My dear students,
My colleagues and I have been reflecting on the power of your work this spring. You more than fulfilled our hopes for shared learning in diaspora by completing bold projects while attending to the concerns of your families and communities. We found special meaning in celebrating the Class of 2020. Graduation is a cherished rite for marking new beginnings, and even at a distance, it seemed to defend against the tremendous costs imposed by the pandemic and the forces that isolate us. That was at least our hope, that we would find new ways forward in one another.
The murder of George Floyd, just one week after our commencement, calls us together once again, now in shared pain and the demand for justice. Protesters have taken up other hallowed rites to make a stand for him, for Breonna Taylor, for Ahmaud Arbery, and for the countless more whose names are no longer remembered or declaimed in public.
I write simply to be with you, now, in anger and in defiance, against all that denies these brothers and sisters their rightful places in this world.
Our traditions of learning demand that we reckon openly and honestly with racial terror and anti-Black violence. It is a violence manifested not only by police and vigilantes, but under cover by actuaries, zoning boards, and demagogues. By the ones who set the price of admission to the protections of safe housing, resourced schools, preventative medicine, sustenance and clean water – in short, life in all its abundance. To be educated at this moment in the world means ensuring that learning as a gateway to mobility and belonging cannot belong to a precious few.
Whatever university plans unfold for the coming academic year, the anguish laid bare in these protests will be with us. I know that ER&M students will help make our teaching and scholarship responsive to the calls for attention emerging from afflicted communities. Your experience, your questions, and your understanding open vitally important windows of social possibility.
Know this too, that we are a community of care. Please check in with one another and reach out for support when you need it. When things are too much, we can find refuge in one another and in that wild imagination that is the privileged birthright of every living being.
With respect and concern for your friends and families,
Alicia Schmidt Camacho
Professor and Chair of Ethnicity, Race, and Migration
Yale University
she/her/ella
