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The Daily Tar Heel

At the #SayHerName vigil last week, Black women here at UNC shared their stories, said the names of Black women — both cisgender and transgender — who were murdered by police and mourned the extinguishing of Black women’s lives.

Toward the end of the vigil, event organizer June Beshea opened up the mic, giving preference to Black women.

As the next speaker — a Black woman — approached the mic, a white woman wearing a backpack walked directly in front of the laminated signs bearing the names of the Black women who were murdered, crossed paths with the speaker making her way to the mic, all without batting an eyelash.

To the white woman who crossed the stage: your actions exemplified the fact that this campus — and this country — erases and diminishes Black women, their lives and their stories, every single day. Your apathy is a form of violence. It contributes to a system that actively works to annihilate Black lives.

Just a short walk across the quad from where the vigil took place stands “Carolina Hall,” formerly known as Saunders Hall, named after a former leader of the Ku Klux Klan in North Carolina.

Here, too, Black women were erased — this time, by the UNC Board of Trustees. After years of organizing around renaming Saunders Hall to Hurston Hall after author Zora Neale Hurston, the board erased the voices of Black women on this campus by renaming the building Carolina Hall and placing a 16-year moratorium on the renaming of any building or monument on campus.

In response, organizers of The Real Silent Sam Coalition who proposed the name Hurston Hall wrote a statement on their Facebook page.

“We named this building after Zora Neale Hurston precisely because racist and sexist admissions policies excluded her and other Black women from UNC,“ the statement said.

Wednesday, The Daily Tar Heel published a letter claiming the NAACP and BSM hosted the #SayHerName vigil. The UNC community’s own newspaper erased the labor of another Black woman — the organizer and student who lead this event — June Beshea. And yes, we will say her name.

Yet outside the Student Union, the faces of Black women at UNC are paraded, in a display of tokenism, with a sprinkling of Latino/a and Asian faces in the mix. Black women are only visible on this campus when their beings and their bodies are exploited to support the white-supremacist foundations of this institution.

When does the University make Black women invisible? When does it choose to make them hypervisible and why? When does the country do the same? These are questions that we need to be asking, and we need to be listening to and giving space to Black women at this institution.

So to the white woman who walked past — to all of you walking past Carolina Hall every day, walking past the vigils, the protests, walking past the Black women organizers last year demonstrating with nooses on their necks, to all who continue to walk past, it’s time to stop. It was time to show up for Black women yesterday — you’re late.

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