The Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies stands in firm solidarity with our colleagues in the
Department of Black Studies in their statement and their call to protest UCSB’s failure to protect our students and freedom of expression.
We express our deep concern with the harassment that many students, faculty, and staff have confronted in the past months in discussing the Israeli government’s human rights abuses and violence in Palestine. We want to make it clear that we do not condone anti-semitism, and that critiquing and protesting the government of Israel is not equivalent to anti-semitism. To racialize and dehumanize others, to strip us of human rights by referring to us as “terrorists,” “illegals,” “savage,” and “primitives,” is a common tool of settler colonial logics to justify genocide and displacement.
We are deeply alarmed that many of our undergraduate and graduate students have been and continue to be doxed and harassed online. Our concerns for their personal safety led our department to take the difficult but necessary decision to temporarily remove our graduate student’s profiles from our webpage during Fall quarter, as it contained their photos and names. In the case of our graduate students, this impacts them in various ways as they are unable to use our department webpage to network and make their crucial work visible. Moreover, potential graduate students for our program see that we had to remove our students’ photos, names, and emails. This has prevented them from easily contacting our graduate students, while giving them the sense that UCSB is not a safe space for critical thinking and academic freedom. This situation alone illustrates the harsh reality and insecurity graduate students, undergraduate students, staff, faculty, and visitors are all confronting at UCSB.
Recently, undergraduate student staff at the MCC have been doxed online; in one list almost all were women of color. Several of these students are majoring in Chicana/o Studies. Some have stated that the students’ legal status has been published online. Deeply alarming, these students are put at risk for further harassment and harm.
Our department was created by Black and Brown student activists who sought to create a better future through education. We, students and faculty, have since been at the forefront of internationalist struggles and academic freedom in pursuit of social justice. For decades, our students have engaged in protests, hunger strikes, sit-ins, and international solidarity movements, often at great risk; today they carry on that legacy of speaking truth to power. It should alarm the administration that undergraduate and graduate students, staff, and faculty across UCSB do not consider themselves secure on campus because of their solidarity with the people of Palestine, who are currently undergoing violence, displacement, and starvation by the government of Israel. It is a reminder that the struggle continues.
In solidarity,
Some concerned faculty of Chicana and Chicano Studies
[Updated from letter originally posted on March 7, 2024]
