Statement from the Board of the Critical Ethnic Studies Collective at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
We strongly condemn the recent support for the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV) by the Board of Governors of the University of North Carolina System (BOG) through the appropriation of $2.5 million in UNC Chapel Hill funds. This patronage of white supremacy, and its defense as supporting the diversity of ideological differences, is unconscionable.
Such actions and justifications are in direct opposition to the stated mission of the Critical Ethnic Studies Collective, which is focused on realizing a different South than one mired in white supremacist origin narratives. The monetary support of the SCV invalidates and insults the work faculty, students and staff have done to make visible the history of slavery and indigenous dispossession that this university is built on. It also disregards increasing instances of white supremacist violence experienced by many of us on this campus and in the surrounding community.
We ask the administration, in addition to initiating a response from our campus to address and walk back this 2.5 million dollar “shake down,” as one Faculty Council member put it, to address long-standing requests from People of Color and Indigenous Faculty:
- The university engage the request of our students to set aside 25 million in reparative infrastructure to address our current crisis in the form of: free tuition to the descendants of the enslaved of North Carolina and free tuition for Indigenous students from this state whose lands we occupy.
- The university compensate all graduate students through stipends of $25,000 per year, in keeping with peer institutions.
- The university adequately fund the Department of African, African American, and Diaspora Studies and The Institute of African American Research, and provide The Sonja Haynes Stone Center for Black Culture and History a permanent allocation.
- The university fund a Climate Changers Program for faculty across the university who will be compensated for their work to diversify this space through competitive course releases.
- The university commence a search for at least two historians of slavery.