In a press conference on April 30, New York City Mayor Eric Adams issued a warning to the parents of Columbia University students who were participating in on-campus protests against the genocide of Palestinians. Columbia is a private Ivy League institution, so university administrators must request the presence of the NYPD to intervene. “Please call your child and urge them to leave the area before the situation escalates,” he says. “This is for their own safety and for the safety of others.”
Just a few hours later, NYPD officers entered the campuses of Columbia and the City University of New York, breaking up encampments and arresting students. Since then, police have broken up student encampments at UCLA, MIT and many other schools, arresting students, charging them with misdemeanors and felonies, kicking them out of campus housing, and suspending them before graduation.
When situations with the police escalate, as Adams describes them, Black and Brown students are disproportionately targeted as “unsafe” by police officers, who often beat and arrest protesters. These are the moments Black parents, in particular, try to prepare their children for while praying in perpetuity that when the inevitable situation arises, their children survive. That preparation — “the talk” that Black parents recite to their children as an obligatory right of parenting passage — often falls to kids unprepared for the significance of their race and subsequent racism they will experience in their daily lives.
In my book “Black Women, Ivory Tower: Revealing the Lies of White Supremacy in American Education,” I discuss the other “talk” that parents of college students must give their Black children. This talk is about how distasteful folks will find their intellect, grit, work ethic and persistence in their attempts to destroy them.
I want to convey to my children that it’s not just formal policing they have to worry about. Teachers, principals, counselors, friends and parents of friends can be potentially racist. Stereotypes at school, with friends and even in friends’ homes may subject them to unexpected violence and traumas based on their race. I want them to be ready.
This other talk tries, and often fails, to explain future disappointments at school and work that will feel unexplainable in the moment. It tries to prepare Black children to have their hard work overlooked, their achievements demeaned and their credentials ignored. But how do you explain to your child that success may continue to feel out of reach no matter how hard they work or what they accomplish? The future mother in me often feels paralyzed by the knowledge of the talk’s simultaneous impossibility and absolute necessity.
Who is protecting Black and Brown students as police target them, institutions punish them, and the people and programs that support them are gutted?
Some versions of this talk include how Black people are sentenced to a lifetime of overwork, undercompensation and a front-row seat to watch mediocrity rewarded to the White people around us. The talk changes over time to include, at different points in our lives, what we don’t learn about Black history in school, the horrors of slavery, details of the Black Panthers’ work to feed Black students, and the race pride ideology of the Black women and men of the Harlem Renaissance. My parents included the other talk as part of their rotation of important lectures repeated during any lull in regular conversation. It wasn’t until I understood enough about the concept of White supremacy that the words they spoke had true power for me.
I didn’t realize until now that those talks impacted my sense of belonging in places like school and work. We tell Black girls they have to work twice as hard and be twice as good as everyone else, but we don’t explain how they’ll be treated for actually being twice as good and working twice as hard. It would’ve been almost impossible to explain to a younger me that no amount of effort could buy my membership into the academy, or that the promise of success as a result of hard work wasn’t the norm if you were Black.
At Columbia and universities around the country where students continue staging similar anti-genocide protests, White students are the face of the movement, alongside videos of Black students and faculty who are tased, handcuffed and imprisoned by police for their participation. For example, Black Morehouse students protesting in solidarity at Emory University, were arrested at a high frequency. At the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Black disabled professor Sami Schalk was strangled and handcuffed by police following her attempt to protect students.
DEI offices and initiatives are being rolled back just as students of color and their White allies demand accountability and morality from their respective schools. Black students are more easily targeted in these situations because there are fewer Black faculty and staff concerned about what happens to them. News pundits prioritize Jewish students, questioning schools’ ability to keep them safe amid pro-Palestine protests. That’s the wrong approach, though, because Jewish students’ safety on campus was never in question. In fact, many students and faculty leading these protests are Jewish.
Who cares about Black students’ safety and sense of belonging on campus? At Ole Miss and UCLA, Zionists and other counter-protesters have been caught on video yelling racist epithets at Black student protesters and throwing them to the ground. Who is protecting them as police target them, institutions punish them, and the people and programs that support them are gutted?
This week marks the 70th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, a legal precedent steeped in a movement of protests that caused a disproportionately violent backlash on the Black community. In light of that legacy, we must now consider the overwhelming costs Black students face on the front lines of protests. They don’t pay the same cost — and they have so much more to lose.
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The Talk: How identity shapes the way we keep our children safe
Depending on who you are and how you live, this conversation can go a lot of ways.
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