Walking The Line of Blackness

“”Walking the Line of Blackness,” a 20-minute video created by and featuring graduate students from the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, puts their direct, personal experiences with racism in focus.  Their intent is to contribute to the national discourse about race, here and throughout academia in the U.S.”

I post this video in solidarity with the students in the video, and with other students, staff in faculty who are black at U of M’s campus, and other campuses around the country.

I honor your bravery as you try to live your lives in a time where black people in academia are increasingly punished and scrutinized for telling their own stories and pushing back against dominant narratives that assert our inherent inferiority while uplifting the notion of the superiority of whiteness.

Students in the video also reflected on the importance of why we say #BlackLivesMatter instead of #AllLivesMatter, and ideas on what changes they would like to take place in order to begin feeling like Black life actually matters.

Check out the news story about the video from The University Record.

“It’s not just about numbers and bodies of diversity in a room, it’s how do you thoughtfully and purposefully engage those different lived experiences in a way that’s meaningful for people.

And that doesn’t just start and stop in schools, it has to continue in work forces, it has to continue in communities. If we want to get to a place of common and human understanding, the only way to shape that, is through communicating those different lived experiences, in the places where we meet and interact.”

–Maron Alemu, MPP ’15

Ubuntu,

From Aspiring Humanitarian, Relando Thompkins-Jones, MSW, LLMSW

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