AAUP-TNS Stands in Struggle Against Racialized State Violence
The Only Possible Pedagogy is Action: AAUP-TNS Stands with Communities in the Struggle Against Racialized State Violence
October 29, 2020
AAUP-TNS Chapter stands in solidarity with the family of Walter Wallace Jr. and with the students, community members, political organizers, and scholars fighting against racialized state violence across the United States, and the globe. We condemn the recent act of racialized state terror on October 26 2020 when the Philadelphia Police Department shot and killed Walter Wallace Jr., a 27-year old Black man, father, and essential worker in a West Philadelphia neighborhood in front of his family and neighbors. His mother pleaded for police not to shoot him and tried, repeatedly, to de-escalate the situation. Walter Wallace Jr. struggled with mental health issues and was in distress at the time he was killed--his family tried to help him, but the state’s only answer was the police. Like Saheed Vassell, Sandra Bland, Freddie Gray, Deborah Danner and so many others, the murder of Walter Wallace Jr. is the direct result of the expansion of the carceral state to the spheres of social work and health care.
Ongoing racist police violence must be situated within a broader history of racialized state violence that dates back to the colonial founding of the United States. The United States was borne out of genocide, the seizure of Native homelands, and slavery—these are not simply details in “US history,” but foundational characteristics of white US nationalism and racial captialism that are anchored to contemporary, racist laws and social policies and the legitimation of endemic structural, racist violence in institutions of policing. This history lives in the present.
As educators and scholars committed to racial justice, we understand that there are moments when the only possible pedagogy is action. We commit to teaching freedom, and joining our brothers and sisters in the streets, in the classroom, and in every conceivable location to work for the abolition of the carceral state, and for a just world where Black lives matter. As spaces of critical education, universities like The New School have an essential role to play in challenging oppression in all its forms and understanding the intersections and complexities of political struggle in our current historical moment. We must be visible. We must speak out. We must theorize. We must organize. And we must act.
As an immediate act of solidarity, AAUP-TNS asks that you support the Philadelphia Community Bail Fund to stand with the hundreds of people who have been arrested in the ongoing struggle for racial justice, freedom, and liberation.