Things Are Gonna Get Easier: Refusing Schooling as a Site of Black Suffering

Michael J. Dumas

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When the Detroit teachers’ union and several parents’ groups recently filed a lawsuit against the Detroit Public Schools, their complaint highlighted dangerous and unhealthy learning conditions for children: infestations of rats and roaches, freezing classrooms, exposed electrical wiring, and falling debris. “That floor’s been like that for at least four years,” parent Christopher Robinson complained, referring to the growing mold in one school. “Our children deserve better,” said Shoniqua Kemp, parent of two children in Detroit schools, and one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit. “They’re going to get better, one way or another.”

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EMU Faculty: No Confidence in Regents

Dear Colleagues,

Yesterday the Faculty Senate unanimously, with no abstentions, adopted a resolution of no confidence in the EMU Board of Regents regarding the ongoing participation in the EAA and the Board’s decision on December 8, 2015 to delay consideration of that partnership. I have attached the no confidence resolution to this message.

The Faculty Senate resolution reflects a broad faculty consensus across colleges and departments. Indeed, the resolution originated at the departmental level. On December 11 the Department of Teacher Education unanimously adopted a motion of no confidence in the leadership of the Board of Regents. It also unanimously supported a motion of censure of Board Chair Michael Morris. Teacher Education forwarded these documents to the Faculty Senate Executive Board (FSEB) on December 14. I called a meeting of the FSEB on December 15 to discuss next steps on the EAA, including the possibility of a vote of no confidence. The FSEB found the justification for the vote of no confidence—that the Board of Regents had violated several articles of its own Code of Ethics—to be compelling. We decided that the best way to proceed on the motions was to forward them to the college councils for consideration. Below is the chronology of actions taken by the college councils.

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Letter from George Jackson

June 14, 1970

I don’t think we can afford to be nice much longer, the very last of our protection is eroding from under us. There will be no means of detecting when that last right is gone. You’ll only know when they start shooting you. The process must be checked somewhere between now and then, or we’ll be fighting from a position of weakness with our backs against the wall. (I think we still have the advantage now.) We of the black colony know about that kind of action, fighting off of the wall. It’s not the best way to get down.

It’s getting tighter here, they’re taking our visits. It looks as if they’re stopping our court appearances. They also made a mistake concerning our “money draw” this month. This means we’ll be without the little things even.

You may never read this letter either, our mail is being held back, returned, thrown away somewhere. Nice people aren’t they? They richly deserve anything we can do to them. This man who just passed my cell counting, he’ll never listen to reason. His mind isn’t constructed that way. While we reason with him in ideals and ideas, he isn’t listening. He is thinking about which rule he’ll quote to dismiss us. When he walks away, you’ll see the little code book protruding from his ass pocket. That’s where he carries his mind, in his ass pocket. When we attack the problem with intellectualism we give away the advantage we have in numbers.

I’m with Bobby! We are going to have to kick him where he keeps his brain, in the region of the ass.

Power.

George