Hi All,
I don't know about you, but this week has been SUPER impactful for me. One of the things that is emphasized is the amount of service work faculty and students of color, especially Black faculty and students, complete but is not always recognized.
Given that Pearis is a graduate student and Dr. Mosley is untenured, one way we can support THEM is to leave notes of "thank you" for developing this training that they can use in 1) job applications, and 2) tenure & promotion folders. I really want their work recognized far and wide and that their service in developing this program is exponential. They could have spent the same amount of time, which is a LOT of time, on multiple manuscripts for peer-review (what is often considered the only thing necessary for tenure, jobs, internships, etc.), but instead spent it organizing material to educate US and provide a space for healing for our Black colleagues.
So, what was most impactful for you? How has this training changed YOU and what will you take from the training? How will you implement what you learned throughout your life? How will you be a better ally? To Pearis:
THANK YOU. Thank you for taking the time away from your own progress in your program to help curate the training sessions. The amount of time and effort you have spent putting these 2 concurrent weeks together (in only a 3 week time span!) is absolutely incredible. I am truly grateful for the mental, emotional, and physical work you put into developing these trainings especially when you are working through your own trauma. My views as a white woman are challenged and I am much more aware not only of the space I take up in academia, but how I can better understand and advocate for my Black students and colleagues. I have already shared numerous resources you provided to fellow academics and non-academics alike (crediting that I received them from this initiative). To any potential employer (internship or post-Ph.D.), you are getting a star. Pearis is already changing the world and you are truly lucky to have her on board. Help her continue to fight for justice and liberation.
To Dr. Mosley:
THANK YOU. As a fellow untenured faculty member, I can only imagine the work that you put in as service to OTHERS in developing this program rather than your own research which often weighs more strongly for tenure. I want everyone on your tenure committee to know just how impactful this past week has been (and I still have one more day of training left!) and that your impact on the entire global community of academics and beyond is further than any other initiative I have seen, regardless of the topic. I have already shared numerous resources you provided to fellow academics and non-academics alike (crediting that I received them from this initiative). Dr. Mosley, you are truly an inspiration and I am eternally grateful for the mental, emotional, and physical work you put into developing these trainings especially when you are working through your own trauma. I am encouraged for change in our world and thank you for providing me with the tools on how to make this change.
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First a life-altering week and then a reboot! For over 2,500 academics called together in less than a semester? That is academic miracle territory! Let's make all of our colleagues know about this life-altering training, so they can support the careers of every scholar who contributed, can donate funds to the cause, and can go on to make change on every campus.
Dr. Mosley, Pearis Bellamy, and others, gave me more information in a week than I could have learned in ten years. The thought-provoking assignments and questions, the orienting meditation, the free way of speaking about their own personal experience. Each day, at the end of the day, I was wiped out and energized. My fatigue was from thinking and feeling so hard, not from the screen. The programming energized me to do more. To use my voice for anti-racist work in the academy.
If this training is not the definition of success for a tenure promotion review committee, then Dr. Mosely and Pearis Bellamy deserve to be tenured elsewhere.
Words seem inadequate to express my feelings about this training and the amazing team that presented it. I cannot thank Pearis Bellamy, Dr. Della Mosley, and their entire crew who put so much of themselves into this effort. What a gift. I can only hope to do what I can to make a difference. As academics who have probably told ourselves and others that we are in this work because we want to contribute to making the world a better place, our charge is pretty clear. I still have a lot of thinking, digesting, and work to do to turn it into continual action, but every decision and action has to be viewed through the lense (to use that metaphor we heard earlier in the week) of A4BSW. Echoing what others have said, my mind seems to be in a different place after this week, and I wake up thinking about steps to take next. Silence is not an option; neither is failure.
Thank you, Pearis Bellamy and Dr. Della Mosley for a life changing week. Everything has already been said and I could not say it better. Please count me in to give a "temoignage" of the importance of your work- also and especially for white academics of European descent (anette.freytag@rutgers.edu), I keep listening and learning by going through the seven days, again and again, and my partner, a musician, is joining in as well. Your work and the work of the amazing scholars you have invited will join me for the next 20 years. THANK YOU!
Thank you both and everyone who took the time to assist, so much for organizing this. As a black female who is unapologetically intersectional I have been fighting this battle in all the spaces I occupy, trying to make space for others. I found words to describe my experiences and thoughts about how to be mindful, self care and guard my time as I work towards Black liberation, as a result of your efforts. Thank you!
Dr. Della Mosley, Pearis Bellamy and the whole A4BL team: Thank you so much for inviting us in to learn and to fight with you for Black lives, wellness, and liberation. I will be applying lessons learned here to institutional transformation until Black liberation is realized.
To other participants who may be organizing signatures for a letter to deans/chairs/directors that could be used in a tenure case or other institutional recognition of the valuable work A4BL organizers have done: please count me in -- april.haynes@wisc.edu.
Ditto for the accountability spreadsheet: it froze when I tried to sign, but count me in.
As academics, our roles are to change lives. These changes can take many forms. One might discover a cure to an illness, and change folks health, another might create a tool that changes folks relationships to other objects and the way they interact materially with the world. A third might write a novel, and change how we imagine some aspect of reality. The degree to which our efforts effects such change, and the more valuable and positive such changes are, is really what our value as academics is best measured by. These changes might, and indeed, should, be directed not just at other academics (a closed circle of academics playing the game of telegraph), but at our students, and at all the publics we are part of, interact with, speak for, and crucially, tend to ignore, tend to fail to see and hear. Pearis Bellamy and Dr. Della Mosley have effected such change more directly, effectively, foundationally, and in a manner creative, authentic, and rigorously academic, then one could ever hope. And one can be certain the effects of their academic research and the programming which resulted from it will only continue to build. Academics For Black Survival and Wellness is a major research accomplishment, bearing all the hallmarks of what we should and do value in research. But of course it is far more than that--it is a blueprint for new ways of effecting change, new models of relationally between academics and others, new modes of pedagogy, new and powerful methods of activism and accountability. I could write books for a hundred years, I can teach a 1000 classes, I can participate in scores of workshops, movements, and meetings, and not have the positive impact that this week of training has had on so many. "Know Thyself" was a statement made by Socrates--it was picked up this week, and interpreted most forcefully as a challenge to each of us. Yet there is no fallacy of the Cartesian self at play here--To know thyself is an imperative, for too many of us who have and continue to benefit from white supremacy, fail to realize the way we contribute to the oppression of blacks, and more generally those whose identity does not "measure up" to the yardstick of whiteness. If you are a university administrator, dean, chair, or in a position of evaluating this program, I say to you in no un-certain terms, this is impactful work of the highest order! To change the mind's of others is hard enough--to change what it is one discovers when enacting a process of coming to know oneself, is so much more. As a fellow academic who works in areas of critical race theory, intersectionality and anti-racist activism, it would not have been odd for me to have come away from this week with little more than a concentrated occasion to think the issues at play through one more time. I have been challenged, changed, confronted in the best sense of the word, and taught so much. If your institution views its mission statement as being directed at being a force for positive change, grounded in new research, if it is concerned with being a force for the establishment of a more just, ethical, tolerant, inclusive society, then I implore you to consider this program, and the vast work that went into it, as a shining example of how academics can lead the transformation that we can all hope is presently underway. The time to dream of racial equality is over--the time for action which might actually produce black liberation is now, and it may well be when the history of the changes to come (they must come!) is written, the work of Pearis Bellamy and Dr. Della Mosley (and their surrounding network of scholar/activists) will be a crucial chapter in this history.
Pearis Bellamy is the leadership this world needs. Her work has changed me forever. I am so impressed with the quality, authenticity and thoughtfulness of the content of this week. Her creativity, innovation, scholarship, professionalism, and maturity flowed so clearly throughout this week. I can't wait to follow your professional career! Thank you for all that you do.
Dr. Mosley, thank you for creating the space to highlight your exceptional scholarship, mentorship, and pedagogy with us all. Not only am I completely changed by the content and approach you took to this week, my awe of you as an academic has created substantially higher standards for myself as an academic. You modeled everything that can be right about academia - from lifting up the strengths of your graduate students to the often undervalued skill of identifying the needs of your academic "students" and meeting them in exactly the right way. You met us where we were at, held us, and challenged us to become the best of who we can be. This all because you have obviously done all the work and your strong platform of scholarship gives you grounding. So few of us take the next step beyond research and publications, even though in theory our job as academics is to create more learned communities. Thank you for everything. You have become a role model.
Dear Pearis,
Thank you for envisioning this training. Thank you for having a glimmer of hope that non-Black folks could change. Thank you for your beautiful, accessible website, for your honesty, for holding us accountable. Thank you for your pedagogy of liberation. Thank you for outlining how the academy is a site of racial trauma, and how we can stop it. Thank you for your hours of work. And thank you for demonstrating how masterfully and effectively a team can teach a fully online course beyond "delivering" content. In our pandemic world, your skill is so vitally important. This course is a model for how transformative education can continue during COVID. Thank you.
Dear Dr. Mosley,
Thank you for your commitment to your won students and your thousands of new students. Thank you for telling us clearly, with no room for error, how much commitment is required of us. Thank you for your work, for your modeling resourcefulness, for your transformative teaching. Your students are so very lucky. You assembled a team to teach some of the most complex, high-stakes, difficult content in the world. Thank you for showing us the best of what academics can be.
Dear Jeanette MejÃa,
Thank you for your gifts in teaching about intersectionality. In particular, thank you for sharing with us how fatphobia affects Black and people, and the poem ""Undocumented Black Boy." Thank you for making visible what is often invisible. It is hard to explain exactly how your words, and that poem, affected me. Somehow, they transformed "Until Black liberation is realized" from a phrase in my head to a near reality I can taste. Thank you.
I am forever changed. What an incredible gift of courage, energy, passion and knowledge. I am motivated and armed in a way that is transformation. I can and will bring all I have learned at this welcoming table to everyone I meet. The care, intentionalality, sequencing, self/peer reflection was brilliant teaching. Period. This is teaching that will save lives. Thank you for helping me on the path to do this necessary work. I will bring forth the message to make change until Black Liberation is Realized. Thank you. I would joyfully write a letter for anyone involved in the preparation and execution of the most life-changing teaching I have witnessed in a 39 year-teaching career.
What an honor and privilege this week has been. Thank you to Pearis and Dr. Della for birthing this experience and revolution. Your efforts are like the ripples that will last long beyond you. My hope will be to join with others from my University and geographical area to continue the necessary work.
If and when either of you would like a letter of support in your tenure file, PLEASE let me know. The only word I have for my experience of this week is transformative. It is the rare scholar who takes the time and labor away from their intellectual endeavours to share the fruits of those labors in a transformative way, to energize and galvanize beyond your community, to share the insights, the experiences, the research, the colleagues, and the path forward for change. I don't think anyone else could have led us through this training in such a thoughtful, gentle, provocative, and change-making way. You deserve medals for this effort.
Are there deans, or chairs of departments that I can write directly, and at greater length, then here? This is great, but sometimes "crowd sourced" comments like this can be discredited by administrators, for all the wrong reasons of course, but nonetheless.