"Racism Lives Here": a student response to the UR's "We're Better Than That" campaign

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Submitted by Rochester Indymedia on Sat, 2016-04-16 09:15

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"Racism Lives Here" is an incredible response / resource for those on and off the University of Rochester campus looking to understand structural racism and why the university's "We're Better Than That" campaign fails miserably.

According to the "Racism Lives Here" statement of purpose, the website is a response to the university's focus on "interpersonal racial prejudice":

This website, entitled “Racism Lives Here,” is a response to the University of Rochester's “We’re Better Than That” campaign. Rather than focusing on interpersonal racial prejudice, our aim is to address some of the limitations of “We’re Better Than That” by talking directly about the socio-historical structural forces that are crucial to understanding the nature of racism in the United States. Our goal is to situate racism at the U of R in a much broader context—to help demonstrate how, for many people of color, racist posts on Yik Yak cannot just be shrugged off. They cut deep, as they are indicative of centuries of oppression and discrimination displaying themselves in one of countless ways. We hope exploring this website can provide a framework for understanding how racism is much more than its most explicit manifestations (e.g KKK member in a white hood).

Our website has been curated to present a broad education on the issue of racism through multiple lenses and medias. By clicking on the links and dropdown menus at the top of the page, you will find posts written by the authors on topics such as micro-aggressions, notions such as “Black on Black” crime and “reverse racism,” housing discrimination, police violence, and more. You will find portraits of students with accompanying quotations describing their relationship to race and racism. You will also find links to other websites we have found useful.

Finally, we want to recognize the limitations of our own project. We are four students with limited time and resources. We are not here to provide “every side of the argument.” We acknowledge and recognize our biases, and we embrace them. We feel that for far too long, issues of systematic racism have been guarded from the public eye and left out of the conversations about race. This website is an attempt to provide educational information specifically geared towards U of R students. Our hope is to help shift the discourse around race to be more historically informed and structurally situated. We welcome comments and criticism which you can leave at the end of this page. We will continue to update this site. Please click on some of the photos below to hear testimony from members of the University of Rochester community and read the "Materials" to learn more.

UR senior students Darya Nicol, Robin Graziano, Miles Meth, and Shakti Rambarran developed and released the website publicly on April 13, 2016 , as an intervention combined with a shorter paper for their class The Black Body: Intersecting Intimacies.

The intervention focuses on "the socio-historical structural forces that are crucial to understanding the nature of racism in the United States," as a corrective to the university's campaign. A big part of this is structural racism. The students used this definition from the Aspen Institute:

Structural Racism: “A system in which public policies, institutional practices, cultural representations, and other norms work in various, often reinforcing ways to perpetuate racial group inequity. It identifies dimensions of our history and culture that have allowed privileges associated with “whiteness” and disadvantages associated with “color” to endure and adapt over time. Structural racism is not something that a few people or institutions choose to practice.Instead it has been a feature of the social, economic and political systems in which we all exist.” -The Aspen Institute

Rochester Indymedia was able to sit down with three members of the team, and talk about the site and how it came about, on the same day it was released. See the interview below: