Keywords

1 Panel Discussion

Yuval Dinoor (She/Her)

I am co-moderating this session with Rachel, who will introduce herself shortly. Before we get started, I would like to take a moment to offer a land acknowledgment that we here at the CEP put together… (See Rosales Introduction). Thank you for listening. I will pass it to Rachel to begin our panel conversation.

Rachel Elkis

Thank you. As Yuval mentioned, I am Rachel. I am a junior at Barnard studying Economics, and I am the former SGA representative for sustainability. I am excited to be here. I would love to get started by having our faculty panelists introduce themselves with name, pronouns, department, courses you are teaching, and your role within and outside the Barnard community.

Elizabeth Cook

Hi everyone, I can start us off. I am Elizabeth Cook. I use she/her pronouns, and I am an Assistant Professor in the Environmental Science department. I teach a couple of classes right now, including our senior seminar, in which several students are researching environmental justice and injustices in their senior theses. I also teach an Environmental Data Analysis class where environmental justice is incorporated into case studies of data analyses using New York City-related data. Finally, I teach Urban Ecosystems, which is in the Environmental Science department, but it is an interdisciplinary course, and we discuss environmental justice topics in that as well. I am relatively new to Barnard. Last year was my first year, and I was only on campus for a short time before we were swept away by Covid, so I am still figuring out my role, but I am really happy to be here.

Manu Karuka

I am Manu Karuka. I use he/him pronouns. I am an Assistant Professor in American Studies, and none of my courses have an explicit focus on environmental justice. But my courses do focus on imperialism, racism, and colonialism. That is the entry point in ways that strongly resonate with the powerful land acknowledgment that Yuval read. When we think about these themes, it impels us to think about environmental justice. It comes into the conversation in a first-year seminar called Liberation. I am teaching an Introduction to American Studies course where environmental justice comes into the conversation as well. In addition to these broader overarching themes of imperialism, racism, and colonialism, I think environmental justice is also a way to think about place and our relationships and responsibilities to place.

I have learned a great deal in our preparations for this conversation, just thinking across our divisions in the college. One of the things I have learned is how all of us have thought about Harlem, Barnard’s location in Harlem, and how Harlem connects to our disciplines, and with our teaching and research approaches. We found that we even discuss some of the same campaigns in our courses. For example, WE ACT for Environmental Justice,Footnote 1 a community organization based in Harlem, comes up in our courses in different ways, so that has been exciting and enriching for me to have that conversation with my colleagues on this panel. In terms of my role, I have been helping my colleagues to build the department of American Studies and I feel very committed to helping to build the Critical Consortium for Interdisciplinary Studies, which I think is a really unique formation at Barnard. It brings together American Studies, Africana Studies, and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies. This is a group of scholars and teachers for whom questions of environmental justice are really at the center of how our conversations have been shaped in the past and are shaping our visions for the future.

Angela Simms

Thank you, Manu, for setting me up so well. My courses dovetail well with his. But first, my name is Angie Simms. For Elizabeth and me, this is our second year, so I had a whopping nine months in Harlem and I am now working remotely from Maryland. I use she/her pronouns. I teach two lectures: Race, Ethnicity & Society and Metropolitics of Race and Place, and two seminars: Suburbs, Racism, and the United States Opportunity Structure and Advanced Topics in Race. In these courses, we think about the socio-historical context of the development of race and racism and examine the interactions between capitalism and racism. One of the big takeaways of my classes is that racism comes from the needs of capitalists. We also investigate how racism shapes metropolitan space, including relationships within and between cities and suburbs, centering historical and social processes in regions. Environmental justice is one of many aspects of unjust power dynamics we cover. Social connections between people and their resource exchanges, particularly in the Global North, are not sustainable because they distribute benefits and burdens unevenly among people and diminish the Earth’s capacity to maintain equilibrium – this leads to social and natural catastrophes. My courses equip students with language for understanding environmental justice concerns as embedded in power structures across levels and types of social organization. We also address cumulative effects over time. Additionally, I am working on the exhibit “Undesign the Redline,” which highlights how racialized capitalism has led to different kinds of investment and divestment in Black, Latinx, and White neighborhoods in New York, resulting in the racial inequities we see today.

Outside of Barnard, I am a member of Renaissance Church. I have been there for about a year. As a Christian, I think about the earth in terms of stewarding what we have been bequeathed by the Lord. When Genesis says, we have “dominion” over the Earth, that indicates we have responsibility for the planet’s wellbeing. It’s not an invitation to manipulate the Earth’s resources purely for our short-term gain. In addition, I have been doing a series of anti-racism workshops with churches and civic groups about what racism is and how it’s connected to unjust social relationships. I want all people, whether academics, Christians or otherwise, to be socio-historically grounded and participate skillfully in shaping society in ways increasing humans,’ other creatures,’ and our natural environments’ capacity to flourish.

Yuval Dinoor

Thank you all for introducing yourselves. I am so excited to hear the rest of this conversation. To get started, I am really curious to hear how your integration of environmental justice in your coursework or in your external work as well, has evolved over time. Manu’s What is American Studies course is the first place I learned about environmental racism back in 2018, which is part of what got me so excited to commit to the American Studies major. I am curious how, as current events and different world transformations have progressed over the past few years, you may have changed how you speak about environmental justice in your classrooms.

Elizabeth Cook

I will start by putting myself out there a little bit and being honest. When I started teaching the Urban Ecosystems class, which I have taught now for several years, including at other institutions, at first, I only dedicated a tiny portion of one class, one individual class, to environmental justice. Even though it is something that I care about and have been considering in my work and research for a long time, I thought other urban ecologists didn’t value it very much as a critical part of the field, and I think, to some extent, that might have been true. But now, I dedicate much more class time to discussing environmental justice, so that is one obvious evolution.

The field of and scholarship on environmental justice has also evolved. Early work on the environmental and ecological framework of environmental justice was very much done in terms of distributional justice. Distributional justice frameworks ask which communities are impacted disproportionately by either environmental disamenities or hazards. For example, which communities are more impacted by higher heavy metal concentrations in different locations? Or which communities have greater access to particular amenities like green space and parks? Early on, when I was teaching about environmental justice, we discussed the distributional aspect of environmental justice, largely dominated by analyses focusing on classism and wealth. That framing has evolved quite a bit in the last several years in the ecology field, and I know it has already evolved quite a bit in other fields. In terms of ecology, recently, there has been much more discussion around the role of structural racism in driving those differences and taking a procedural justice framing. With this framing, we ask, what are the drivers of those inequitable distributions of amenities and disamenities in different communities? I try to bring both of these perspectives and framings into my work now.

One other point is that early environmental justice work from an ecology perspective focused on topics such as access to green space and distribution of toxins or heavy metals. Now, the ecology work on environmental justice is not just focusing on green space and species richness in different communities but also considering how environmental injustices can drive evolutionary trends in cities differently. For example, the size of the green space can impact how species interact, which may lead to different trends and evolutionary patterns.Footnote 2 So there is really cool scholarship happening on these topics, and I think that is a huge advancement for the urban ecological community as well.

Manu Karuka

I will jump in next. Thanks, and Yuval, thanks for sharing that about the intro classes; that makes me really happy to hear. One of the ways that I teach this and other topics is through dialogue with students. It is something I have taught on a number of campuses, and there is something I have felt that is distinct about teaching at Barnard, the dialogical relationship between instructor and students even with a big class like, “What is American Studies?” When I first started teaching at Barnard, it was during the first wave of Black Lives Matter. Students wanted to start class by giving reports to each other. I was teaching a class called the “Profits of Race,” about the political economy of racism, and the uprising in Baltimore was happening. In that context, activists and scholars were pointing out that Freddie Gray was killed by the Baltimore police, but he had been a victim of lead poisoning as an infant. Activists and intellectuals were asking questions about the slow death that someone like Freddie Gray had been subjected to, even before that horrific violence that he suffered in the back of a police van. When the #NoDAPL camps at Standing Rock were happening, every day at the beginning of class, students wanted to spend about 10 minutes sharing the news from the day before, and so there was an immediacy to these questions. It is harder for me right now on Zoom to get a sense of what the immediacy is. Of course, we have the pandemic and the lockdown. It is staring us in the face, but it is harder to have that space where we begin sharing information, which gives me a sense of seeing where students are getting information, and what questions they are asking of the information they are getting. Last week, I was talking about the news about Pfizer, that they have been negotiating with the government of Argentina and demanding collateral on infrastructure and national debt to purchase vaccines. There are countries around the world that have been asked to put their roads and bridges up as collateral to buy vaccines. It is harder for me to gauge, but I think part of it is really trying to understand what is happening right now and what the students are thinking about and asking them how to respond. What are the collective questions that are arising for us?

Angela Simms

I will take a step back to discuss what motivates my coursework and my research. Before Barnard, I had a mini-career in public policy. I was a legislative analyst at the U.S. Office of Management and Budget during the George W. Bush and Barack Obama Administrations. My scholarship is at the intersection of race and class and thinking about the policy implications for reducing social inequities. Specifically, I study political economy through the lens of the Black middle class. The Black middle class is a window into understanding how class and race interact because we see a group with class resources still facing legacy and contemporary headwinds from racist policies and market practices. One of the points I highlight for students is the importance of shared authority between levels of government. I tell them their new favorite “f word” is federalism. Federal, state, and local government action are at the heart of the geography of opportunity. There are nestings, clusters, of public and private authority and resources that elite Whites are disproportionately able to leverage to pursue their interests at others’ expense. One of the historical events I highlight regarding non-Whites resisting White dominance in terms of access to habitable neighborhoods is the 1991 National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit. Here we see Indigenous, Black, and Latinx folk coming together to discuss the common burdens they bear and how to pursue policies and other social processes that correct harms and envision a future where people and the natural environment are whole.

My course material has evolved over the past two years at Barnard. Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s new book (2022), Changing Everything is on my reading list. My syllabus includes, among others, works by Bob Bullard, a professor at Texas Southern. He’s the self-styled “father of environmental justice” and has written several books about what environmental justice entails.Footnote 3 I invite students to think about the options racial groups have for creating life-sustaining spaces in a context where they have differential amounts of political and economic power. When was the EPA established? In the wake of the Modern Women’s Rights Movement. While People of Color have been petitioning for environmental justice for decades, it was not until White women took on the issue that significant political change occurred. Even then, it was focused on issues that affected them and their families. Also important is how incremental wins can lead to major breakthroughs. In 1994, the Clinton Administration established an environmental justice office at the EPA. While it did not correct past harms, it was charged with equitable distribution of negative amenities, such as trash dumps. Thus, the justice movements of People of Color and Women led to a shift in policy focus.

I also use Daniel Faber’s chapter in Environmental Justice and Environmentalism: The Social Justice Challenge to the Environmental Movement  (2007), called “A More Productive Environmental Justice Politics.” He offers three great principles for thinking through what sound environmental stewardship looks like. The first is “the precautionary principle” of risk assessment. The onus is on the potential polluter to demonstrate to us that their product is not harmful. If we have a history of pollution, and we have a history of certain people bearing the weight of that, then why is it that people have to sue after they realize they have been poisoned? Second is the “substitution principle,” replacing toxic chemicals with non-toxic alternatives. Finally, there is the “clean production principle,” which means our default is to work in concert with the Earth’s processes to achieve economic goals and improve quality of life. Again, we see the theme of stewardship, as opposed to commodification at any cost. Faber’s principles are not anti-capitalist per se, but they do challenge capitalist forms to work in concert with values we believe lead to thriving people and a healthy planet.

In doing my fieldwork in Prince George’s County, Maryland, I became familiar with the School of Public Health at the University of Maryland. Sacoby Wilson directs the Community Engagement, Environmental Justice, and Health (CEEJH) Laboratory.Footnote 4 This project integrates the public in tracking pollution and devising remedies to reduce negative fallout. Wilson and his team equip people to be citizen scientists who gather data and deploy that data to engage decision-makers. CEEHJ models how different stakeholders can work together – from health professionals to teachers and students, advocacy groups, and policymakers.

Of course, the horizon on environmental justice and climate change issues is always moving out ahead of us. Therefore, I hope I empower students with transferable skills and a core vocabulary for thinking critically about how to intervene in natural processes to sustain a high quality of life while also achieving equity across social groups and a planet capable of renewing itself over the long run. Still, this set of topics often leaves students discouraged. “How are we going to fix things?” they ask. I tell them: “You’re standing on the shoulders of giants.” People have been resisting oppression since people have existed. Now you have the baton, and you can learn lessons from your elders, empowering you to be more effective. This is a life-long commitment. Engage strategically with your time, talent, and material resources. Press forward alongside like-minded others in organizations. My courses involve real talk about what is happening, alongside skill and knowledge building for being effective as we negotiate with each other about our future.

Rachel Elkis

That just led us perfectly into our next question: how we can extend discussions about current events outside of the classroom through our work and how do you encourage your students to do so.

Elizabeth Cook

I can speak about that and build on what Angie just said. My research uses participatory methods to engage communities and different stakeholders in thinking about the future. Through participatory engagement processes, such as the development of positive future visions, we explore innovative solutions to address some of the challenges that we are facing, particularly extreme weather-related events. This work lends itself to thinking about climate justice and the impacts of climate change on communities. When we talk to communities about the changing climate and the future, they are often thinking about these topics in addition to meeting their basic needs, which tends to go hand-in-hand with considering environmental justice and climate justice. So, as we develop scenarios or visions for the future, equity and addressing environmental justice is really front and center, whether it is in conversations with community members who are living in Harlem or whether it is with decision-makers in the Mayor’s Office of Climate Resiliency in New York City. Through these conversations outside of the classroom and this framing of the future, I try to engage students, in the same way, to ensure that they are thinking about how the topics apply to their own lives, in their own communities where they live. For example, in the Urban Ecosystems class, the students engage in a visioning exercise to imagine a positive, equitable future for New York City in 2080. It is a creative and important exercise to discuss how we address environmental justice, and it is easy to do because most of the students are living in New York City, and it feels directly applicable.

Manu Karuka

I also try to address some of these questions in my assignments. The Intro to American Studies class that I am teaching right now is organized around Dr. King’s speech, “A Time to Break Silence,” which he gave at Riverside Memorial Church. He spoke out against the Vietnam War, and in that speech, he spoke about the giant triplets of racism, militarism, and extreme materialism. So the class is organized into three sections: racism, war, and poverty. There are three assignments, and the first essay, which students are writing now, is, “What will I do to fight racism?” They have definitions of racism that I have given them and some material that I want them to have, and there is a range of ways students respond to it. Some take it as an academic exercise, and some students take this very personally. I encourage them to do so. I tell them that their graders and I are just there to encourage them through the process. Some write it as a letter to themselves, something that will hopefully be meaningful to them later on. For those students who take this really personally, it is a very, very difficult assignment to do. And it becomes a way for them to think about what skills they are developing at Barnard: “What is my major? What am I learning in this major? Where am I from? What have I learned and how am I assessing racism in this society, and how can I contribute to fighting it in really concrete ways?” Not all of the students, but many of them, bring in questions of environmental justice. The second paper is about what I will do to fight racism and war. So they are accumulating their analysis and thinking.

My hope is, by the end of the semester, in a purely personal way, they have given themselves a sense of what they can actually do. I think a lot of students wrestle with this question, and then, when they think about it, they think about the resources they have at their disposal. They start to see, “Oh, actually, I could do this; there are specific things that I can do.” They think about participating in collective struggles. It has been a productive space and a moving space to see students work through. When they are in person, I have them do collaborative research projects. Small groups of students are assigned to a state, and they research poverty in a particular state and specific modes of poverty, like hunger and education. One of the modes of poverty that they are looking at is environmental justice, broadly speaking, which is one of the ways that we can see premature death, as Ruth Wilson Gilmore talks about in her definition of racism. That is new research about actual poverty in these different parts of the United States.

Angela Simms

Well, I was taking notes on what Manu and Elizabeth discussed because I need to think more concretely about how to expand my assignments. I encourage students to engage in the material and apply it in their own lives. We talked about my favorite “F word,” federalism, but in thinking about policy, one of the trends regarding the post-Modern Civil Rights Movement backlash is the issue of disparate impact. The 2001 U.S. Supreme Court case Alexander v. SandovalFootnote 5 established the principle that disparate impact does not in itself indicate racism. So if a policy is not explicitly racially-biased, meaning that it is not targeting racial groups, the policy is not unconstitutional. Elizabeth brought up different types of justice. Procedural justice is what we often focus on, due process of the law. Due process is important, but it’s not sufficient. The full meaning of justice involves reckoning with power as historically and presently wielded and how resources flow to individuals and groups, and locations. We must account for the sedimentation of history and the roles of government and market institutions in it – and thus how they’re situated for helping to create a more equitable society. Whose interests matter to these institutions? Who has the time, money, energy, and skill to navigate and reform them?

In my courses, we also think about intersectional social statuses. What is your race, your class, your gender? One of the things I encourage students to do is to understand their social statuses. For many of my students who are White and who come from privileged backgrounds, there is a sort of eye-opening moment of recognition about what has been happening in their communities. For my students who have come from backgrounds where they have not had those same resources, say those from the Bronx, they feel validated: “Now I understand why a freeway cuts through our neighborhood and why asthma rates are higher here than in the Upper West Side.” One of the exercises students do is write an op-ed. It is an opportunity to take a stand on a policy. This assignment dovetails fairly well with what Manu described. It’s not a letter to yourself, but it does ask students to think about what they value and the specific kinds of social change they seek. Another thing I tell students who are White is that there are spaces you are going to be in that I am not and things people will say around you that they will not say around a Black woman. You have a unique opportunity to champion justice when this happens.

All of us have to own our spheres of influence. I mentioned, for example, that I’m a Christian. So when I talk about environmental justice and racism, I use the language of theology when I’m with other believers. We’re all made in the image of God. If we are all image-bearers of God, we all ought to have human dignity, and our social systems should reflect that. If some people are treated like trash and other people like humans, that’s a profound problem. You are calling God a liar. Certainly, these are uncomfortable conversations, really sitting with the emotional, intellectual, and spiritual weight of this. But the discomfort is unevenly distributed. I, as a Black woman, have to stand up, again and again, to assert that I am as fully human as everyone else. It’s exhausting and demonstrates how deeply distorted our social systems are.

The convergence of climate change and environmental justice is critical for racial justice. For too long, they have been separate movements. We know that the burdens of climate change are likely to be borne by people of color and poor people because of the history of capitalism. The people who have benefited the least from these capitalist practices, the people whose bodies have absorbed the negative externalities, are experiencing the effects disproportionately. So we need to think about how we can have a system that really honors these disparate distributions.

Yuval Dinoor

Thank you so much for that. I think that, on that same note of what kind of language and argument engages these conversations in different spaces, I am curious how all of you are seeing environmental justice as an opportunity to come into contact with other disciplines and do cross-departmental work or make these connections across the university that you might not get to really act upon in other kinds of work. What do you imagine those collaborations to be?

Elizabeth Cook

I can start us off. Angie, Manu, and I already have fun ideas about how we can integrate our work and think about next steps. So it is already happening, and thank you for bringing us together to do that. In terms of urban ecology, the field of urban ecology in and of itself is interdisciplinary. So already, there is a lot of cross-talk and integration with social sciences and certainly with planning, urban studies, and architecture, and I feel very grateful to be working with and learning from people who are experts in those disciplines. From an urban ecological perspective, many sub-disciplines are important in understanding the ecological interactions happening within a city. For example, community ecologists are examining how species distributions are different among different neighborhoods, and the environmental justice implications, or, for example, some ecologists study the ecosystem services or the benefits that people get from the environment in those different communities where ecological disparities may exist. As I mentioned at the beginning, there is more recent work by evolutionary biologists and ecologists in cities thinking about how structural racism has driven evolutionary processes in different parts of cities, impacting communities differently – including the benefits that people might get from the environment in their community. So I appreciate that question, and my answer is that urban ecology is already a very interdisciplinary field. I think by bringing in the environmental justice focus, there is room for additional collaborations with other departments and disciplines on campus.

Manu Karuka

I want to echo that I appreciate the question, and I think part of the excitement for me just being part of this conversation was to think across our divisions. So when the three of us met before the panel, I talked about teaching Silent Spring in the first-year seminar class. We had an interesting conversation about that because it is an old text. It is not current in terms of research, yet it spoke to the students. For me, there is a question about how we read across our literatures in a deep sense – I like to teach texts that I think are foundational – but then, how can we collaborate to build a sense of literacy about the cutting-edge directions various disciplines are taking. I think environmental justice is an opening, potentially, to think across our divisions. So, for example, water is becoming increasingly important in my classes in the last few years. There are approaches to thinking about water that are firmly rooted in Black Studies, Indigenous Studies, and new work in those fields, and also in Latin American Studies. I am thinking about struggles, for example, in Bolivia. It becomes a way to think across geographies, but I do not yet feel literate enough to say what the cutting-edge analysis of water in conversations in Biology is, for example. One of the concrete takeaways the three of us had from our earlier conversation was thinking about doing collaborative or guest lectureships in each other’s classes, which I think is an exciting way to go forward. I have an Intro to American Studies course and I can bring in someone from a division that seems very far removed in terms of the teaching and the methods to talk to an American Studies course about water. Maybe it could be a mini-lecture, maybe not for the whole class, but I think there are opportunities for us to collaborate as teachers and build those relationships with each other, as colleagues. And I think environmental justice seems like a vibrant site to imagine those conversations across our academic divisions.

Angela Simms

Certainly, the lecture swaps intrigue me! Sometimes the best interdisciplinary work is really about grounding yourself in your field and then recognizing your limits – and from there seeking growth by partnering with an expert in another subject, not trying to master another field of research. Pairing with an expert in another discipline means you have a mentor to guide you through the literature. One of my growth edges is knowledge in the biological sciences regarding carbon dioxide and how it affects our planet. Elizabeth and I have talked about microclimates within New York City, but I do not consider myself an expert on microclimates. This is potentially an area where I could partner with Elizabeth, so I can ask more “literate questions,” to use Manu’s phrase. Elizabeth could share her expertise in my class, and I could offer to her class a deeper dive into the socio-historical context of racism and how environmental justice is situated within it.

We need to think about professors’ and students’ growth edges and how to pivot out strategically, respecting where we’re based while discerning where we are headed next. For instance, many students in my classes are pre-med. Thus, I make sure we talk about environmental justice and climate change in relation to public health, not just the social determinants of health. How are racial groups living in fundamentally different social worlds? Lead contamination is much more likely in Black neighborhoods, relative to White communities. Why is that? In Flint, it took pediatrician Hanna-Attisha’s sound of the alarm as she noticed a pattern in Black children’s health outcomes.Footnote 6 I am excited to hear what others are thinking about and how we might collaborate. Let’s start with the low-hanging fruit – the course material we’ve already prepared and how to share it more broadly across campus.

Rachel Elkis

This is fantastic! I am very eager to see how these collaborations come to fruition. Environmental justice is such a unique topic to be able to do that. So that is extremely exciting, and we would love to open up to questions from the audience. If you would like to raise your hand, you can unmute and then just say a question or put it in the chat and we will get started.

Yuval Dinoor

One from Leslie.

Leslie Raucher (Assistant Director of Sustainability)

Thank you all so much! This was really great. One of the questions that I have, I do not know if anyone is prepared to answer, but eco-anxiety and environmental and ecological grief are starting to get talked about. We are beginning to hear about this from students, and it was touched upon a little bit with the hopelessness and what to do next. I was wondering if you are taking a conscious approach to thinking about this or dealing with it, and what we could do to help provide resources if it is something you are noticing. I am hearing about it from students, but I do not experience it in the classroom, so I was just hoping to get a little bit more of your perspectives.

Manu Karuka

I can jump in. My mind immediately goes to some of the lessons I have learned from Indigenous Studies. I learned that there are climate scientists researching carbon dioxide levels in the Earth’s atmosphere who found that in the decades after Europeans started coming to the Americas, there was a change in the atmosphere itself. Some interpret this as reflecting the rapid drop of the human population on the planet because of the earliest phases of European colonization in the Americas. It is devastating to think about that, to understand that this violence was registered on the planet’s atmosphere. But this is something that Indigenous communities and Indigenous philosophies have been thinking through for a long time, which is: how do you survive catastrophe? So it is something that is being voiced in different ways in different Indigenous movements around the world. The apocalypse already happened centuries ago, and part of what it is to be Indigenous now, Indigenous presence today, is living after the apocalypse. So there are many lessons I think that Indigenous philosophies are trying to propose, not just to Indigenous peoples, but to humanity. That is one entry point for all of us who are non-native is to begin thinking, “Okay, what are the lessons that we can commit ourselves to studying. This whole area of thought that goes back 500 years, and what can we learn from that to think about the choices we are making now?”

Angela Simms

It is a provocative question, and I appreciate you asking us to think it through. In my course, I support students in developing their capacity to push past anxieties arising from confronting that America’s history is not one of linear progress and society is not a meritocracy. I tell my students that there is no app to cure racism. There is no hack for poverty. These are fundamental relationships. As Manu shared, there’s a reservoir of wisdom we can tap into. For Black people, their ancestors have already survived the Middle Passage. Indigenous people have survived genocide. These groups have had to define their humanity outside of a White gaze to survive, live lives of meaning, and have hope up to this point. So while there is trauma, there is resilience and a language for processing devastating experiences and imagining new futures.

To move forward, we must honor that violence underpins the political, economic, and other social relationships we have. Manu just centered violence too. None of what he described could occur without fierce use of force. Whether implicit or explicit, people are experiencing slow death through violence. Toni Morrison, and other people in my wisdom tradition, have already been contemplating what it means to move beyond horrific experiences. Resmaa Menakem in My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies (2017) discusses how flight, fight, freeze, and annihilate responses override the sophisticated thinking of the prefrontal cortex and thus influence our social relationships more than we expect. We feel threatened by conversations that cut to the core of our identities and worldviews, and we react to this threat the way we would if we were to encounter a wolf in the wild. Emotional and spiritual processing is critical. As a Christian, prayer – reaching for a higher wisdom and power than myself, that of the Creator and sustainer of the world – is crucial. People of Color have many communal processes, from churches to dance halls, for managing social distress. Circling back to My Grandmother’s Hands, Menakem said that his book’s name comes from noticing the calluses on his grandmother’s hands. His grandmother picked cotton starting at age six. She combed through tiny, razor-sharp seeds, and her hands were left bloody and raw. Eventually, the skin responded by developing calluses to protect her.

Let us honor those traditions that reflect the social calluses we have. Yet let us also move through the pain to get to the other side. As people in positions of power at Barnard, we are responsible for amplifying the voices of people who do not hold our platforms. I hold class privilege and have access to an institution that many of my brothers and sisters do not, even as a Black woman experiencing my own forms of discrimination.

Yuval Dinoor

Thank you so much for sharing. I am so sad that we have to wrap up the panel portion of the event, but I know that these will be amazing springboards for conversations in the breakout rooms. So another huge thank you to all of our wonderful panelists for everything you shared with us today. Thank you all for having Rachel and me here with you for this conversation. It was an honor. Thank you.