To our brothers and sisters at Mizzou, Yale, and beyond:

An African proverb suggests that written history will always be his-story, the hunters-story, unless the lions learn to write, and you have done just that. You have learned to write, learned to fight, learned to stand for a cause bigger than you and I, but here, at the University of Iowa, we exist in similar anti-black structures in which the administrative board hires presidents on myopic assumptions.

In the 21st century, we still wake up to Ku Klux Klan paraphernalia showcased in the epicenter of campus and in return our overseers are more concerned with containing what in hindsight was treated as a black plague when in reality it was an organized collective of black students expressing the need for consideration.

We, black students at the UI, stand in solidarity with Mizzou, Yale, and every student across the country who are repressed for merely existing. The new language of white liberalism is diversity, equity, and integration, but these are only good insofar as the rainbow coalition can smile for the media-op in university pamphlets but never to talk over rates in retention, graduation, and our many tropes. Former Missouri system President Tim Wolfe is only a microcosm to a larger context of enslavement, and his resignation provides a space for structural adjustments or a centering of black freedom; let’s choose the latter.

The voices on Mizzou’s campus have been heard and with the unity of black students across this country; together, we will dismantle the same system that has worked so diligently to break us. These overly caffeinated white spaces that we call home: the UI, the University of Missouri-Columbia, Yale University, etc., have failed to demonstrate that Black Lives Matter. Our struggle is far from its conclusion, but with student activism, administrative changes, and the country engaging in insightful and constructive conversations regarding race and systematic oppression in university settings, we can begin to change our destiny, for the better.

To those who have taken place in this movement, your work is not in vain. We, as black scholars do not have the privilege to quit. This is the beginning of a revolution led by millennial leaders who have the capability and passion to change the way our country sees black faces and how they feel about them. “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

With Black and Gold in our hearts, we, the black students of the UI stand in solidarity with the students at Mizzou, Yale, and beyond.

In solidarity,

Black Students at the University of Iowa