STEM4BLACKLIVES is a horizontally organized collective at ucsd focused on struggling against academic anti-Blackness rooted in its connections to colonialism and capitalism, technology and science. We make decisions using consensus procedures to make sure that all of our voices, talents and skills go into decision making and collective action.
BSU 2010 Demands Analysis Report Released!
In February 2010, during the events of the “Black Winter” set in motion by the Compton Cookout, a party held by members of a UCSD fraternity mocking Black History Month, the UCSD Black Student Union put forth its “State of Emergency” address and list of demands to be met by the UCSD administration. Given ten years to consider, respond to, and act upon these eight demands, we can now ask which of them have been met by the administration. We create three categories when assessing the administrative response to the demands: Met, Partially Met, and Unmet. We find that of a total of eight demands, broken down further to twenty-seven sub-demands, just four were met, six were partially met, and seventeen remain unmet.
STEM4BLACKLIVES started with the June 10, 2020 STEM STRIKE/STRIKE FOR BLACK LIVES, where we met in person and online to discuss selections from three articles that highlight the connections between anti-Blackness, capitalism/colonialism, science and technology, and universities:
• T. Elon Dancy II, Kirsten T. Edwards and James Earl Davis (2018) Historically White Universities and Plantation Politics: Anti-Blackness and Higher Education in the Black Lives Matter Era, Urban Education, 53(2), 176–219.
• Ruha Benjamin (2019) Race After Technology, Polity Books, Chapter 1: The New Jim Code.
• Rayvon Fouché (2006) Say It Loud, I'm Black and I'm Proud: African Americans, American Artifactual Culture, and Black Vernacular Technological Creativity, American Quarterly, 58(3), 639-661.