Necessary Change: The Impact of Protesting, and How We Must Continue to Fight for Justice
George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery — three names that will forever be symbols of the necessary change this country is currently facing. We often look to those who lead as sources of inspiration, but who do we look towards when the conversation is all but concrete? These conversations can be tough, but they are necessary in order to promote (and hopefully achieve) the needed transformation of society.
Two UNC Greensboro professors with a breadth of experience in tough conversations like these are Dr. Noelle Morrissette and Dr. Armondo Collins. Dr. Collins is a professor of African American and Diaspora Studies (AADS), and Dr. Morrissette is the director of the AADS program.
We sat down with both of them to talk about how important it is to have these discussions with young people, why they are passionate about the work that they produce, and what exactly our future may look like in the midst of today’s political climate.
As someone who studies and teaches about the diversity of Black cultures, history, art, and sociopolitical movements, what are your thoughts on the protests ignited by the death of George Floyd?
Dr. Noelle Morrissette
Director of African American and Diaspora Studies, UNCG
I think first about George Floyd as a man who lived, had a mother, a father, a family, friends, and a community to which he belonged. He was loved. I find this no different from Emmett Till and countless other African Americans whose lives were brutally ended. While there is often the inclination to turn their lives into symbols, they were humans first. By turning the focus to their humanity, we can more easily see that their fate could befall any person who is raced.
It is sometimes difficult to see the experience of someone whose life is different from our own. But these protests underscore that many recognize our shared fate and possess the will to recognize inequality and advance a better practice of democracy. I deeply affirm this will in our students.
Dr. Armondo Collins
Professor of African American and Diaspora Studies
Director of the Digital Media Commons
The George Floyd protests are pivotal, I think, in how they inflect a national ethos that acknowledges a common danger shared by all living under militarized police rule. The protests will be remembered in history as a catalyst for more far-sweeping social liberalism and political reform.
I worry, however, that the catalytic nature of our particular moment will skew the facts attending to the case proper and distort its unique place in the history of state-sanctioned violence against African America specifically since the nation was founded. Black people have been killed dead and alive by the system of white supremacy that most American police agencies represented for centuries. Police reform is one of the many systemic changes this society will have to grapple with in order to overcome America’s legacy of slavery and racism.
What led you to African American studies and specifically African American literature?
Dr. Morrissette: My lifelong love of African American literature began with two texts: Malcolm X’s Autobiography of Malcolm X (with Alex Haley) and the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe’s first novel, Things Fall Apart. I read these works independent of my high school curriculum, which was quite limited, and felt each of them very deeply. They raised questions about what I thought I knew about America in a global context: its history, culture, experiences, and literature. These two books helped initiate my quest for greater cultural and literary understanding. They are also examples of the writer’s craft of storytelling. I love the story of America and of Africa as it is written by its diverse authors, and in my own scholarship, I continue to work on my craft of writing about these stories accurately, ethically, and vividly. Both Malcolm X and Chinua Achebe assume the great responsibility that comes with being a good writer; I use their texts, and others, as models of ethics and craft in my writing and in my classroom.
Chancellor Gilliam’s recent statement about our shared fate reminds me of the crucial nature of storytelling. The story we tell about ourselves can, should, affirm our shared fate. In the late 1980s, Achebe wrote:
“It is only the story that can continue beyond the war and the warrior. It is the story that outlives the sound of war-drums and the exploits of brave fighters. It is the story…that saves our progeny from blundering like blind beggars into the spike of the cactus fence. The story is our escort; without it, we are blind. Does the blind man own his escort? No, neither do we the story; rather it is the story that owns and directs us.” I think this says it all.
What does this movement bring up for you from a personal perspective?
Dr. Collins: I was born in St. Paul, MN. I lived there until I was 20. I know firsthand the policing that George Floyd was subjected to. It was a part of everyday life as a Black person in Minnesota. Over-policing and surveillance. It isn’t just the Minneapolis police department; it is the white society in Minnesota as a whole that over-polices and surveils Black life and Black bodies.
From ages 13 to 25, I thought it was normal for police officers to drive up on the curb with cars, to cut you off as you walk, to ask you where you were going. I thought it was a given that officers would draw their guns out on you during routine traffic stops. I thought all white people were naturally scared of Black people, and although annoying, were expected to ask you if you live or belong in the space you were occupying. None of that is normal. And none of it is justified. And none of it will bring about social equilibrium if we allow it to continue. Racism is pathological and unsustainable as a social-economic-political growth model.
Being a white woman who deeply discusses the evolution of Black culture, have you ever encountered challenges to your knowledge?
Dr. Morrissette: Yes, and always. I have to be comfortable with the fact that I lack daily experiential knowledge of what it is like to move through this world as an African American. I have to affirm and make central the voices of students and faculty who can speak to these experiences. And I need to provide a platform for their voices. I am humbled to be present in this conversation as an active listener. My obligation as a mentor of students is to train tomorrow’s scholar, even as I listen and am educated.
Many now ask: what can I do? How can I know more about these issues? One of the challenges for non-marginalized peoples — whites — is, I think, relinquishing the idea that they themselves will solve the nation’s racial problems. But this idea of empowerment reinforces the disempowerment of those who are marginalized. One can look to our nation’s nineteenth-century abolitionist movements to find emblematic examples of this. Education and reading — I mean books — can crucially inform the nation of these issues. For whites, it seems especially important to understand that dissent is a healthy action that demonstrates one’s defense of democratic ideals. Knowledge is not a static concept. Knowledge is practice. It moves through people.
In your experience, what are productive ways to teach and talk about race and bias?
Dr. Collins: I talk about race and racism as functional components of America as a system of white supremacy designed to evolve and self-perpetuate in the maintenance of itself. Race and racism, though very personal in their manifestations, are at their core vital aspects of a system of living predicated on violent inequality and served by racism’s continued existence as a social force holding sway over the progress of society as a present and future reality.
Dr. Morrissette: I think the first thing to note that race does not equal blackness, although the term is often used in this way. There are excellent scholarly studies of the formation of whiteness in the American nation, from the Immigration Exclusion Act of 1791 forward, that can help us understand that the term “race” applies to us all. Of course, race as a black-versus-white formation was and continues to be the deepest dividing line in this nation. (The “one-drop rule” distinguishing black ancestry from white was spectacularly confirmed in the case of Plessy vs. Ferguson, where Homer Plessy, a man by all appearances white, sued for equal access to the whites-only train car in order to contest segregation; the Supreme Court responded by making official what was already the “custom” of de jure Jim Crow.)
In my classes, I provide some of this historical context, and we get at these ideas and this history through culture and literature — that is, through specific texts, authors, and genres. What we find is that these authors use their art to renegotiate, confront, and create circumstances for beauty and for conversation between groups. We recognize that there are diverse perspectives and many voices within the African-descended community and points of connection between Americans. What’s significant is that these authors do not turn away from, but rather turn towards, issues of crisis and inhumanity, to voice the ways in which our nation has addressed, or failed to address, its democratic principles across lines of race, class, and gender.
What is the best way to talk about this movement with children?
Dr. Collins: Explain to them that the events we are seeing on TV now have a long history. The people they see protesting are not criminals, they are courageous citizens expressing their disagreement publicly. The rioting, looting, and violence associated with protests are not the same things as protests or the necessary result of public disagreement.
Do you think we’ll ever truly achieve a utopian society?
Dr. Morrissette: To strive toward our ideals, we must acknowledge that they don’t yet exist as they should. I hope as a nation we will strive for a personal truth that is bigger than our individual experiences, and that we will use the skills we learn from each other in respectful conversation to think about, write, and becomes agents in narratives that facilitate broad humanistic understanding.
What do you feel the role of young people is in this movement?
Dr. Collins: Youth are often the vanguard of social movements. I think they have been vital in this latest resurgence of activism, but I don’t they have gone it alone, nor should they. Unlike some previous movements, I am not sure the current iteration of Black Lives Matter is served best by a break with previous African American protest movements. In fact, they are building on an unbroken tradition that it would be dangerous to untether from, no matter how seductive narratives suggesting otherwise may seem.
What is the best way to educate yourself/ourselves in order to become the most effective ally?
Dr. Morrissette: I love to read. I will never know everything, and I will never know enough. But reading by itself isn’t enough. Our knowledge must be put into practice as we form alliances with one another. I prefer to think of such alliances as filiation, a process of affirming kinship. Here I offer the wisdom of J. Saunders Redding, a scholar of African America who, in the midst of the nascent Civil Rights movement, observed: “If modern scholars are to deserve the name of scholar — of a moralist, of humanist, of philosopher — they must begin to show a vital concern with what happens to knowledge, with how it is used and why. The essence of true wisdom is distilled in the conscience. It is time that the scholars’ conscience spoke to the world.”
