AADS and the New Semester: A Welcome

Dear beloved African & African Diaspora Studies and the Boston College community: As I go into my third year as Director of African & African Diaspora Studies, I am shook by this most challenging of welcomes for the 2020 academic year.  Normally, the pulse of the new semester enlivens me as new students and colleagues grace our campus with fresh energy, and returning faces provide familiar comforts.  The spirit and determination of AADS’ faculty, staff, and students have always been a part of the exhilarating thrill of the new semester, as I can count on my AADS community for intellectual innovations, activist and artistic engagements, and emotional and spiritual support.  Every year, I look forward to this new beginning.

This new year, though, is obviously different.  Thus, this welcome must meet you differently.  While AADS faculty and staff will continue our legacy of excellence in teaching, research, and programming, we must do so at the intersection of a new viral pandemic and a much too familiar epidemic of racialized state sanctioned violence; both of which disproportionately affect and kill Black, Indigenous, and Latinx people.  With this in mind, AADS is determined to meet you and the BC community at this crucial crossroads.  And the empowering words of two of our foremothers, Ida B. Wells-Barnett and Toni Morrison, offer us roadmaps for how to navigate this hazardous terrain.

Although video recordings of police officers and vigilantes shooting and murdering Black people like Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and Jacob Blake have replaced community hangings and lynching postcards, anti-lynching activist Ida B. Wells’ historic research reminds us that public and state sanctioned death of Black people is a grotesquely familiar U.S. story.  Its horrors need no embellishment, as “it makes its own way.”  As a journalist, educator, and activist Ida B. Wells provided a blueprint for addressing violence against people of African descent – document, analyze, educate, and fervently and consistently resist oppression.  AADS is committed to these pillars of scholarly activism.

The pandemic, however, has made organizing for justice more challenging, but not impossible.  AADS will do its part to hold virtual spaces so that we can nurture the conditions that allow our community members to envision and make a world free of anti-Black violence, even as we traverse the racist and deadly consequences of this viral pandemic. As such, we have dedicated this year’s New Directions series to “Arts, Activism, and the Movement for Black Lives in the age of COVID – 19.”  Like Wells-Barnett, we will ask bold questions and suggest daring solutions, as "[t]here must always be a remedy for wrong and injustice, if we only know how to find it."

One place I aim to find a remedy is by participating in the upcoming #ScholarStrike on September 8th and 9th.  To honor this national demonstration of solidarity with the Movement for Black Lives, I will not be conducting business as usual on these days.  I will be unavailable to students, faculty and administrators.  I will, though, be joining and streaming in for the national #ScholarStrike teach-in.  If you are inclined and able to participate, I invite you to join in and participate in this virtual conversation and act of civil disobedience.

And for many of us caught in the cross-hairs of systemic racism, state violence, and the global pandemic, the Movement for Black Lives is not just intellectual – it is, indeed, embodied and personal.  Like many people of African descent, I, too, have experienced police brutality.  And COVID – 19 has also had a devasting impact on my family; with five members surviving the brutal infection and one succumbing and transitioning to an ancestor.  Thus, while we make space for academic study and social justice, we must also remember to take good care of our hearts, spirits, and minds.  Make time to laugh, scream, sing, pray, meditate, and commune with nature.  We must take time to love our flesh and our whole selves, “for this is the prize.” (Toni Morrison).

If you are having trouble, please reach out to a mental health professional. BC Counseling Services is a resource and students can download WellTrack, a self-help app for students to address stress, anxiety, and depression.  If you aren’t comfortable with BC services you can also try Good Therapy to help find a local therapist.  Other helpful therapeutic networks include:  Therapy for Black Girls, Therapy in Color, and National Queer and Trans Therapists of Color Network (NQTTCN).

In closing, while this is an unconventional welcome, I do look forward to working with you, AADS, and our broader BC family as we create an intellectual, civic, and justice minded community.  And in doing so I also look forward to us celebrating the spirit of the late John Lewis by getting into some “good trouble."

With love and solidarity…

C. Shawn McGuffey, Ph.D.

Pronouns: He/Him/His

Director of African & African Diaspora Studies

Associate Professor of Sociology

Boston College