Artwork from book cover | America at War with Itself
Today on campus was a discussion aimed at addressing the issue of safety for our most vulnerable students: people of color, especially Black students and undocumented students (who, at NIU, mostly come from Mexico), as well as women and LGBTQI individuals.
Why now?
This past weekend, an African American male was accosted by a group of four white men in a pickup truck with a Confederate flag. A firearm was visible.
These are by no means limited to NIU. There was a “daily lynching list” at University of Pennsylvania. A University of Michigan student, a Muslim woman, was threatened to be set on fire if she didn’t take off her hijab.
These acts of intimidation and climate of fear begin at an early age.
Sociology and Latino Studies professor Simon Weffer’s seven-year-old daughter was quaking, worried about her grandmother being deported. History and Southeast Asian Studies professor Trude Jacobsen’s six-year-old son, fair skinned and blue eyed, was so afraid he would be found out as a Muslim and bullied, that he stayed home from school.
Often dismissed as “micro-aggressions,” Weffer’s Ohio State colleague Koritha Mitchell instead calls them “know-your-place” aggressions.
And the consequence is deadly: NIU alumni Sara Briseno reported eight suicides among Chicago’s undocumented community so far.
There is a movement on my campus, with a large and active undocumented student population, to declare it a…