Abstract
We write as a collective of BIPOC undergraduate activist students/organizers and contingent/tenured professors dedicated to Black, Third World, and Indigenous liberation through a feminist analysis at Soka University of America (SUA). We focus our critique on liberalism as a dominant political paradigm that has solidified the reign of empire and it’s necropolitical grips on our communities within and without SUA, our SLAC. We highlight through a brief chronology of the epistemic and physical struggles against hegemonic power exercised by our university the ways in which liberalism acts as counterrevolutionary ideology and offer critical reflections/interventions on our struggles against white supremacy at our SLAC, as well as on how our university administration utilizes “liberalism” as a technology of imperialism. We come together to resist empire from where we stand. We believe in the pedagogical possibilities of resistance.
Highlights
W e write as a collective of BIPOC undergraduate student organizers and professors dedicated to Black, Third World, and Indigenous liberation through feminist analysis at Soka University of America (SUA)
Through a case study of sorts of the fight for Critical Global Ethnic Studies (CGES) at SUA, we note the specific ways liberalism as counterrevolutionary ideology plays out at our new but already very highly-ranked private Small Liberal Arts College (SLAC) that boasts a utopian mission premised on global citizenship
There are few Black students and virtually no full-time Black faculty trained in critical Black studies on our campus or representation of African Studies in the curriculum
Summary
SUA is a 20-year old private SLAC, uniquely founded on “the Buddhist principles of peace, human rights, and the sanctity of life.” Soka is “a Japanese term meaning to create value.” SUA’s mission is “to foster a steady stream of global citizens committed to living a contributive life.” SUA boasts an almost 2 billion dollar endowment for a small student body of around 400. It is established ostensibly to showcase our university’s dedication to diversity, but without the involvement, let alone leadership, of the students and professors engaged in the struggle for CGES who understand that the push for Critical Global Ethnic Studies as concentration and center must not be a mere theoretical showcase but must be grounded in lived experience and community praxis, redistributing university resources to build sustainable and anti-imperialist presents/futures It is divorced from long-standing commitments to working with and developing relationships with working-class Chicanx and Southeast Asian community organizations to create support networks for undocumented people and students within and outside the university, mobilizing on multiple issues and fronts, including the contribution of labor in support of the Acjachemen Nation, the Indigenous peoples whose land SUA sits on. This is the point at which we find ourselves still in struggle, still in communion, still in solidarity, still in resistance, still, to invoke Gloria Anzaldúa, “making face, making soul.” In the sections that follow, we offer our individual reflections on the struggles at SUA, emphasizing in these fractals of our communion our unwavering commitment to one another and/or the communities we hail from, to solidarity and liberation
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