Dear Substack Community: If you read this Substack, then you know I tell the truth. I’m told I have the double gift of prophecy, which doesn’t win me any friends, but I am compelled to tell the truth.
I live in Western New York. I make my home in a small college town where there is a State College and a Private University. The Private University’s mascot is The Saxon! That should tell you a little bit about my context and the history that undergirds the context.
This land is indigenous to the Seneca Nation. The Haudonsonee and Onadonga people lived on this land and nurtured it. In fact, the land is alive! When I first moved here, I could feel the vibrational energies of the land. I was excited to be on land that still had feeling! The closer I have moved to the the two higher education institutions, the more I feel the waters of supremacy culture.
After being here and in engaged as a pastor, I began running into the edges of people; the edges of their capacity.
Everyone said this is a community, but everyone else told me they wanted community.
The owning class had one story. The workers and students had another.
People are divided; there’s no vision for bridge building.
Also, this area does not compensate people well. We live in one of the poorest counties in New York. I have four jobs and am on the system here for food and healthcare.
We’ve been seeing the institutional agenda roll out on a federal level, and I want us to be aware that other institutions are rolling out their institutional agenda!
For example, the Private University here reached out to me for help with their Trans & gender expansive students. I was excited to help and bring a sense of communal ethics to this Private University, but things shifted and the idea they grabbed onto without any conversation via email was to host a support group.
I wrote to them, including the provost, and thanked them for including me. I reminded them that I spend most of my time with THEIR students, faculty, and staff who are terrified right now. I let them know I couldn’t volunteer my time beyond commencement and convocation, which I understood was a paid position for the former minister of the church where I serve.
Tonight, at an art opening, the provost (a cis white woman) punished me for standing up for myself. She let me know I was no longer needed. Someone on campus will do what I had been asked to do.
It’s like asking a Black person to come talk about racism, it letting them know there was no budget to pay for their labor.
It was a Black woman who reached out to me regarding this. I had initially emailed her about some Trans scholars who wanted to come for TDOV. But, I ran into the institutional agenda.
Jesus taught: “They know not what they do.”
The provost committed a micro aggression against me that makes me wonder if it’s also Trans antagonism?
I’m called to tell the truth. I always have. It’s why I wrote my first book, Activist Theology.
I’m learning how deep the waters of supremacy culture are here where I live, and which people in which institutions want to nurture community. There are not many!
Relationships move at the pace of trust.
Tonight’s interaction didn’t sit well with me and shows me what the institutional agenda is here with the Private University. Even some of the BIPOC folks who work there are complicit in harm and accelerate the institutional agenda.
They say a core value is inclusivity.
But, what does they mean when the president of the Private University doesn’t even live in the town in which he is employed?!
I hear he was given a Telsa and a free house.
He drives his Telsa to his home in the Greater Rochester area, presumably where he has his community of other members of the owning class.
The institutional agenda doesn’t embody care.
Institutions are self-interested and self-invested.
I hear they won’t change the name of the mascot (The Saxon), because the President doesn’t want to lose funding from billionaire trustees.
So, they are building a multi-million dollar sports complex.
I guess we call that progress?
As we move thru the next few months, remember your value. Stand your ground.
Rest is resistance.
Don’t let yourself be taken advantage of in the name of service, because that’s how we exploit people and workers.
We have a real chance to practice democracy, but it will take a diversity of tactics. I am anti-assimilationist, and I refuse to assimilate future into supremacy culture.
Keep on, y’all! We are doing something right!
Paz, —Roberto Che Espinoza+
That is a lot of emotional labor to take on for free. No one should have asked you for your time without compensation. I would be interested to know how MZ would feel about that.
Regardless, I am so sorry you experienced this. As a person who works at the very same institution, I can assure you that they pay their degreed staff the same as they pay their custodial staff.