TO THE EDITOR:
It is encouraging to see administrators and students show support for the AFAM department in The Daily Tar Heel.
However, the power of the written word will have to be matched with a more significant show of student might to counter the pernicious attacks levied at the department by the woefully uninformed masses.
It will have to be through the deliberate efforts of concerned students that the cloud of scandal and fraud currently suffocating the department is dispelled, exposing the overwhelming influence of University athletics on the two misguided former faculty members responsible for this fraud.
All students, and certainly students of color at UNC, have a responsibility to insist upon the importance of the AFAM department to our University because attacks discrediting and devaluing AFAM only encourage and precipitate ignorant attacks on identity studies writ large.
Students have a powerful and glorious history of activism to inspire us in defending our education. When students have organized on this campus, things have happened.
We can look to the student/faculty coalition creating the AFAM department 40 years ago, student solidarity with the Lenoir cafeteria workers’ strike, as well as the BSM’s demonstration against the racist student body statues just to name a few significant instances.
Only in a culture of ambivalence about blackness can calls for the removal of the entire AFAM department be taken seriously enough to be published in the printed expression of our University’s collective voice.
And it is only students who have the power to change that here on our campus. We must.
