[Content warning: racism, policing, violence around campus]
In the past few weeks, No Red Tape and Take Back the Night have watched the Columbia University administration remain silent while systems of policing continue to endanger Black and Brown community members. This includes the university administration’s silence regarding the New York District Attorney charging the children accused of killing Tess Majors as adults.
While both of our groups remain committed to supporting survivors of violence regardless of the path they choose for justice after assaults, including survivors who choose to report to law enforcement, we actively oppose the carceral system in our broader work to eradicate gender-based violence.
The carceral system was designed to maintain white supremacy, not provide “justice” or deter violence. Destroying the lives of young Black members of our community will not bring Tess back. There are systems of accountability such as restorative justice that could give those who harmed Tess the opportunity to take responsibility for their actions without subjecting them to violence, and give closure to those affected by Tess’s death.
Using eminent domain, the university has spent years stealing the land that many Harlem residents called home, which displaced families and significantly increased local housing costs. As campus anti-sexual violence activists, we have also seen the university treat Black and Brown student survivors as disposable, from racially profiling them as inherently mentally unstable to calling Public Safety on survivors despite the danger policing poses to students’ lives to discouraging Black survivors from reporting assaults out of “racial solidarity.”
The university’s abhorrent treatment of Black and Brown people in our community and gentrification of the neighborhood cannot be divorced from Tess’s death and the police violence enacted upon the children accused of harming Tess. Furthering economic inequality only increases the likelihood of situations arising like that which occurred in December.
As students who have benefited from Columbia’s racist theft of land and had our tuition dollars used to fund policing on campus, we feel we have an obligation to speak out against Columbia’s endorsement of inequality, discrimination, and violence. It is only through ending violence that we will ever truly get justice for Tess, and incarceration and increasing policing will only continue cycles of violence in our community.
In the words of Angela Davis, “The prison … functions ideologically as an abstract site into which undesirables are deposited, relieving us of the responsibility of thinking about the real issues afflicting those communities from which prisoners are drawn in such disproportionate numbers.” We refuse to let the university feel relieved of that responsibility.
