social justice

Social Justice Fellows Named

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Kama Tai Mitchell (left) and Lillie Wolff
Kama Tai Mitchell (left) and Lillie Wolff

The Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership (ACSJL) has announced the 2016-17 Regional Fellows. The program helps leaders in Kalamazoo County clarify the core values they want their work to exemplify, increase their effectiveness, and bring a stronger social justice focus to their work.  Fellows will engage often with the ACSJL for eight months, attending training and coaching sessions while laying the groundwork for their projects.

Names of the fellows and a brief description of their projects follow.

Jesselyn Leach is the creator of #Gang4Change, an initiative explores how art and social justice can work together. The project will work with Kalamazoo teens and young people, providing them the opportunity to connect with their artistic selves in music, spoken word poetry, slam poetry, cyphering, and other creative genres.

BlackOut, a project of Maxwell T. Isaac and Lexington Everson Fate, is designed to lay the foundations of greater visibility and sovereignty for the Black community of Kalamazoo. BlackOut is comprised of parts: the Living Narrative and the Living Action. The former will increase the visibility of Black stories as told by their authors, sharing their experiences with injustice in Kalamazoo. The latter will fortify leadership and community ties through community awareness events and trainings.

Movement for the Movement is a collaboration created by Kama Tai Mitchell and Lillie Wolff ’04. It will examine and address the systemic barriers that impede people with marginalized identities from accessing and benefitting from healing arts spaces and resources. When shared equitably and accountably, healing arts practices, such as yoga, can aid in transforming the harmful and dehumanizing effects of oppression and privilege.

Remi Harrington‘s project is called City Schools and BMFA (balancing motherhood for the future of America). Her work will promote parental engagement and community integrated education for the purpose of dismantling the cradle to the prison pipeline. The work will create intercultural spaces in neighborhoods to support academic mastery through industry centered, project based learning. These spaces will also develop employable skill sets and will build an infrastructure for a sustainable community.

Chris Wahmhoff is a creator of the Edison Ducks in a Row, a project that began in April of 2015 after two ducks were adopted and Edison neighborhood kids began to take interest. The program helps educated kids and young adults about farm animals and basic urban farming techniques. The eventual goal is to transition public school food sources to local farming in the Edison neighborhood.

Thanksgiving Journey Home

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Jamie Schaub and Brenin Wert-Roth
Jamie Schaub and Brenin Wertz-Roth

Jamie Schaub ’12, a Montessori teacher who lives and works in Traverse City, Michigan, traveled to Standing Rock Indian Reservation in North Dakota during Thanksgiving. She shared her story of leaving home to go home.

A few days before Thanksgiving I decided to travel to Standing Rock, an impulse initiated by donations collected in Traverse City by Jenn Demoss, who knew Lee Sprague, an elected tribal leader in Michigan currently living at Oceti Sakowin camp, one of several that compose the Standing Rock community of Water Protectors. Jenn had more than she could fit in her car, a testament to the power of human connection, a power my partner, Brenin Wertz-Roth, and I experienced often during the journey. We felt love and support from our families and friends, as if all of the people we know were traveling with us, and in addition to warm clothes, gear, tools, and supplies, we also were carrying prayers, hope and love.

We wanted to support the protesters who have left their homes and created a new community at Standing Rock camp. I believe in protecting the water and the earth, and I wanted to support those who have been standing strong for such protection against the Dakota Access Pipeline, in spite of violence, harsh weather, and sleep deprivation.

Throughout our drive our friends from near and far sent donations which felt like little hugs along the way. Friends with whom we hadn’t been in touch reached out, and it initiated beautiful conversations as we caught up about our lives. We were welcomed to stay in many homes in Minneapolis (the journey’s halfway point). How lucky to have such kind friends in our lives.

We received around $3,000 in donations within hours of deciding to go, which meant we could purchase more supplies for the Standing Rock community along the way.

The most expensive of items needed were dry suits, (a new one starts around $1,000). We searched Craigslist and made a couple of detours in Wisconsin and Minnesota.

In Minnesota we decided to purchase more neoprene gear, binoculars, walkie talkies and space blankets. We needed to find an outdoor store; Cabela’s opened the earliest. I decided to ask for a discount at the checkout stating that we were buying supplies for Standing Rock protesters. The manager gave us employee pricing without hesitation. Beautiful human. With the $200 saved we purchased more building supplies.

Outside Minnesota we let Lee know we were on our way. He recounted the violence of  the previous Sunday, the deployment against the protesters of concussion grenades, rubber bullets, water hoses, pepper spray and mace. He had a large deep purple bruise on his side despite having many layers of protection. Most people at the camp, including Lee, had suffered injuries. We made plans to arrive at Standing Rock following morning.

Next day, car stuffed, we drove north, anxious to arrive at camp. It was a cool, muted morning. The grassy landscape greeted us, and then the river–it was beautiful, worth protecting. This landscape was like the view of Lake Michigan, vast and seemingly unending, just more yellowy-beige than blue.

As we neared the camp its immensity (physical and symbolic) nearly overwhelmed us. It was so much larger than I thought—cars, teepees, yurts, tents, and buildings everywhere; all sorts of flags flying in the winds. The person at the gate embraced us saying, “Welcome home.” We found the flags Lee told us to seek atop a plywood building next to several tarpees (teepees constructed from donated heavy-duty,cold-resistant poly tarp material).

Cold weather shingling
Cold weather shingling

We unloaded the provisions we had brought, and I felt such a lightness. All of the hours in the car disappeared as everyone’s faces lit up with happiness and gratitude. The words “thank you” radiated around us with such deep feeling. Their hugs lasted and warmed us. We found ourselves at home at Pueblo Camp in Standing Rock.

Offerings to us were made throughout the day and evening as we prepared the plywood house for winter. I helped Brenin build storage shelves for food. We shingled, sealed holes, insulated walls. I kept thinking: “This is where I am supposed to be right now.” Actually, I NEEDED to be here. I needed something bigger, something important, something meaningful. At school my students are representing Venezuela for Montessori Model UN. Our  months of discussion had opened my heart to the thoughtfulness of children. I had been feeling like I wanted to take action, my mind afire with ideas, some of them from my students.

My work at Standing Rock was concrete, worked in wood. While most folks went to protest at the front line on Thanksgiving day, Brenin and I stayed back to continue building and insulation projects, helping prepare the camp for a long winter.

When we left camp for the journey home the moment, and its magnitude, hit us. Gratitude for the ability to go and do something we believe in. Gratitude for those who love us. Gratitude for the strong people at Standing Rock. Gratitude for each other.

I remember the Pueblo people talking about how they are a family (and yet most of them didn’t know each other before they arrived in North Dakota from New Mexico and Arizona). I remember the idea of “family reunion” and a gathering of humans happening at camp. This way of interacting with each other I had felt once before, on study abroad in Thailand–the feeling that you are accepted, loved, and family.

I remember a tepee conversation around a fire late one night about the need to realize our shared humanity, that we are brothers and sisters. We talked about people losing their drums, and if we went back to our drum we would go back to acting with intention and care. We discussed prayer, meditation and mindfulness. What a gift to have been with such present and focused human beings.

I am feeling anxious for the friends I met at Standing Rock. I fear that more violence may be coming. The Water Protectors need our support and the action is about much more than an oil pipeline. Where do we stand on an action that gives hope to all?

The people we met at the Standing Rock community are peaceful, loving, kind and welcoming. I am in awe of their strength to maintain a peaceful protest in the face of incredible provocations. I stand with them.

by Jamie Schaub

Profile of Courage

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David FranceIn May of 2013 alumnus David France ’81 returned to Kalamazoo College’s campus to present his Oscar-nominated documentary “How to Survive a Plague.” David has recently written and published a book of the same title, How to Survive a Plague: The Inside Story of How Citizens and Science Tamed AIDS. On November 21, the New York Times published a rave review of the work by writer and former editor of the New Republic Andrew Sullivan.

“A question has always hung over the reaction of gay men to the plague that terrorized and decimated them in the 1980s and 1990s: Why did they not surrender?,” writes Sullivan. “David France’s remarkable book tries to answer that question.”

The answer, David articulates in his history, is a courage that not only ended a plague but also revolutionized medicine, a kind of courage as remarkable as it is rare in human history.

After graduating from K with a degree in political science, David moved to New York City to study philosophy at the New school. A mysterious disease was killing many people around him, and no one was writing about it. So he began to investigate.

“I had only one science class at K, and I had to take it twice,” he told Elaine Ezekiel in May 2013. “Suddenly I’m interviewing bench researchers trying to see if their work offered any hope.” David trained himself about the virus and about the bench and clinical procedures as well as the federal bureaucracy involved in the development of medicines. He also relied on what he learned as a news editor for The Index.

David also had experience with the need to summon courage. He and his friends had established the College’s first gay and lesbian support group. “It was a dangerous time,” he said. “We had to meet off campus. There were constant threats of violence.” For an Index article that interviewed friends about what it was like to be gay at K David had to use pseudonyms to protect the sources.

Sullivan suggests the combination of David’s qualities, contacts, breadth of expertise and curiosity make him the indispensable author of this profile of extraordinarily persistent courage.

“It took years to gain traction, but the courage of the resistance turned out, over time, to be as persistent as the virus itself,” wrote Sullivan. “And the merit of this book is that it shows how none of this was inevitable, how it took specific, flawed individuals, of vastly different backgrounds, to help bring this plague to an end in a decade and a half.”

Sullivan lauds David’s passion and fairness.”You wonder, of course, how many of those deaths could have been avoided. France makes a strong case for the staggering insouciance of government at all levels, especially in the early years. He’s brutal about bureaucratic incompetence and political cowardice. And yet he is also fair enough to show that the science of disabling a dazzlingly resilient retrovirus was fiendishly difficult and that by 1982, 42.6 percent of gay men in San Francisco and 26.8 percent of gay men in New York had already been infected. The community’s own adoption of safer sex — and the vital gains activists made in pushing for cures and treatments for various opportunistic infections — made the most difference in preventing further catastrophe. But in the end, science takes time. Some made it over the line before the war ended. Many never made it. Some of us live lives still haunted by that distinction.”

Photo of David France by Ken Scheles

Conference Honors K Student’s Research

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Sarah Bragg discusses her research during a poster session at the inauguration of President Jorge Gonzalez.
Sarah Bragg discusses her research during a poster session at the inauguration of President Jorge Gonzalez.

Sarah Bragg ’17 won an award for her poster detailing research on barriers to HIV testing. She presented the poster at the Annual Biomedical Research Conference for Minority Students in Tampa, Florida, this month. Her work was awarded in the conference’s Behavioral Science and Public Health category.

Sarah conducted her research during 12-week summer internship at Morehouse College and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for HIV/AIDS, Viral Hepatitis, STD and TB Prevention. She plans to expand the project she completed (titled “Barriers and Solutions to HIV Testing Among College and University Students”) and make it the basis of her Senior Individualized Project. That project will compare the prevalence and contexts of HIV testing at public and private institutions of higher education. During all four years of her undergraduate experience at K, Sarah has served as a Civic Engagement Scholar in the College’s Center for Civic Engagement. She has worked in a weekly mentoring program with young women. She also has worked with Assistant Professor of Psychology Kyla Fletcher on her three-year NIH study on daily HIV risk reduction behavior in African-American partner relationships.

Sarah is earning her bachelor’s degree in psychology with a concentration in community and global health. She plans to pursue a career in public health and, after graduating this June, to apply for a one- or two-year fellowship with the CDC. About the work she did during her summer internship, Sarah wrote: “I was able to use the skills that were cultivated at Kalamazoo College, especially through my work at the Center for Civic Engagement.” The CCE stresses the connection between effective social change and work that applies a social justice perspective. “We do not strive to save the world,” explained Sarah. “We collaborate with communities in an effort to find solutions that are suitable and that ensure the dignity and respect for the community.”

“Without Borders” Conference Imagines World Where All Life May Thrive

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Without Borders ConferenceThe tension between what is politically possible under the world’s current political and economic systems and what is ecologically necessary exposes an urgent need for change, said journalist and activist Naomi Klein, keynote speaker for the conference, “Without Borders, Post-Oppression Imaginaries and Decolonized Futures.” The conference was sponsored by the Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership at Kalamazoo College and attracted several hundred activists and social justice experts from across the country.

According to Klein, even though the recent Paris climate change agreement looked like the beginning of the end of the fossil fuel era, the treaty is neither legally binding nor sufficient in its goals to avert ecological disaster.

“Fossil fuel frontiers have to be closed if we have any hope of a future,” said Klein. “Politicians have absolutely no plan to do this.”

Adequately addressing climate change has failed since the late 1980s, emasculated by a neoliberalist interpretation of capitalism that promotes privatization, fiscal austerity, deregulation, free trade and reductions in government spending to enhance the public sector. Such policies have created in people a profound sense of hopelessness about climate change, said Klein.

“We are told that selfishness and short-sightedness is part of human nature, which prevents us acting,” said Klein. “This is not true and it steers us away from an analysis of our system. In fact, the fight for survival is human nature.”

Many local, grassroots groups are advocating steps to address climate change because they see the issue’s connection to an unjust economic system that is failing for a vast majority of people all over the planet, she added.

Klein challenged the audience to work for “climate justice” by reversing the “extractivist” point of view of the Earth and promoting the “caretaking” of one another, an ethos that indigenous people advocate.

“It’s not just ‘energy democracy’ but ‘energy justice’ that we need,” said Klein. “This leads to clean energy projects and jobs.”

She also emphasized that service work like nursing, child care, public interest media should be redefined as climate work that sets out to create a “caring and repairing economy.”

“We need to embed justice in every aspect of our lives,” said Klein. “The people are hungry for transformational change, and we have to go for it on all fronts.”

The conference focused on four related themes: Afrofuturism, Decolonized Knowledge, Sustainable Futures, and Next Systems.

Text by Olga Bonfiglio; conference photo by Susan Andress

Public Lecture Explores Historic Treatment of Pueblo People

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Nora Naranjo MorseNora Naranjo Morse will deliver the annual Phi Beta Kappa lecture at Kalamazoo College on Tuesday, October 11, at 8 p.m. in the Mandelle Hall Olmsted Room. The event is free and open to the public. Morse Morse is a sculptor, writer, and producer of video films that look at the continuing social changes within Pueblo Indian culture.  Her talk, “Numbe Wahgeh,” focuses on the historical treatment of the Pueblo people and history retold by indigenous peoples.

An artist best known for her work with clay and organic materials, she has been trained in the Pueblo clay work tradition of the Southwest.  Her installation exhibits and large-scale public art speak to environmental, cultural, and social practice issues.  Beyond New Mexico, her work can be seen at the Heard Museum in Phoenix, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, Washington, D.C.

She studied at the College of Santa Fe, where she received her B.A. degree in 1980, and is the recipient of an honorary degree from Skidmore College.  In 2014 Naranjo Morse was awarded a Native Arts and Cultures Foundation Artist fellowship.  She is the author of two books:  a poetry collection, Mud Woman: Poems from the Clay, and a children’s book, Kaa Povi.

Morse will spend two days on K’s campus. In addition to her public lecture she will visit four classes and meet with various faculty and students.

Decolonization is a Medical Necessity

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Associate Professor of Anthropology Adriana Garriga-Lopez
Associate Professor of Anthropology Adriana Garriga-Lopez addresses a plenary at the 20th United States Conference on AIDS

Adriana Garriga-Lopez, associate professor of anthropology, attended the 20th United States Conference on AIDS where she was interviewed by MD Magazine on the response to HIV/AIDS in Puerto Rico.

That response has long been the focus of her research. Specifically she studies the social ramifications of epidemics and how those ramifications influence the public health system in Puerto Rico. Although she finds much to criticize about the public health response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic on the island where she was born and raised until the age of 16, she is quick to note the debilitating influence on that response of the mitigating circumstance of the unjust power dynamic between the United States and its “unincorporated territory” of Puerto Rico.

Her work also studies the responses of the marginalized communities most affected by the epidemic, and there is much in those responses that have overcome the challenges presented by the inadequate public health response and, despite those challenges, been highly effective.

Garriga-Lopez’s interview was divided into four chapters: What is the Focus of Your Research?; Did Your Heritage Influence Your Decision to Pursue Anthropology? (which explores how colonialism manifests every day and an approach to decolonizing public health); What Challenges Do You Face? (which includes a focus on States, Bodies, and Epidemics [the title of a class Garriga-Lopez teaches at Kalamazoo College] and the fact that because social injustice affects everyone, everyone has a responsibility to understand and address it; for example, an effective response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic begins with understanding that it is in fact comprised of multiple epidemics; and What Are Your Thoughts on Some Researchers Considering Zika as the New STD?, in which Garriga-Lopez articulates the need to inextricably link public health and a social justice conscience. The former must go much further than emergency management and act on the complex issues of the latter, such as lack of access to basic rights and basic needs as well as an unbalanced power structure that denies democratic participation in distribution of resources to persons in greatest need of those resources.

Dining Green

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Food Recovery Network members prepare unused food for donation
Food Recovery Network members prepare unused food for donation.

Fulfilling the food needs of an entire campus can be a pretty resource-heavy task. This is why dining services has been especially active in their efforts to create an environmentally-friendly operation. Those efforts include using locally sourced food, donating what food isn’t used, and composting what can’t be given away.

There are numerous benefits to eating locally. On top of tastier and more nutritious food, less travel time means significantly fewer carbon emissions by trucks and fewer preservatives used to keep the food fresh. Moreover, eating local foods supports local jobs and businesses. Food is considered local if it is grown or manufactured within a 150-mile radius of a given location. For K, this means much of southwestern Michigan, as well as parts of northern Indiana and Illinois. Some of these local products include apples from Crisp Country Acres, dairy products from Prairie Farms, bread from Aunt Millie’s, sushi from Hunan Gardens, and coffee from Simpatico and Kalamazoo Coffee Company. Most recently, free range eggs from Old Town Farm were added to this list, and it will continue to grow as the weather warms different fruits, and vegetables become in season in Michigan. Not limited to the dining hall, these foods can be found at the Richardson Room, the Book Cub and catered events. Look for the Michigan sticker that says “Local Flavor!”

A major part of creating a more sustainable dining operation is the reduction of food waste. Kitchen staff keep track of how much food they make in order to avoid excess waste. Still, many pounds of food go unused at every meal and ordinarily would simply be thrown away. This is where the Food Recovery Network comes in. This student group, founded last winter by Calli Brannan ’19, comes to the dining hall kitchen every Tuesday and Thursday to “recover” unused food and provide it to food insecure families in the area. In the weeks it has been active at K, the group of 16 volunteers has recovered more than 1,500 pounds of food. That translates to more than 1,000 meals to people in need. This food goes to Eleanor House, a shelter for families in Kalamazoo where more than 60 percent of the residents are children. The FRN seeks more volunteers so that it can expand its efforts and save even more food.

Composted food supports landscaping
Composted food supports landscaping at new buildings like the social justice center.

Not all food that’s uneaten is fit for donation. That food is composted. Every week a group of student compost interns collects between 600 and 1,100 pounds of pre- and post-consumer waste from the cafeteria and bring it to Facilities Management for composting. There, large earth tubs use augers and the natural heat from the composting process to accelerate the process. About six weeks later, the final product is used all around campus on landscape beds, notably at the Arcus Center and the new Fitness and Wellness Center. The use of compost on these areas will count toward LEED Gold certification – a trademark of sustainable buildings across the country. This symbiotic relationship enables both Dining Services and Facilities Management to run more sustainable operations, and students to live on a more beautiful campus. Moreover, compost is open to all members of the College community for use both on and off campus.

These are just a few of the growing list of efforts made by Dining Services to run more sustainably. The move toward a totally green operation is an ongoing process that continues to produce extraordinarily valuable benefits.
Text and photos by Jeff Palmer ’76