--Chicago, Cincinnati,

Cleveland, and Detroit suburbs, and one finds a dangerous breeding ground for racial incidents

and white echo chambers.1

Where, then, does student activism fit into all these questions? For much of our nation’s

history, centers of education and the individuals who drive them saw their schools become a

battleground for equal rights and the democratic process. This was, of course, most evident in

the 1950s and 1960s, when civil rights activists targeted universities and the entrance of Black

students as a way to destabilize and bring down Jim Crow. Following that spirit of disruption and

radicalism, universities became hotbeds of student action during the Vietnam War, occupying

campus administration buildings and demanding that the universities divest themselves from the

military-industrial complex that fueled the war. I’ve always wryly noted to myself that in the

grandiose celebration of Miami history in Armstrong’s Shade Family Room, there is no mention

of the occupation by the BSAA during the Vietnam War of Rowan Hall, the building that the

Shade Family Room now occupies.

Due to a reactionary counter-policing of student protests after the turbulent 1960s, as

well as the increasing militarization of police forces, student activism has become, in many

1
Much of this information taken from Raj Chetty, College Mobility: Miami University, Ohio. New York
Times, n.d. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/college-mobility/miami-university-ohio
cases, muted. However, as the Racial Consciousness 101 panels demonstrated, the spirit of

student activism is very much alive--and very much necessary, especially at a university like

Miami that has an innate function to become a rich, white echo chamber. Getting affluent Miami

students to confront and disprove their biases may be a Sisyphean task, but the panel’s

organization and efforts, as well as those of the Black Student Action Association show that

students are still dedicated to asking those hard questions and probing the nature of white

attitudes toward their black peers. If the classroom, as John Dewey posited, is to be a miniature

model of society, then that society must possess discourse that leads to social sustainability--

and Racial Consciousness 101 is a fitting starting block for that idea.