The following call for action and accountability was written by the nextGEN community and published on June 6, 2020:

We, the members of nextGEN, recognize the importance of being action-oriented and attendant to the perspectives, bodies, and communities most affected any time we have organized and raised our collective voice. While our collective actions are sometimes prompted by graduate students’ experiences and specific requests, we act here in response to the valid pain and anger Black folx in our community and beyond are feeling in response to anti-Black violence. nextGEN is a community, a movement that advocates for and with graduate students in our collection of disciplines. As such, we hope our Black colleagues read and participate in this call from DBLAC for Black love. For our non-Black members, especially those white members with greater institutional power, we urge the affirmation of these axio-epistemological statements and action on the following labor necessary for praxis related to those beliefs. Departments cannot claim to offer graduate students safety and/or support as long as institutionalized, systemic racism exists and as long as those of us trained in our constellated disciplines remain inactive.

Therefore, we call on scholars across our various disciplines to join us in recognizing the following: 

• The United States is a white supremacist, settler-colonialist nation-state that wields global sociopolitical power as the legacy of Western ideologies and late capitalism. Decontextualization and dehistoricization are mechanisms of oppression aimed at delinking whiteness from institutionalized power and memory. Coalition is therefore not only necessary, but also possible by working to articulate transsituational, transhistorical connections between multiply marginalized peoples. We must coalesce to end the anti-Blackness that permeates the United States and so much of the world.

• Communication is action, but also insufficient action compared to the material actions necessary for dismantling oppressive systems. While we understand that we must #SayTheirNames, #CiteBlackWomen, and remind the world that #BlackLivesMatter, what we communicate must be more than words. Material action, sacrifice, and risk are all necessary if words are to mean anything, and if we are to resist the performativity of institutional statements circulated only to protect a public image rather than out of genuine concern for victims of racist violence.

• Remembering in tumultuous situations that the folx most hurt in a given time do not owe anyone the education needed to contextualize their pain. White folx need to do this work for other white folx like one of our nextGEN moderators did here. Importantly, when white folx think about how much work it will be to contextualize this one moment, commit to living in the space with your/our own ignorance until you/we have earned your/our way out.

We demand of ourselves, our colleagues, and our departments that we answer these calls to action:

• Making and acting on departmental and college commitment to hiring clusters of tenure-track scholars from marginalized communities, especially Black people and people of color.

• Making and acting on administrative commitments to facilitating, promoting, and supporting current and future radical and anti-racist pedagogies.

• Changing tenure and promotion guidelines so they recognize community activism, praxis, and collaboration as intellectual labor, especially for scholars hired for their training, affiliation, and work with critical race, ethnic studies, and a number of feminisms from a collection of Black feminisms to a collection of International feminisms. Otherwise, hiring people with these specialties reflects how much the institution values the social currency of their employment without valuing the ontological framework of their expertise.

• Supporting vulnerable international job candidates and faculty of color by sponsoring their work visas and paying them enough to secure them through their residency processes--an issue already addressed by nextGEN in its International Scholars Anti-Discrimination (ISAD) Open Letter.

• Ensuring that departments promote marginalized voices while immersing their curricula in those voices rather than promoting mere “diversity.” These calls to action that spend so much time on critical whiteness, on resource aggregation, and clear actionable steps are necessary because academe has failed us in our training and preparation, but we cannot continue to harm folx by propagating ignorance, mere surface level engagement with marginalized voices, and the myth of objectivity. 

• Committing to and acting on an equitable politics of citation by citing BIPOC, queer, disabled, Enby, trans, and feminist voices to help create a “canon” that better represents the breadth, depth, and nuance present in our disciplines and in academe. This new politics of citation must include a commitment to acknowledging any work emergent from, parallel to, and inspired by critical race, indigenous, and non-Western theory.

• Refraining from using others’ pain and suffering to garner professional acclaim. Especially as white scholars further read and study the works, knowledges, and experiences of their fellow humans, they must resist appropriation for academic gain. However, we do encourage work that situates their current learning within their efforts to divest themselves of their compliance with our current anti-Black and anti-nonwhite axiological systems that produce institutionalized racism and violence.

• Not only allowing students the right to their own voice and language in our classrooms, but honoring the quality of their labor equitably in departmental and institutional funding and other awards.

• Scholars ethically crediting their students’, research assistants’, student advisees’, and mentees’ labor on any academic work to which they have contributed. This crediting must include defining Intellectual Property so that all collaborators and students retain ownership of their work.

• Committing to and acting on keeping alive conversations about what can be done as researchers, educators, and community members in disciplinary venues, such as listservs, even and especially when the conversations do not feel as kairotic. What we can do about institutionalized racism in academe and beyond is not, and has never been, limited to those moments when hashtags are trending and uprisings are occurring; it is work scholars must always be doing.

• Committing to stepping up as senior scholars, tenured professors, and disciplinary leaders to prevent vulnerable shoulders bearing the brunt of the labor required to create greater security for themselves. Listening to vulnerable folx does not mean staying so silent the vulnerable folx are doing all of the work. 

• Departments committing to building accountability structures and committees that include diverse faculty, graduate students, and undergraduate students to stop the cycle of meetings about what we can do and begin to have meetings that give actionable feedback on the efforts departments should already be making.

Black Lives Matter. Black Queer Lives Matter. Black Trans Lives Matter. Black Disabled Lives Matter, Black Graduate Lives Matter. George Floyd. Breonna Taylor. Ahmaud Arbery. Nina Pop. Their lives mattered and will continue to matter as we honor them into public memory.

Let’s Do This,

nextGEN