When They Lead Us
Crunk Feminists Support Emory Students & Community Call for Divestment
Dear Students and Members of the Emory Community:
We write as the longest running feminist collective in the country, auspiciously founded during our time as Emory graduate students in the early 2000s and situated in the best traditions of Southern organizing for racial, gender, and labor justice to express our dissent, disgust, and dismay at the deployment of police, rubber bullets, and gas against students, faculty, and community members in the waning days of April 2024. As we, the Crunk Feminist Collective, came together to make sense of this use of state violence against peaceful protestors, many of us, who have been connected to Emory over the last two decades, recalled a much longer history of campus protests against injustice, and an equally long history of lamentable responses by multiple Emory administrations to students exercising their right to dissent.
From 2002-3, one of us participated in anti-Iraq War protests in the aftermath of September 11th. In 2003, several of us participated in the Concerned Students of Emory Coalition after a faculty member used an anti-Black racial slur during a course lecture. That organizing led to the hiring of the first Chief Diversity Officer, Ozzie Harris, in the University’s history. In 2011, the University deployed the police against peaceful protestors who organized a labor protest on behalf of contract workers laboring under poor conditions at the University. Because many of us were alumni by then, we organized a response petition of over 200 signatures to ask the University not to prosecute the Emory Seven. In 2013, the then University President argued in a letter to the community that the infamous 3/5ths Compromise, that Compromise which proclaimed that enslaved Black people ought to be counted as 3/5ths of a person for the purposes of taxation and representation, served as a model example of a political compromise. In response, several of us participated in campus-wide protests and organizing that eventually led to the creation of the Emory Black Student Union.
We offer this brief and recent history of outrageous assaults on the dignity of people of color and the poor at Emory and the student response to these assaults to remind the University that this willfully problematic approach to peaceful protest against the creation of Cop City and in support of vulnerable populations, this time Palestinians being slaughtered in Gaza, is not new. Despite more than two decades of vocal dissent, the negative response to the exercise of free speech and the right to peacefully assemble has been met with an escalation of policing, that has lead this time, to you, the students, and your professors, alongside invited community members, being detained with no provocation, slammed violently to the ground, tased, tear gassed, and having loaded guns pointed at your heads. We are so deeply sorry that you have been treated in this unjust and egregious manner.
As alumnae of the University, we support your calls for divestment.
This is not what democracy looks like. This is not what a university invested in protecting the students’ right to protest – rather than protecting university property from student protestors– looks like. This is what fascism looks like. Universities are supposed to be the primary institution where the free exchange of ideas is encouraged and sustained, where we are taught how to engage civically and productively with a range of differing positions. It is where we refine our worldview, learn what it means to stand up against injustice, and where we, when leadership is happening in courageous ways, find the protection to engage in the best traditions of dissent that are hallmarks of healthy democracy. Precisely because we are a University, we ought to be able to hold the idea that the long and violent history of antisemitic treatment of Jewish people must be avoided at all costs, while also recognizing that having geopolitical disagreements with the official state policy of Israel, and moral outrage at the slaughter of Palestinians, among them women, children, and faculty and students of all Gaza’s universities, are not incompatible truths. We have both the moral and intellectual sophistication to hold all these truths together. But this cannot happen when students, faculty, and community members are shot at, gassed, and terrorized in broad daylight at the University. At a time when higher education is under attack, this implosion is disheartening. Administrative choices that deal blows that try to erode the very core of who we are makes us wonder who the real outside agitators are.
As people who care about democracy and education, we support your calls for divestment.
Healthy democracy making space for productive and peaceful dissent is not what happened at Emory last week. Instead, students experienced the violent quashing and quelling of dissent, while being told that such tactics were necessary to suppress the actions of “outside agitators.” Though we wish the leadership of a university founded in the birthplace of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. understood the irony of invoking one of the worst caricatures of Jim Crow, this specter of the “outside agitator,” it is clear that such ironies completely escape the notice of those charged with leading our great institution. A previous President thought the 3/5ths Compromise was a model of political negotiation. The current President thinks that tasers, rubber bullets and tear gas should be deployed against “outside agitators.” These failures of historical understanding, factual accuracy, and ethical integrity bring shame on this community and threaten its national and international reputation, not to mention deeply harming and wounding you, the students, especially Palestinian, Muslim and Arab students and other students of color.
Not only is the militarized violence against peaceful protestors deeply racist, it is also patriarchal. The most visible examples of patriarchy in operation at the Emory protests were the videos of women and femme students and professors being violently subdued by male law enforcement officers. Still, to reduce the operation of patriarchy to the genders of those imposing unjust power is reductive. However, the nationalist and colonial projects that seek to squelch the voices of dissenters are in fact patriarchal projects, rooted in masculinist ideas of dominance, subjugation, and ownership. As student protestors rightly point out, Cop City’s training of police officers is aligned with the very same Israeli police forces with whom these officers train and share subjugation tactics. Cop City is not only racist, Islamophobic, and an assault on the poor – it is also deeply masculinist and patriarchal in its affect, approach, and impact.
As people who care about justice, we support your calls for divestment.
We are proud of and support the intentional way that you as student organizers have reminded the university that Emory is the community and the community is Emory. We do not have to accept elitist attempts by the administration to wall people out of our campus as though it is not a part of the Atlanta community.
Additionally, we call on President Fenves to resign immediately. We do not believe Emory’s administration can claim to encourage students to find their voice while simultaneously enforcing campus policies that violently punish and harm them for doing so. The University deserves a more caring and careful leader, one with more cultural literacy than has been evinced, and one who can bring the campus together, one with a vision for an Emory University poised to meet the intellectual demands of the 21st century rather than one who recycles the worst ideas of the 20th century.
These are times that require creative and bold leadership, and that is not what has been offered to any of you, or any of us, over the last week. Instead, Emory has become a shameful national example of how protests ought not be engaged. Instead you have been assaulted by a persistent and recalcitrant failure of imagination as President Fenves has told us in letter after letter all of the reasons why he continues to engage the police, even when it is clear that they escalate and exacerbate dangerous conditions rather than ameliorating them. As students you deserve better. As alumnae, we deserve better. Atlantans deserve better, too.
Finally, we want you to know that there is power in the collective. We stand with you. We send you our love. And our money! Keep fighting the good fight. We got you.
In Love and Struggle,
The Crunk Feminist Collective