The whole culture has to change
By: Sey Elemo, Columnist
Tigers,
As the year comes to a close, and I grow tired with your resistance to our efforts of liberation for ourselves, I just want to remind you all of a couple things.
Our revolution. Our movement. This struggle to be treated equally with our white, male, heterosexual, cisgender counterparts IS NOT GOING ANYWHERE.
1. We have been here for centuries.
Do you not realize that we, just as you, occur unceasingly in nature?
We’re not leaving.
You WILL regard us with respect, dignity and equal treatment.
2. Y’all don’t even know what racism is.
Racism = prejudice + power.
White people have power through the privilege THEY ARE BORN with.
White people, stop reading me dictionary definitions of racism.
Y’all wrote that, too.
I live it every day.
Who are you to tell me what racism is and what it’s not?
3. You can be quietly and unintentionally homophobic.
A lot of you all think you aren’t because you’re not scared of homosexuality.
All of your actions still scream hate toward people that identify as LGBTQIA+.
The policing of your own and others’ sexuality is heteronormative and sometimes homophobic (No homo = Homophobia).
You’re not slick.
We see you.
We’re pulling up on you, too.
4. Black men.
While you are a black, you are also a man.
You still exhibit male privilege.
A lot of you are male chauvinist pigs.
Y’all don’t even really know what sexism, feminism, or womanism is.
You don’t realize that you sound EXACTLY like white racists when you disregard women’s rights.
Also, why do y’all hate strong black women when 9/10 of y’all were born of strong black women?
Whatever. I still love you. But I’m pulling up on you as well.
5. CAB.
I love you for everything you did this semester for the ratchet black girl that I am.
This has, socially, been the blackest year of my college education.
I am grateful to you all.
6. Towson University leadership.
I don’t care about your procedures and logistics.
Your procedures and logistics are what got us here in the first place.
Do something differently.
Also, we’re tired of explaining our platform over and over again.
Maybe if you listened the first time, we wouldn’t have to keep pulling up on you the way we do.
I don’t want to yell at y’all again.
My mama raised me to respect my elders, and it hurts a part of me to have to yell at adults like this.
However, I will yell until I am heard and listened to.
Also, HOW DARE YOU ASK ME IF I WAS REALLY HARASSED?
I don’t hate y’all.
Y’all are all, very, very, nice people.
But I wish y’all would do your jobs and make us feel safe here at TU.
7. President Schatzel.
Respectfully,
I hated and continue to hate your response to my letter.
All you really said in your response was that you read my letter.
You also agreed to make TU openly anti-racist, which gave me a little hope, but not for long.
Your actions since have proven that you don’t think it’s a big enough part of your job to minimize racism on this campus.
That whole week we cried and feared for our lives, while you sat in your office wondering what you could do to pacify this situation.
This is proven by the way you addressed us in the BSU an hour after a man you refuse to remove from this campus, despite his hateful and violent attitude, rolled up on us.
Or your inability to fit us into your busy schedule.
Uninterested.
Also you keep talking about Towson’s history/legacy of social justice since its opening?
….. where it at doe? (Translation = Where is this social justice you speak of)
Where was social justice when the Maryland State Normal School moved its campus from West Baltimore to Towson, to remove itself from the urbanization (blackening) of the city?
May I see the receipts? (Translation = proof/evidence)
TU I love you, but the whole culture has to change.
Until next year.
Yours in Blackness,
A Ratchet Revolutionary
