When I first spoke with writer, afrofuturist, visionary thinker and pleasure activist Adrienne Maree Brown, for our interview in Longreads last month, Kanye West was distant memory. If I’m being honest, I had forgotten about him, outside of the reference from Jay-Z in 4:44. But then, he came back to Twitter and to public life with a vengeance, making statements and choices that have made many of us ask ourselves whether or not we can claim him as one of our own. As I wrestled with these questions, I reached out to adrienne to follow up on our interview and to ask her about how the ideas she talked about in the interview around Emergent Strategy connected with the response to the behavior of Kanye West and whether it makes sense to “cancel people” when they make mistakes that seem like there’s no coming back from. We spoke via email. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Justin Scott Campbell: So my first question is in regards to how we are responding to [Kanye currently]. I couldn’t help but watch the responses to some of his tweets and comments and think of what you said in our interview in Longreads last month:

adrienne: [What] I see in practice is that people still default to punishing each other — as soon there is a break in communication, as soon as there is a misunderstanding, as soon as there is a difference in political opinion, there’s this attitude of, you know, we cancel this person, we’re throwing them away. And so I pay attention to people’s beliefs and their practices and I try to question people and call people into thinking about, what are you practicing?(emphasis added)

Is [punishing] what we’re doing to Kanye? Or is there something more nuanced at work in our responses to him?

adrienne maree brown: Kanye is fascinating to me, or our interactions with him are fascinating. He is clearly thinking all the time and seems prone to making his growth spurts and regressions public.

We love him and his art, call him a genius, and then he does something that reminds us that a) his mama died at a crucial moment in a traumatizing way and b) his mental health is in question. Or c) he’s a megalomaniac. And d) the same person who said “George Bush doesn’t like black people,” is now a Trump enthusiast.

Our responses are the exact opposite of what I think we need to do with someone who is truly having a breakdown: [We]engage seriously with the most outrageous words spoken, publicly ridicule him (brilliantly I might add, #ifslaverywasachoice on Twitter is an example of humor that heals) and even ‘kill’ him off (#ripkanye). We basically say he is of no use to us because he’s crazy. Or we say he’s just doing it all for attention, for controversy.

I only met Kanye once, when he was very young and hungry. I don’t know him now, but I think it’s a bit of all of the above. He’s not well. He makes choices to exacerbate his condition, part of his condition is rooted in mother grief, and, just like the president, his need for attention is greater than his longing for respect. And his mental state makes it impossible for him to hide how much he cares, and impossible for him to get what he seems to want — love, respect, to be seen as an evolved thinker.

The best interaction I’ve seen in this is with the young black man in the TMZ office who basically says, you hurt me, you hurt us with this foolishness. And Kanye moves towards him so intensely, with such passion, to apologize. It produced two reactions in me. First, why does it upset us? This farcical love between insane men [in Trump and Kanye] who do not know how to live with dignity. Why does it feel so personal? I think this shows our terror. We are terrified. And we need the Kanye who stands up to Presidents. And, like in a bad breakup with a mentally unstable abuser, we want to believe the ‘good’. We do not want to surrender woke Kanye for sunken place Kanye wherein the sunken place is a mental illness cocktail that includes internalized white supremacy. We definitely don’t want to consider that woke Kanye was just a play for attention from a ravenous black hole.

Which brings me to my other reaction — it’s like Ender’s Game, where the children believe they are playing a game. [What they] don’t know [is that] they are fighting a real war, taking real lives. Kanye is traipsing through a field of

landmines asking us to chase him. In this way, he is just a public reflection of America at this time. We’re all going to die and we can’t seem to course correct because we can’t take it seriously enough to change our trajectory.

As you note, he’s sworn off perfectionism and being “on brand” in an attempt to live in what he believes to be an authentic way. The hard part is that his authenticity will obviously be informed by the fact that he lives in a gated community in Calabasas, and does lots of, what he calls “rich nigga shit” that the majority of his potential audience cannot relate too. It’s also why comparing this to Ender’s Game works so well; he thinks he’s at the casino-themed holiday work party playing with fake money, when really he’s in Vegas, asking us to bet all of our money on ideas that may end up bankrupting the movement.

We love him and his art, call him a genius, and then he does something that reminds us that a) his mama died at a crucial moment in a traumatizing way and b) his mental health is in question. Or c) he’s a megalomaniac. And d) the same person who said “George Bush doesn’t like black people,” is now a Trump enthusiast.

This was, for me, also part of the brilliance of what the young black man at TMZ pointed out. He talks about how “the rest of us” have to live in a world that is not Ye’s world, and that’s why we cannot be expected to resonate with his own notions of authenticity, since for many of us, accepting that, for example, slavery was a choice, could lead us to approach liberation from a historical foundation that’s faulty, therefore jeopardizing the entire liberation project in the process.

Take Beyonce. Admittedly, one of the differences is that Beyonce is so much more private than Ye is. We never saw her process and this kept her in our hearts as a beloved artist and then elevated her to Nina Simone status once she started to use her genius explicitly for the movement. That being said, it’s the idea of banishment and the effects of said banishment on our culture that really worries me. What do you think?

I agree on the point around banishment. And I completely understand that people need boundaries with Kanye. I think there’s ground between those two things and I think black people deserve the space to be public in our trauma and to navigate through it with good boundaries. So when people say they are done with Kanye that’s fair. But he’s not dead, he’s not gone, he might be learning something important, even if I don’t have much emotional room for it.

Again, just like in any situation where mental health is in question, each of us as individuals can’t necessarily be a witness to everything that comes in the process of another. Secondary trauma is real. We each have limits.

I wrestle with my own wellness. I am beginning to suspect that this is the cost, a cost, of being fully alive. To really ask why you are here, for what, are you good, what do you really want, how can you live that, why are humans so harmful…the scale of these questions! But we’re supposed to consider all of these things, and live lives that others perceive as normal. Kanye isn’t beyond this, he wants to be perceived by others. He speaks of love and empathy with his arms around those who kill with the weapon of greed-based economics, racist economics.

Beyoncé has grown up in front of us — she sang ‘Cater to You’! But she isn’t a great comparison here because she has the capacity [and ability] to decide how she wants to be perceived, and generally to wait until her desired perception is possible before she acts. She never gets pulled into anyone else’s story, she waits and shapes her own. Kanye has no capacity [or ability] to wait, to let the water get clear. The anxiety that shows between the lines, in the lines, on his face, it looks so heavy, so disorienting, he seems to have no control.

I think the strategy with Kanye is the same as with the president — and I don’t think we have the discipline to do it en masse. But I think attention feeds the fires in these men, more than vision, more than positive obsession or stupidity or genius or their wives or anything else. More even than legacy. They are addicted to the attention possible in a moment, it is the drug that creates their public personas. We give it to them.

So I’m really struck by you saying that you wrestle with your own wellness and that you suspect that this is the cost, a cost, of being fully alive. I think this is what for me, is at the heart of this whole thing.

The problem with what Kanye said, though, is that there is a HUGE cognitive dissonance, as you so accurately note, between Kanye saying that he wants to be grounded in love and empathy while at the same time dapping up with people who live lives grounded in the exact opposite. It’s that disconnect that upsets me the most because at the end of the day, it’s confusing and ends up distracting us from conversations about how we can actually live lives grounded in love and empathy in the real world.

I wish Kanye did have the ability to wait and process before opening his mouth to millions of people. But wanting that to be true and it being true are two totally separate realities and we can only operate from the reality we currently have, so I’m glad that we do have Beyonce to lead us forward in that way.

Outside of setting up boundaries, there’s not much we can do about Kanye; we can’t sit down and have a heart-to-heart or tell him to go fuck himself to his face. In light of that, what does this mean for the “rest of us”? We will most likely publicly stone Kanye, but after he’s “dead”, what then? I’m interested in what you think this moment can teach us about ourselves, if anything, and how we move forward from here, not necessarily in terms being of pro or anti- Kanye, but as a larger society in general. Or maybe more specifically in the movement.

I think the whole practice of canceling people is childish and regressive. When I see it in people, I think they are hiding from their own shame and flaws. Kanye is a public mess, politically fickle, on his own trip. But whether he’s well or unwell, it’s his right to live and learn how he wants to, and it’s on us to choose how to interact with that. Moral high horse doesn’t seem to do much for us as a species — if it did it might be more interesting to me. But it just gets us into reduction and discarding people that actually don’t go away, just get further isolated and more likely to cause harm to themselves and others.

I think attention feeds the fires in these men, more than vision, more than positive obsession or stupidity or genius or their wives or anything else. More even than legacy. They are addicted to the attention possible in a moment, it is the drug that creates their public personas. We give it to them.

I’m tender around this because I’m watching people now say they want to cancel Junot Diaz. Junot comes out as a rape survivor, and within two weeks the move is to cancel him for the harm he did wrestling with that trauma? What is the point of that?

Accountability is so important, but it happens in community. There’s no such thing as a community in which all harm has been exiled. I think we have much harder work to do than we want to do here. The easier move is us vs them, victims vs perpetrators, sane people vs Kanye, everyone vs men.

But it’s not true.

What’s true is [that] trauma makes weapons of us. And fools, and secret keepers, and collaborators in harm. What’s true is that trauma is both singular violent events and the ongoing constant socialization of ‘power over’ for those deemed superior because of skin or penis or ability or inheritance or something else they didn’t create or do. If we are going to grow, we must embrace truth telling. We must generate our compassion. We must learn to set and hold boundaries within community, on this planet we share. We must learn what is worth our attention, and how powerful our attention is. We must get more passionate about healing than we are about punishing.

That’s powerful. I was just talking about this with a mentor of mine and she pointed out that all of this is about healing ourselves; our current way of dealing with pain isn’t healthy and the medical stats around stress-related diseases in communities of color seem to bear that out. She also pointed out that we contribute to the dehumanizing of ourselves when we dehumanize and dismiss others. And that’s what for me is at the core of this; how I respond says more about me than it does about anyone else, for better or for worse.

We are so deeply socialized into punitive systems that it feels impossible to us to consider that when someone has caused harm, harming them might not be the move.

As I think about it, it may be that Kanye’s sickness might be severe individualism.

Would that be a ramped of version of selfishness? Or something more nuanced?

Something [more nuanced]. It’s not just here’s what I want, but like…who I am, even if it’s fickle, [is] more important than a community, even if it’s the community that loves me. That being said, canceling people still isn’t abolitionist, or transformative.

This means that calling someone into accountability as opposed to calling them out would be the more transformative or abolitionist modality. How do we do that, though with a public figure?

I also think that withdrawing financial support is huge. I support #muterkelly for that. I’m interested in the #timesup work moving alongside of #metoo, which is figuring this out. We are in an interesting moment — I believe in believing survivors. I’ve also met people who misuse that trust to attack others from revenge or other bitterness, I’ve seen how memory can get distorted by public pressure, I think finding good process is crucial. And not all harm is equal. I think we do a disservice to the species and to survivors when we try to make something simple when it is actually complex. There a lot of experiments happening right now in transformative justice — this moment shows us how far we still have to go.

And when you say all this I can’t help but think of Bankole [in Parable of the Sower] and how he is skeptical of what he see’s to be the earnestness and simplicity of the Earthseed religion; it’s as though he doesn’t believe Lauren’s new religion will really work. And yet Lauren maintains that even if Earthseed feels simple and earnest, there HAS to be a shift, a new way of doing life with each other; the current way is not sustainable. I think I feel like we don’t even realize how much we’ve been socialized to believe that punishment is the only way. Collectively, outside of these experimental spaces, we still resort to using the same systems that oppress us everyday. How do we bring what we’re learning in those spaces into these types of moments? Maybe we’re already doing that, and I think your work in Emergent Strategy and Kate Werning’s work with the Healing Justice Podcast are crucial in that they offer practices and ways to integrate non-punitive accountability into our lives and organizations. Also I just had a thought; is Emergent Strategy your Earthseed?!

[Laughs] Emergent Strategy is definitely Earthseed. And yes that’s it — we are so deeply socialized into punitive systems that it feels impossible to us to consider that when someone has caused harm, harming them might not be the move. I think we need accountability so badly, we know we deserve it, and we think we can make something right about the past. But we can’t. All of these harmful men can’t make it right. They can hopefully get themselves right and help break the cycle that created the monsters within.

Right; so it seems that the point isn’t to make the past right but to change the trajectory of the future. To create new ways of being that will end with our “taking root among the stars” as opposed to our current path which has a high chance of leading to species extinction.

Yes.

Well, adrienne, thanks for this follow-up. It’s great to see the practices you talked about being applied in real time.

Thanks for intriguing questions!

adrienne maree brown is author of Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds and the co-editor of Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction from Social Justice Movements. adrienne also co-hosts the podcast How to Survive the End of the World with her sister Autumn. She is a writer, social justice facilitator, pleasure activist, healer and doula living in Detroit. Find out more about her work at adriennemareebrown.net

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A Response to Biola University’s SB 1146 Opposition

I’ve seen a lot of responses to California’s SB 1146 in the past days and weeks. LGBTQIA student activists argue that the bill seeks to disable Christian colleges from seeking exemptions from Title IX when it comes to LGBT discrimination on campus. The schools and their supporters, on the other hand, have argued that their religious freedom is being threatened by this bill. I want to begin by saying that I recognize that I am neither the first to speak or the center of this conversation; fundamentally this, to me, is about the students who attend these universities. Biolans Equal Ground/Biola Queer Underground, have represented LGBTQIA students at Biola and have been working to get the word on this bill and to bring attention to the arguments against it. My friend and colleague Brian Walton, an ally, has gone in detail, into the specifics of the SB 1146 bill and Christian college’s campaign against it here: Fear-Mongering From Religious University over LGBT Protections.

I want to respond to some of the claims made in one response in opposition to SB 1146 here. Brett McCracken, author of the books Hipster Christianity: When Church and Cool Collide and Gray Matters: Navigating the Space Between Legalism and Liberty recently wrote an essay called “‘Tolerant’ California Will Not Tolerate Christian Colleges”, on his blog. I’d like to push back on some of the points he argues for, as they seem to be similar in tone and rhetoric to those of institutions like Biola University are using to garner support for the opposition of SB 1146.

For the record, I believe that tolerance, inclusion and equity (and here I mean equity as opposed to equality, as Shane Safir describes in her essay “Equity vs Equality”) have never been terms that have allowed space for the tolerance and inclusion of discrimination. This seems to be where LGBTIA students and the administrations of these institutions disagree. In my opinion, these terms mean that as a society, we are attempting to create spaces within our institutions, where discrimination and exclusion are not the status quo. And yet opposers of the bill argue that their opposition of SB 1146 isn’t about reserving the right to discriminate.

It seems that the crux of the disagreement between Conservative Christian colleges and LGBTQIA students is this: fundamentally (no pun intended), these Conservative Christian colleges believe that LGBTQIA people aren’t part of a protected identity class in the same way as people of color or women are, even though LGBTQIA students would argue vehemently that they are. I’ve heard many refer to people being LGBTQ as a “lifestyle” choice in conservative spaces. This assumption (an assumption that could, at the very least, be challenged genetically, psychologically, biologically, etc) undergirds their entire argument for exemption, since religious tradition, for them, would override a lifestyle choice in the end.

As an aside, maybe an interesting conversation could happen over the claim that if either of the two, religion and sexual orientation would be considered a “lifestyle choice”, it seems it would be the former, as opposed to the latter. This could perhaps make the case of allowing LGBTQIA students to be a protected class at religious institutions, on the basis of these institutions own arguments for protection (granted the protection of freedom of religion is much more explicit constitutionally than the protection of one’s “lifestyle”, but this is a conversation I’d be interested in seeing both sides having).

That being said, the essay I’m responding to argues that the real victims of SB 1146 are Religious institutions. For McCracken, SB 1146 is an example of what he calls,

new liberal intolerance. SB 1146 is a blatant example of it, and the contentious debates about the bill in the California legislature have raised this concern. As state senator John Moorlach (R-Costa Mesa) said in the California Senate debate about SB 1146 in May, “Sometimes you can become what you hate, and you can become intolerant if you’ve been the victim of intolerance.”

And yet, I would argue that what the essay refers to as “the new intolerance” is actually anything but new. It’s the same “intolerance” that caused abolitionists to oppose widespread religious institutional support of slavery; it’s the same “intolerance” that caused the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. to lambast white and black moderate clergy in his “Letter from Birmingham Jail” when they asked him to “go slow” when it came to fighting racial injustice. As Jon Green writes,

Ending the tax exempt status for religious institutions doesn’t ban those institutions and it doesn’t constitute, as [Damon] Linker claims, “persecution.” All it means is that the government isn’t going to endorse their practices or give them extra help. Orthodox Jews are more than welcome to continue to turn away interfaith couples, and the Mormon Church is more than welcome to turn away same-sex couples, so long as they don’t do so with the direct endorsement of the government. This same principle is why Bob Jones University — one of the nation’s highest-profile religious institutions — lost its tax-exempt status in 1983. The University insisted on discriminating against African-American students, and the (notoriously irreligious) Reagan administration decided that the federal government couldn’t endorse that sincerely-held religious belief.

As per Green, SB 1146 isn’t about legislating intolerance of Christian universities; it’s about not allowing LGBTQIA discrimination to continue at institutions that receive taxpayer dollars from the state.

In reality, when we see claims of persecution in the panicked response from Biola, what we are really seeing can be summed up by the following anonymous quotation: “When you’re used to privilege, equality feels like oppression.” Religious institutions have been used to getting their way when it comes to exemptions like this for years. Now that they may not be, what actually is a push for equality on these campuses, feels to those involved, like oppression.

McCracken’s essay goes on to cite an opinion piece in the New York Times to make the case that liberals have been guilty of being intolerant of conservatives for a while now. The piece, by Nicholas Kristof, argues that

When perspectives are unrepresented in discussions, when some kinds of thinkers aren’t at the table, classrooms become echo chambers rather than sounding boards — and we all lose… Universities should be a hubbub of the full range of political perspectives from A to Z, not just from V to Z. So maybe we progressives could take a brief break from attacking the other side and more broadly incorporate values that we supposedly cherish — like diversity — in our own dominions.

Again, this is a rhetorical misdirection. The opinion piece is referring to the discrimination experienced by conservative scholars at public institutions. While we could argue about whether or not conservative scholars face discrimination at public, state schools, this it not what SB 1146 is about. As an alumnus of Biola University, I can certify that, in fact, universities like Biola are emphatically not “a hubbub of the full range of political perspectives from A to Z.” That’s exactly why bills like SB 1146 are being written. It’s my opinion that many of these universities don’t actually model what Kristoff is saying we need from universities any better than public higher ed institutions do. In private Christian higher ed, instead of there being only political perspectives from V-Z as Kristoff describes, there’s just A and you sign a consent form saying you believe in it to attend, work and teach there. McCracken’s essay goes on to say that,

California has forgotten what pluralism and tolerance are and why they are valuable for democracy. It’s not about everyone agreeing about everything. It’s about the value for society when the opposite is true: when there are varying perspectives and strong institutions that respect one another even while they hold distinct (and often mutually exclusive) beliefs. Civil disagreement and principled pluralism are foundational to a healthy democracy. Sadly America at large is forgetting how to do this and why we should.

The irony here is that, again, these conservative Christian institutions are, again, emphatically not about pluralism within their halls of their campuses; they are about everyone agreeing about everything; they are not about civil disagreement. If they were, bills like SB 1146 wouldn’t be needed because LGBTQIA folks and “traditional values” folks could go to the same school and agree to disagree. The same thing Biola wants from the state is exactly what LGBTQIA students want from their institutions: protection from discrimination.

Ultimately SB 1146 isn’t saying that religious institutions should be discarded; it’s not saying they aren’t crucial to our public discourse. What it’s saying is that religious higher education institutions shouldn’t be able to have the cake of discriminating against LGBTQIA students while also feasting upon taxpayer dollars for said students to attend, all the while being untouchable when it comes to civil actions from their LGBTQIA students. No one is making these institutions dissolve. In fact, what SB 1146 is doing is finally challenging these universities to do what the rest of public society has to do: become inclusive. If that feels like oppression, imagine what it must feel like to actually be one of the LGBTQIA students attending one of these institutions, watching all these institutions bend over backwards, to not have to protect them as people.

Justin Campbell is a college English professor and freelance writer living in Los Angeles. He is the winner of the 2013 Hurston/Wright Award for African-American Writers. He is the co-creator of an original podcast on the intersections of race, gender, sexual orientation and class with spirituality/religion entitled “embodied. a podcast”. Justin is also a contributing writer with the Los Angeles Review of Books and his work has been published in The Millions and The African American Review.

On Fear and Writing

Let me echo what Damon Young of Very Smart Brothas said at the outset of his piece by saying at the outset of my piece that I am in no way comparing my career to either Damon Young’s or Ta-Nehisi Coates’; their work is far ahead of mine in terms what they’ve achieved and the notoriety and, in turn, derision that their work has received. I write this because as a I read both Coates’ essay, “On Homecomings” and Young’s response, “On Ta-Nahesi Coates And The Very Real Danger of ‘Writing While Black’”, I resonated deeply with both of their pieces.

Recently, I advised a Black college student to share publicly about their experience of racial microagressions on their college campus. The reason I advised this was because the campus community needed to know that racialized incidents happening in dorms and classrooms were not isolated; they in fact were pervasive.

It seems, then, in writing this, I am following my own advice. What Young and Coates write about are not isolated events. The night after I published an open letter to my Christian, conservative university, asking it to reckon with the legacies of white supremacy and racism thriving within its midst, I had a dream. Not the Dr. King kind of dream; an actual, while I was sleeping in my bed, dream. In that dream, a brick with a note wrapped around it came crashing through the window of my house, like that scene in Remember the Titans. It was so vivid that the anxiety it produced during the night followed me into the next day. The only reassurance I was able to give myself was that as renters, our address was unlisted and that we had double paned windows that might be able to stand up to whoever thought to throw something at it. And so, as I read Coates’ and Young’s essays, to say that they hit close to home, would be both an understatement and a terrible pun.

The hyper-vigilance that requires that I be ready, at any moment, to protect my body from racist harm, I’ve come to realize, is a psychological mindset passed down from the plantations of the South, through centuries of my ancestors being conditioned to be ready for random acts of violence to be committed against them solely because of their race. Young describes walking down the street and wondering what kind of object he might use to throw at an attacker; Coates describes his fear of seeing his family and address on the Internet. This same fear, caused me to scrub my social media profiles of all pictures of my family as soon as I posted the open letter. Some may say this is extreme. Maybe it is.

And yet my point in writing this is not to say that I am the most vulnerable among us; I have to admit that there are people even more targeted in this country than I am. That being said, I want to speak to this fear: the fear that who I am, in my very embodiment, may someday lead to someone to justify using violence against me.

That fear is a fear I had long before my first piece was picked up for publication, before my pen ever touched the paper.

My dream, that someone would respond to my work with violence, feels to me a symptom of a deeper phobia: there are those who disagree with me so much that they would rather hurt me than let me voice what I believe. This fear is not unfounded; it was not unfounded on that morning in Birmingham in 1963 when KKK members set off a bomb in a church that killed four little Black girls. It was also not unfounded on that warm night in Charleston in 2015 when a white supremacist killed nine Black church members as they gathered for evening Bible study. The fact is that there are and have always been those in this country who want to see Black folks kept “in their place”; some will even kill to try to make it so.

Or perhaps I’m just being paranoid; maybe the worst of of what I will experience is being called a “whiny negro” by a troll on Twitter. But even if that was the worst of it, one thing remains: as a result of my work, there is a chance that someone might use violence against me and my family. This is something that I don’t believe I will ever shake. I cannot imagine an America, for I have not yet seen this America, where this fear won’t always lurk uncomfortably near the surface of my consciousness every time I, as a Black man, decide to speak my mind.

Justin Campbell is a college English professor and freelance writer living in Los Angeles. He is the winner of the 2013 Hurston/Wright Award for African-American Writers. He is the co-creator of an original podcast on the intersections of race, gender, sexual orientation and class with spirituality/religion entitled “embodied. a podcast”. Justin is also a contributing writer with the Los Angeles Review of Books and his work has been published in The Millions and The African American Review.

An Open Letter to Biola University

While I was an undergraduate at Biola University, a prominent Christian college 20 minutes outside of Los Angeles, a mentor of mine would often remind me that, “The problem is not the problem.” I worked in student development, with the residents of the university and my mentor would say, that what seems to be the problem initially is a symptom of a deeper, more toxic problem. The initial problem, what gets your attention, opens us to the deeper, wider issue at hand. That deeper problem, he said, is what we’re always looking for, and the one we must address.

Biola now faces a hate crime incident in which a swastika was drawn above the dorm room door of an African-American student. As a Black alumnus of Biola, I have been frustrated by the way Biola has portrayed the event to the media, offering an image that contradicts the lived experiences of the Black students who attend the school. That image is represented in a statement released by the administration via email to the student body last week:

“It needs to be clearly and publicly stated that such an action is in direct opposition to Biola’s values of truth, transformation and testimony, which are intended to ensure that our students are equipped in mind and character to impact the world for the Lord Jesus Christ. Our community is to be characterized by Christ’s love in order to be a relevant and redemptive voice in a changing world.”

In the days since the email was sent, there have been multiple student statements that have surfaced on social media that contradict this narrative. The statements make it clear: the social reality for Black students on campus is much different from the image Biola has chosen to portray to the media.

This misrepresentation of the campus climate and culture is dangerous. Misrepresentation in this case, places the responsibility for this hate crime — and other acts of anti-Blackness on campus — on individual rogue “unknown students,” when in fact the responsibility for the campus climate and student culture ultimately lies with the institution itself.

Black students have repeatedly faced discrimination on campus, as their statements attest to; to this point there hasn’t been enough done to make sure these incidents don’t happen again. Biola has allowed a student culture to develop in which cultural competency is not required of all students, a culture which nurtures willful ignorance regarding race, gender and sexual orientation, and which allows students to remain largely unchallenged, and unchanged on these issues as they go through a liberal arts education there.

While events like SCORR (Student Congress on Racial Reconciliation) exist, they are not mandated by the college — for all students to attend — in the same way, say, as Missions and Torrey Conferences are mandated. If Biola’s community is to be characterized by Christ’s love in order to be a relevant and redemptive voice in a changing world, as they say, SCORR would already be required for all students; no excuses (e.g., fear of losing donors, fear of white student and parent retribution, etc.) would stand in the way as obstacles. In addition, Biola has failed to equip its students in mind and spirit because there are no required general education courses that address issues of race and racism in America and the role Christians must play in the fight — because, again, Biola’s commitment to diversity is, literally, only skin deep.

Biola may say, “We are making efforts,” but many current and past students have noted, and I agree, that their “efforts” have — for the past twenty years — made almost no difference.

Instead, then, Black students have attempted, on their own, to create spaces and hold events to educate their peers on issues of race. They should not have to play this role; education, in an institution of higher learning, is the job of the institution, not its students. Not only, though, have students acted as educators where their educators have remained silent, but students have met resistance from their own administration and advisors. Students, being told that their events — which confront issues like white privilege — shouldn’t occur on campus, because white students might become upset. In doing this, Biola has prioritized the comfort of the majority white students over the lived painful experiences of their Black and Brown ones.

Biola’s student newspaper has, for days after the hate crime was made public, willfully ignored statements from their students of color; in fact, as of the release of this article, a week after the event, they have yet to release any story on the matter — opting instead to write numerous articles on a recent talent show.

This is unacceptable.

Within the past week, as I have met with and talked with Black students on campus at Biola, they tell me they are hurt by this incident, but they also tell me they are not surprised. For many Black students, this is just another racially motivated incident in a long line of racially motivated incidents during their time at Biola. The appearance of a swastika, they say, is more of the same: the perpetuation of willful ignorance among the general student body.

When it comes to issues of race, my alma mater is the kind of school where Black students should not be surprised to find themselves victims of racist attitudes and behaviors — and the university has for the most part kept silent. Where is the press conference with Dr. Corey? Where is the statement acknowledging the institution’s complicity in creating a culture that would allow for an incident like this to occur? They are nowhere to be seen. Instead, we have statements that serve to relieve the pressure that could be placed on them by the public, instead of addressing the issues that lead to this event in the first place. [Update: As of 5:32pm on April 25th, Dr. Corey has released a statement, via email, to the student body calling for corporate prayer and fasting in response to the hate crime].

The swastika, then, is not the problem. The problem is that Biola has not accepted its actual social reality. They would prefer, instead, to deny the racism active in their midst. They have not accepted their institutional negligence. They have not mandated cultural competency. What is needed is not just reconciliation; first there must be truth. As an institution it must confess to consciously and unconsciously fostering racism, privilege, bigotry. Biola must confess their lack of action to rid the campus of these issues, supporting ignorance. Biola, then, must tell the truth about itself, to itself, so that it can move forward into hard work of true campus-wide liberation.

If in service of the maintaining the status quo the administration continues to ignore the voices of the marginalized on campus, then we will be able to say with certainty that next time the PR rep gives us a statement about Biola’s commitment to diversity on campus, that statement is spoken to deflect our attention from the real problem, a problem that exists within the hallways of Metzger, the university’s prestigious board, within the values and priorities of the institution itself.

[For more on why this conversation matters, please read Carlos Antonio Delgado’s essay entitled, “Racism Has Again Become Something to Diminish, Rationalize, & Deny at a Christian University”]

Justin Campbell is a college English professor and freelance writer living in Los Angeles. He is the winner of the 2013 Hurston/Wright Award for African-American Writers. He is the co-creator of an original podcast on the intersections of race, gender, sexual orientation and class with spirituality/religion entitled “embodied. a podcast”. Justin is also a contributing writer with the Los Angeles Review of Books and his work has been published in The Millions and The African American Review.