to Columbia’s undergraduates (and students everywhere): HOLD THE LINE.
Adults that say “you’ll grow out of your radicalism when you have bills to pay” do so to make themselves feel better for selling out. LONG LIVE THE RESISTANCE.
This is a letter specifically to the college student dissenters. It was nearly entitled:
Grief is the most political thing that has ever happened to me.
And you can listen to it right here.
I was seventeen years old when I arrived at Northwestern University to attend for my undergraduate degree, specifically from a household that constantly debated between rent or food. Up until that summer (I arrived the summer before classes started because I am a meticulous Type B), I had college in my mind as this mystical oasis, this paradise where, if I could qualify with scholarships, I could have food and housing and space to learn in peace. Maybe I could even escape poverty. The first couple months were lonely and awkward; I dressed like a suburban mountain girl around a bunch of Black folks from Chicago. Somewhat disillusioning but still something worth believing in, this paradise. College.
Within a week of courses starting, the incoming class experienced our first student death: Chuyan Qiu killed by a cement truck on campus. The reports kept repeating that she did not wear a helmet, as if that was supposed to mean something to us. She was a foreign exchange student from China— meaning that she would not return home across seas to her family for new years celebrations, forever.
And, in terms of grief, very little happened administratively. They sent an email; told us to go to the university-sponsored mental healthcare facility; we went to class. This is where the disillusionment really began to take root.
I’ll spoil the ending: college is not where we go to become well-educated, well-prepared members of society. College is where very rich people (1) move students around like repurposed lab mice and (2) mine faculty for their brilliance in job structures that greatly mimics the plantation. The colonial school is colonial, as in: they seek to help us solve the biggest problems of society without ever wanting us to disrupt the structures that truly cause them. Racial capitalism is a death machine, and universities profit off that in many ways— from the ethnic cleansing they spearhead on the surrounding urban neighborhoods so they can continue their property management schemes to the ethnic cleansing they fund across seas with the weapons they invest in. The spoils of capitalism cause death (always), so they teach us death by their “negligence” is acceptable. Because death by “negligence” is the primary cause of death in the working class. Such as: when a cement truck collides into a first year student on campus and she is killed, everyone rules it an accident. Negligence. No citations written up for the driver. No citations written for a university that didn’t have a bike lane. They send an email imploring us to take care of our mental health.
Later in my first year, someone I had just come to know died of said “negligence.” His name is Mohammed Razman and he was in his first year, like me. At seventeen, you really don’t understand how long a life is. I’m twenty five now and he is still dead. We were in a program together; we had friends of friends in common; he drowned to death, after being accepted onto the university’s rowing team, even though he could not swim. Even though he told a teammate just days before his death he could not swim. I heard he died in an “accident;” the accident was that he put his oar in the water wrong fell out of a boat, and found himself swallowed by Lake Michigan without a life jacket on.
We have a rock on campus that served as state-sanctioned creativity, a place where we could color within the lines. They didn’t want you to paint anything but the rock; we were to leave the bench and the tree next to this rock alone. Of course, no one gave a fuck. The tree and the bench were repainted again and again, always alongside the mass of layered paint.
When Mohammed Razman died and there was a cannon shot and an email sent out with a loose nod to “negligence” cc’d, his friends grieved, they painted the rock in black and gold. And the tree too, black and gold, with his initial and name on the trunk: FOR M. RAZMAN.
More emails followed that year. Suicides. Names I did not recognize but will now never forget were added to the tree. Eventually, over the course of my undergraduate career, so many names were there that the tree was painted over, the names made smaller, to accommodate each student that had died. By “negligence.” The rock was painted over countless times, but the tree stood still, a student testament to those that came to college to compete and lost their lives. I remembered why we all fucked with The Hunger Games so much— if we have to be here and watch each other die of your negligence while we scatter off to class and work to compete for the chance at enough money one day to save ourselves from state-sponsored negligence (if you had to compete at all), some of us, at least, would not refuse to skip the grieving. Maybe we would die, in body or in spirit; until then, we refuse to forget.
When our grief compelled us to disrupt, to color outside the lines in ugly ways, in unruly ways, they chopped the tree down.
I will never forget that. I had returned to campus in the summer of 2020 to take graduate pictures. I did not attend my foolish Zoom gradaution because they asked the mayor at the time, Lori Lightfoot, to give the keynote. I, in fact, helped write the petition to boycott. Friends of mine, friends I didn’t know, had been kettled downtown by her administration and beaten by the police not weeks before. When they raise the gates on the river and issued a curfew that was impossible to meet during a Black Lives Matter protest, thus legalizing the abuse and arrest of everyone trapped on the street, I watched states away, on Twitter, as people I knew, people I didn’t, nameless faces, my friends, dorm room folks, people I exchanged numbers with at the Black House were beaten by the police. They asked this same mayor to speak at my graduation on Juneteenth.
When I returned to campus to take pictures in front of the memorial tree, it was gone. They’d chopped it down. This was summer of 2020, when everyone was gone, when we were still only at the start of the dying. It’s as if they knew the heights and depths of the death that was coming, and they knew what they would be asking us to do. Now, with death tolls in the millions in the United States from Covid, death tolls that are horrendously undercounted because we’ve stopped reporting, I worry oftentimes that they’re correct. They successfully got us all to lack grief and to forget.
By fall of 2020, that same year, Northwestern University allowed Northwestern University’s police department and Evanston’s police department to bring dogs to a protest and shot student protesters with pepper balls. The colonial school is colonial. Today, I feel a lot of despair. I got a lot of grief racked up in my body. I almost didn’t get out of bed today.
The students at Columbia University prove my despair to be misplaced.
To the teenagers and the college students with skin in the game:
I write to you wearing my pajamas in the late afternoon, because the days I am not cosplaying as a Black radical Ms. Frizzle for you on TikTok and Instagram I am repeating, remember your revolutionary optimism, ismatu and trying not to smoke for breakfast. You all are compelling my pen today and I thank you for it. I am pulled out of a grief-induced writer’s block because of you. Thank you! I am heartened (!!!) watching you all learn what I learned too in college— that the university does not operate under negligence. They watch us more than they care to admit. They are more than competent to protect us from the death they produce. Only when you stand in their way do they reveal their true motives: they want us in sustained, suspended compliance with death. When you refuse to comply, they call the death squads on you.
The colonial school is colonial, as in: the main difference between the Global North and the Global South is the ability to hide the stink and stench of mass death. The operations in Palestine might have been successful if martyrs did not live tweet their own deaths. We’ve seen third world universities (as in, learning houses that have no stake or desire to teach their students to uphold the first world, word to A Third University Is Possible) bombed in totality. And your school, your infrastructures, your overseers are banking on the idea that you consider yourself distant enough from the death and the dying to package the grief in three to five business days. That you will continue to scuttle from class to dining halls to home and back.
True Grief is deeply unproductive to the ideals and the productions of capitalism. The spoils of racial capitalism are death (always) and Grief does not delight in company. Grief snatches that productivity. Grief commandeers your body like a parasite and mobilizes you towards its own best interest: to slow down, stake your feet in the ground and, alongside your community, refuse the process of forgetting integral to the death machine running. To remember is to act. Grief stands unproductive to the death-machine because it abhors the strange, swinging fruits of racial capitalism.
The only reason we think that disaster here, in imperial cores, is better is because the dead are disappeared and no one blinks. The dead are disappeared before our very eyes. People are made dead alive; they before waltz like zombies, begging us for help, and we do our best to avoid the “homeless.” We hear the numbers of those ended from Covid and they are never real to us because many of us did not see them, when there were so many bodies in New York City they filled meat warehouses with them. There is no panic-stricken neighbor telling you the hospitals are full, wondering what we’re going to do; the person that tells you that is a passive-faced news anchor, speaking in statistics about people that have been removed from society. Hospitals disappear our sick from society. When we observe the spoils of colonialism across the world: murdering indigenous populations in mass, in horrendous ways, the use of sexual violence as a tool of genocide, the bodies of children blown to bits— we are told to turn off our phones for our “mental health.” Thus, the process of forgetting begins. And institutions designed to support and enrich the populace, like universities, continue to fund the literal weapons of mass destruction used to slaughter Palestinians.
We do not grieve in imperial cores because we don’t know how to grieve an invisible dead— when grief is visceral and up close, it lives in your body. It commandeers whatever energy you had away from the scutter to class and to work and directs it towards rooting yourself in opposition to the death machine. Should we make our deaths visible, should we move consciously towards the people disappeared and feel then as our own, we make ourselves targets. We are cut down, murdered slow and in public, entirely disappeared by way social death, by disenfranchisement, set up well to be killed because we were stripped of systematic, familial, and communal support. And in mass suspensions, mass arrests, deploying the city police forces, and evicting you all from your campuses, I am watching your collegiate institutions do this to you!
And here is their end goal: when you inevitably die, physically or socially or both— from lack of housing, or healthcare, or employability, ontologically or literal, physical death, when you are stripped from any meaningful support— they will (eventually) apologize for their “negligence.” They’re “missteps.” Atrocities documented and uncovered; they swear to us they will get right on it. Someone says the word investigate with plenty of gravitas. They wait til the supporters go home or back to school or leave for work and then they chop down the memorial tree. They will memorialize your valor for being on the “right side of history” fifty years from now, if we make it that far as a species.
HOLD THE LINE.
Accept nothing but the full concession of your demands, especially the ones about getting cops off your fucking campus. Divestment from death machines means overseas and here in the city! Or wherever you are! You have the eyes on you to win. You have the people behind you to win. Emcampments are spreading like fire across the country. Hold the line! The next phase of co-opting after rooting and blooming successful dissent is the specticalization. I am an ocean away, already watching it happen. Powerful people will stand next to you, take pictures, call for support, and otherwise treat you like a spectacle. They will do their best to applaud you with no teeth, no skin, no bone in the game. This is done to make the movement you are starting and circulating feel like a viral, passing moment. Whatever to those nerds. You all are already organizing like you will win.
There are high school students watching you all put skin in the game: detainment, suspension, expulsion, jail time, degrees not conferred to you— and you are shaping what is possible for them. Show them that youth means to dissent until these systems collapse under your collective weight. Show them what it means to keep the grief near your chest. HOLD THE LINE UNTIL ALL YOUR DEMANDS ARE MET!
I did not really get involved in organizing on campus until graduate school (since my last year was stolen by COVID-19 and my mother being very ill). And that’s a far more fickle bunch. I’ve also watched, over the past two years, several graduate student union strikes occur across the country that all conceded their collective bargaining power (withholding their labor) before all their demands were met— meaning some of their comrades went on strike and endured that precarity for zero (!!!) material gain. In my opinion, adults tend to move towards radicalism to make a statement, but they do not play to win. You are already learning from our mistakes! The class solidarity I am witnessing is enormous. HOLD THE LINE!
I repeat: we are all watching you. Young teenagers, people about to come to college, are watching you make and shape our collective history. Students across the country are already following your lead. Every day I see more demonstrations, more encampment at schools across the United States doing the same thing. Teach them that you “outgrowing” radicalism is not the natural way of things— that is a conscious choice adults make when they are scared enough or duped into supporting these death-machines. Community investment is the only way to truly keep us safe. You display that with excellence. I am proud to share a generation with you. I am so fucking proud of you.
All this said with a cup of ginger tea and honey. Thank you for loaning me your resolution and inspiration today, where I am really missing some loved ones who have passed on. I hope the work of your day strengthens your resolve for a better tomorrow, where you sleep in your beds with no guilt about the warplanes that pass over our heads (because they’ve ceased to exist). Or, simpler said:
Peace.
ismatu g.
This is what every SJP chapter, what every JVP chapter, what EVERY student RIGHT NOW needs to hear. Thank you for inspiration and empowerment !
This is a radicalism no one can afford to grow out of. Thanks for this powerful post, Ismatu.
Hold the line! And peace to all.