As 2022 comes to a close, Executive Director Dawn Blagrove responds to the arrest of a student at Winston Salem State University. Please make an end-of-year donation to Emancipate NC to protect Black humanity in North Carolina and keep our mission strong in 2023.
At Emancipate NC, we have been silently processing the viral video of a 20-year-old Black college student being arrested in a classroom at Winston Salem State University, a historically Black University. As a leading voice in police accountability and abolition in North Carolina, we were immediately inundated with copies of the viral video. Sent to Emancipate by people as tired as we are of state sanctioned violence and the ongoing trauma created by law enforcement.
Our response to this situation includes all the same talking points. Law enforcement does not create safety. Put people before institutions steeped in racism and systemic oppression. Stop treating Black people like threats. Get cops out of schools and institutions of learning.
To that end, our call to action is as follows:
Call To Action
- Contact Forsyth County District Attorney Jim O’Neil and DEMAND that all charges against the student be dropped.
- Contact the Board of Trustees at Winston Salem State University and demand the immediate firing of the professor in the video. Trustees can be contacted at trustees@wssu.edu, or by calling 336- 720-2041.
- Flood the Forsyth County Courthouse on January 25, 2023 and stand in solidarity with the student, Leilla Hamound, at her first appearance.
But, to create the change we all want to see, our response must be people centered and more nuanced.
As a Black mother, lawyer, and activist, this video hit me differently. I could not initially identify why. Everyone watched this video focused on the harms of law enforcement, the danger of weaponizing white women’s tears, the desecration of the few spaces in America that should be safe for Black children, an HBCU, instead of what our focus SHOULD have been. A Black person in a state of emotional distress. This baby had been pushed to her limit. Not once did any of us ask the only questions that actually mattered in this situation…”Baby, what’s really going on?”
The mental and physical well being of Black people -our humanity- is constantly ignored. Had any figure of authority involved, the professor, the law enforcement officers, Professors in adjacent classrooms, ANYONE, stopped to ask the only questions that really mattered, this entire situation could have played out differently. So many stakeholders I have spoken to about this video asked the same questions…”what should have happened?” Well, Emancipate NC will tell you what SHOULD have happened.
A few alternatives in a world where Black children and young adults are not the enemy
- The educator, who should have grown to know this student, recognized the real stress invoked by the end of a semester and anticipated her students needing help navigating the moment.
- The educator should have never allowed law enforcement into her classroom. As an instructor at a historically Black institution, the people entrusted with forming young minds should not live in a bubble. This teacher should have immediately recognized the harm and the long term implications law enforcement brought to this situation and done everything in her power to protect her Black students from that harm.
- The educator should have immediately seen the situation escalating and understood that the most effective way to de-escalate was to transform this moment from a public one to a private one, taking the student in the hallway or a secluded place, for them to talk.
- The educators in adjacent classrooms should have placed caring for a student in distress as the top priority at that moment. Not completing class, finishing an exam, or coveting quiet. Instead of calling the police to maintain status quo order, recognize the humanity in Black people and treat it with the same care we do the mental state of a non Black school shooter.
I could go on, but I won’t belabor the point. When society invests in people and not institutions designed to uphold white supremacy and oppression of Black people the world is a better place. I want to live in that world.
Don’t you?
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P.O. Box 309
Durham, NC 27702