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On August 12, I boarded a bus in Durham and head up I-85 towards Richmond, Virginia, the erstwhile capital of the old Confederacy. The bus was filled to the brim with fast-food, retail and home health-care workers; airport baggage handlers; state employees; early childhood educators; part-time and contingent faculty and other graduate student-workers like myself.
When I opened my computer Sunday morning and saw Omar Mateen's face staring back at me, the first thing I thought—before the facts had a real chance to register, before the full details of the carnage emerged—was, “He looks kind of hot."
I began writing my column this semester as, simultaneously, a gesture of defiance, an act of solidarity and an exercise in futility.
Living wages and impartial arbitration of grievances—those were the key demands of Duke service workers and allies in 1968, and those are our core demands today.
There are moments for dispassionate analysis. There are moments for carefully outlined arguments and editorials. And then there are moments whose psychological and material urgency render ratiocination moot. When all you can do is seethe and cry and shout and sing and celebrate. Celebrate, in the midst of rage and sorrow, the incredible resilience of those whom the powerful have done everything in their power to destroy—their miraculous survival and struggle and fearlessness. Our miraculous survival and struggle and fearlessness. Our deep, incredible, radiant beauty. Our rage, hope, suffering, joy and longings.
If I didn't want to abolish Greek life before the protest the other Friday, I certainly do now. The outrage and aggression exhibited by campus Greeks, the emotional overreaction, the unwillingness to engage productively with substantive critique—all this clearly shows that our party-happy campus culture is producing a generation of coddled conservatives with a strong sense of entitlement, dangerously delicate sensibilities and an alarming inability to cope with the real world.
This week, contingent faculty at Duke took the historic step of filing for a union election. The decision comes in response to the administration's ongoing attempts to replace stable, full-time, tenure track jobs with part-time, precarious, low-wage positions. Predictably, the burden of these policies is distributed unevenly across race and gender lines; while roughly 40 percent of Duke's teaching staff are now contingent, more than 50 percent of faculty of color—and more than 60 percent of female faculty—labor off the tenure track. As our faculty take a stand for long-term contracts, health care and fair pay, it seems an opportune moment to look back at the history of wage suppression and union-busting here at Duke, which has been chronicled by Erik Ludwig.
This year the Human Rights Center at Duke has been hosting a series of public discussions on gentrification, reflecting growing concerns across Durham about the effects of the city's rapid transformation on longtime, low-income and minority residents. In the first talk in the series, area activist Melissa Norton asked audience members to examine the ways in which our own actions (and inactions) contribute to gentrification. It is past time that Duke asked itself the same question.
A response to this column can be found here
