Scholar Activism: To Make the Road by Walking

• In Event: Moscone Center North Roundtable Session 10
  In Roundtable Session: Radical Vulnerabilities to Transcend Paradoxes and Embrace Wholeness

Abstract

As an academic administrator, founder of a youth empowerment organization, and a scholar of racial justice, I traverse between drastically different environments. Within an afternoon, I will go from an administrative discussion on campus to a meeting with young people in the neighborhood. Because of the polarities, I often get pulled into spaces where I feel myself becoming a cultural broker and code-switcher. While this can serve to build important institutional and interpersonal bridges, there also comes a time when our tongue and tone can no longer double-dutch. Our warmth becomes complicit, our liberalism part of the lie.

Today is not for the faint of heart; it is not business as usual. I am sitting in my office grappling with ideas of community-engaged scholarship. A large part of my work and research contends with moving ecosystems of oppression towards ecosystems of equity. I am wrestling with the institutional barricades and borderless possibilities that bring people, policies, and programs together in service of social change. And then, just 25 miles from campus, Stephon Clark is murdered.

On March 18, 2018, Stephon Alonzo Clark was murdered by the police in his backyard in Meadowview. This neighborhood is a beautiful community, yet remains a disenfranchised pocket of Sacramento. Although UC Davis is not too far away from Meadowview physically, the gaps between these two neighborhoods (95832 and 95616) are ideological, racial, and economic. Two-thirds of residents in Davis are white, while Sacramento is heralded as the tenth most diverse city in the US. Family income in Davis is about four times as much as that of the poorest adjacent neighborhoods in Sacramento. We may witness the same sunset, yet our horizons are viscerally different on measures of health, access, equality, and opportunity.

In the aftermath of Clark’s killing and with the release of the video footage, I felt a collision of conscience. I expected this local atrocity to precipitate all conversations on campus, but for most of my colleagues, they hadn’t even heard what had happened. There was this gap, again, vividly demarcating different realities. This paper will interrogate this moment and larger tensions around scholar-activism. I will rely on auto-ethnography to share some critical moments that have helped turn small steps into radical pathways between art, activism, and the academy.

In a world full of injustice, there is much to do. In this urgency to fight, the work itself can become heavy. Slowing down might even feel selfish amidst the immediacy of inequities, police brutalities, and constant emergencies. So we run and run and often barely catch our breath. Yet justice—literally and figuratively—means balance. Thus a transformative praxis does not just live in our heads, but also in our hearts—and most definitely in our hands and feet. In other words, it is not merely what is conceived that is revolutionary, but what is achieved, daily, in how we are living justice.

Author

• Vajra M. Watson, California State University - Sacramento