Confronting Anti-Black Racism

Building a Culture Where Balck People Thrive

Anti-Blackness: An Existential Threat to Our University Mission

Anti-Blackness refers to actions or behaviors that minimize, marginalize or devalue the full participation of Black people in our university life. Such actions may not be maliciously motivated or even rise to the level of a policy violation. The accumulated impact affects how Black undergraduates, graduate students, faculty and staff community experience belonging at UCI and can negatively affect how they learn, discover and work. In robbing them of their full membership, anti-Blackness distorts the research, teaching and service mission of UCI as a public university serving the state of California while reaching across the country and world.

Our University Response a National Imperative: We Must Be in This Together

The current unrest that is roiling our country is a profoundly distressing statement of the crisis of our society. Sparked by sickening pattern of the unjustified deaths of Black people in police custody and at the hands of vigilantes, the demonstrates in support of Black Lives reflects both a profound and justified sense of grievance and frustration with policing and our justice system. The unrest that we are witnessing is no less about the persistence of systematic oppression and exclusion in educational opportunity, participation in the economy, access to health care, and all areas of social life essential to social justice and human well-being. The experience of anti-Blackness belies the notion that “We are all in this together.” But if we are to survive, as a nation, as a society, we must be in this together.