Insatiable Grief and the Machinery of Disposability
“The paradox of education is precisely this—that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated.” — James Baldwin
In February, I wrote about the institutional agenda of Alfred University, about how this place disposes of people, and about how they disposed of me. Today I return with grief that feels both personal and unbearably collective.
A Black queer graduate art student—disabled, brilliant, vulnerable, fierce—was recently harassed by AU security. Terrified, she wondered if she would die as security and Alfred PD escalated the encounter, pulling on latex gloves as if her Blackness were a contagion. Her crime? She forgot her ID. Never mind that her photograph was on the door of her studio, never mind that she was working in the space where she creates life.
This is not an isolated incident. It is a pattern. It is history repeating, a difference that bears the same old repetition of white supremacy. Alfred University security has troubled the waters before. “Heather,” the officer patrolling art studios—absent from the website, now quietly relocated—has harassed students, fueled by conspiracy beliefs. This is the machinery of disposability at work.
And it doesn’t stop there. Alfred PD has invested millions in new surveillance equipment, accelerating the militarization of a small-town force already aligned with empire’s logics. Surveillance masquerades as safety, but what it produces is fear. What it builds is division. What it accelerates is death.
The grief I carry is not only for this Black queer student who was threatened with removal from her own studio, pacified and disposed of by a Dean and Provost whose whiteness shields them from accountability. My grief is for the rupture itself—for the way policing here in Alfred embodies the necropolitics of our age, deciding who belongs and who must be expelled, who is nurtured and who is discarded.
Unity will not save us. The call for unity is a pacifying myth. What we need is human connection that honors difference, not the oppositional logics that empire feeds on. We need care woven through every rupture, not surveillance cameras placed on every corner.
This is the insatiable grief of white supremacy: it is never satisfied. It consumes, it disposes, it pacifies, it erases. And if we are not vigilant, it will convince us to be silent.
I will not be silent.
✨ Ritual Exhale:
Breathe in rupture.
Breathe out witness.
Breathe in grief.
Breathe out fire.
Breathe in fear.
Breathe out refusal.