Confronting Racial Injustice

In the wake of current events we are forced to reflect on our own obligations and actions to combat racism and injustice within our institutions and pedagogies. In response the directors of Speculative Life have crafted this statement concerning what we feel the attitude to this situation ought to be in our research cluster and at the institute within which we reside—Milieux.

“I can’t breathe” is the powerful and terrible statement attesting to the violence to black lives shown in contemporary America. Coming in the wake of both George Floyd’s murder at the hands of the Minneapolis police and the COVID-19 epidemic that has systematically and disproportionally impacted African Americans, breathing has become very difficult . But only for some. That this most central action to life has been so regularly deprived to so many forces us to consider how breath is about ecology. Breathe is about the very conditions that allow life to commence. Air is a milieux.

We can understand this statement made by George Floyd, and so many before him, as an immediate cry for help and as a a temporal condition. George Floyd was held down for 9 minutes under the knee of Derek Chauvin before his death. Those minutes are haunted by the ghosts of the longer histories of slavery and race in the Americas. Such moments demand an encounter with how history and environments—institutional, political, economic—condition our ability to even hear and recognize the suffering of others.

In an institute named “Milieux” the question of “breath” demands, therefore, that we think ecologically. We must turn to asking how our institutions foster discrimination? What it means to develop more diverse and equitable forms of knowledge? How, in short, do we build a milieux for a more equitable, diverse, and just world?

In 1968 at San Francisco State University the first department of black studies was inaugurated. An outgrowth of both the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, the program recognized that race could only be addressed through institutional and pedagogical change, and the centrality of the university to this agenda. The program integrated performance art, anthropology, sociology, psychology, political science, and history. The explicit goal was to foster a “positive focus on the life experiences of Black people in America.” At its heart was a call not merely to address one group’s identity, but to use the interweaving of different disciplines and temporalities to critically contest and dismantle the seeming “normalcy” of racist America, while fostering practices that created new types and imaginaries of society.

Today we also face the tyranny of “normalcy”. The term “new normal” circulates ad nauseum throughout news outlets and social networks. How quickly we are told that the world has changed and we must accept this new normal. But what is this “new” normal? A world where black people continue to die? A world where the stock market recovers in a “V” but no social, educational, environmental, or health system ever does? For the University this “new” normal has been draped in a language of crisis. Budget cuts are inevitable, the ongoing withdrawal of the University from any mandate of shaping citizens, fostering democracy, producing new knowledge, and critically contributing to the future of societies abandoned.

While our times and conditions of production are far different from 1968 at SFSU, we also, humbly hope to address our current crisis through reflexively examining our own practices, and vowing to refuse this normalcy constructed upon ongoing racism, xenophobia, and exploitation. At this moment, with the University in “crisis”, it behooves us to recognize that the only crisis is not to the University as it was or is, but to our future imaginaries of democracy, equity, and diversity. We have never succeeded in making our educational institutions truly diverse, and if we wish to have a future society other than the one we have today, then it continues to be our role to develop forms of action, knowledge, and pedagogy that will shape that future. While there is no one answer, at Milieux we offer our steadfast commitment to refusing the normalcy that makes the murder of black lives and the lives of many others acceptable. We will undertake the challenge to foster multiple forms of practice and thought. We challenge conventional forms of representation and narration. We will work to create different times and imaginaries for the future. We will encourage pedagogies and practices that are situated, contested, and contingent. We will remember history not to repeat but to change . Our role most be to create a milieux that might generate a world that is not, and never will be, normal. A world perhaps where we all can breathe.

We see this statement as a call to rethink the role of pedagogy and research in the University, and as an invitation to further action. We intend to follow this statement with a series of talks, workshops, publications, and curatorial projects over the next two years responding to this situation, and more broadly to how we should envision and create a more just, equitable, and diverse society in the future. And we ask our members to submit proposal for projects they wish to conduct in relation to these events and more broadly to the issues COVID-19 has made visible, and that now demand action.