EGSA’s Anti-racism and Inclusivity Statement

An open letter to our community from the English Graduate Student Association at the University of South Florida-Tampa:

“Our silences in the face of racist assault are acts of complicity” — bell hooks

No more. Daily, we hear the cries of outrage against the murders of Black people by police officers. No more. This historic moment redefines how we conduct ourselves as humans, as a nation, and for us, as graduate students and instructors. The USF-Tampa English Graduate Student Association (EGSA) supports the justified global protests to bring our communities together to create permanent, structural change to USF and institutions — educational, juridical, political, and economic — across the United States. Tony McDade, George Floyd, Dreasjon Reed, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Sandra Bland, and Trayvon Martin are but a few in a centuries-long list of names who have been taken from their families by state sanctioned and state funded violence. No more.

What can USF do? We want USF — a large, diverse, economic engine of Tampa Bay — to address things that are not as visible as the violence perpetrated against people of color--the institutional racism that quietly kills people of color, especially Black and Indigenous people, every day.

Our efforts to teach and learn to engage meaningfully and effectively with diverse people, places, events, challenges, and opportunities must go beyond diversity statements. As EGSA members, we must be actively antiracist in our readings, teaching, learning, and recruiting. Due to its structure as an extension of institutional inequity that begins in the K-12 educational system, higher education is an inherently racist institution. Some of us will bristle at that, and that is good. Now is the moment to be uncomfortable and to sit with that discomfort as an ally and advocate for the systemic changes that actually redress the injustices occurring every day, both on our campus and off. If we are not working towards equity, we are not working.

Every member of the community must do their own work to redress racism in all its forms. EGSA will do so in the following ways:

• Compose an antiracism inclusion statement that can be added to syllabi

• Study the antiracist teaching resources provided by the National Council of Teachers of English

• Hold bimonthly antiracism and inclusion workshops and training

• Hold listening/advice sessions (for both graduate students and faculty) focusing on strategies for handling pedagogical issues that arise during these discussions

• Support the petition to include a diversity course as part of the general education requirements at USF

We call on President Curall, University leadership, faculty, staff, and students of USF to do the following:

• Work toward actively undoing structures that limit access by and hinder the full participation of Black Americans and other people of color at and across all levels of USF

• Join disciplines together in intersectional teaching and support of justice and anti-racism

• Create curricular and programmatic change campus-wide to address racism and other forms of systemic inequity

• Interrogate their own biases and take action every day to expand their world views and practice compassion and safety for those whose lives have been endangered by brutality and marginalization

• Examine how they are upholding systemic injustices in their hiring, recruiting, and support structures

• Ask university partners what they are doing to show up daily for racial justice in their business practices and interactions with students, staff, faculty, and all community partners

• Work towards a significant, strategic, and visible effort from the administration, at both the college and university levels, to engage with members of the surrounding community with financial and emotional investments

We look forward to a University-wide reckoning with how we have historically upheld white supremacy in our institutional practices, and how we will work together to create real change. This moment is not solely about Black liberation — it is about ALL of us: “To build community requires vigilant awareness of the work we must continually do to undermine all the socialization that leads us to behave in ways that perpetuate domination” (bell hooks, Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope). It is our genuine hope that our leadership and our students will hear us and join in our commitment to do the messy work of growing. Learning does not stop when class is over. We can be better today than we were yesterday. And if we do not believe this to be true and actively engage with ideas that move us forward as a place of learning, then what is the purpose of higher education?

Listen. Reflect. Join us in doing the work.