A growing chorus of Black students and faculty members at prestigious universities across the country are pushing for substantive change with regards to the persistent lack of diversity and representation within these institutions. 

Two weeks ago, following a blistering letter from the African American Student Union and AfricaGSD student groups at Harvard University, Harvard Graduate School of Design Dean Sarah Whiting published a list of initiatives the school would undertake in coming months to begin to address these concerns. Students at Yale, Rice University, and many other schools have also published open letters imploring school administrators to take basic, concrete steps toward incorporating and valuing the work, scholarly contributions, and perspectives of Black students, faculty, critics, and academics. 

This week, Black students and faculty at the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation (GSAPP) published separate statements arguing for fundamental change, as well, pushing back against a pair of statements published in early and mid-June by GSAPP Dean Amale Andraos. 

The faculty letter, signed by GSAPP's eight Black faculty members⁠⁠—Amina Blacksher, Lance Freeman, Mario Gooden, Jerome Haferd, Malo Hutson, Gordon Kipping, Justin Garrett Moore, and Mabel O. Wilson⁠—implores GSAPP administrators to "engage in the hard work of unlearning white supremacy," advocating for sending the coming academic year "understanding anti-black racism through a deep analysis and investigation of whiteness and white supremacy." 

The student letter, crafted by the Black Student Alliance at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation (BSA + GSAPP), offers a 12-point plan created in response to "a profound and intolerable lack of vision, awareness and imagination from the [GSAPP] administration," and echoes some of the demands made by Harvard students, which include basic efforts to incorporate the work, experiences, histories, and legacies of Black designers within the school.

 Both letters are printed in full below. 

Unlearning Whiteness

A Statement from the Black Faculty of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation

We are in the midst of a seachange in attitudes towards race relations in the United States. This precipitous change was ignited by the callous murder of George Floyd,  and the recent murders of Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery. The devaluation and dehumanization of black life emblematic of these murders has riveted the nation and world, and prompted a profound reconsideration of the symbols, spaces, and institutions that perpetuate racial inequality in American society.  Statements and pledges of solidarity have abounded. There is a clarion call for real action to dismantle racist systems, and indeed some of those actions are in their nascent stages. The common thread that diminishes the lives of persons racialized as black and brown is white supremacy, the belief in the superiority of whiteness and those advantaged to access its opportunities. This corrosive force operates systemically and structurally to the profound detriment of all members of society and our collective liberation (including the liberation of white people) is at stake.

GSAPP, as an institution and a community, has pledged its commitment to change, but we must first engage in the hard work of unlearning white supremacy. Fifty years ago there were radical actions undertaken by GSAPP students in architecture and planning inspired by the Black Power and Civil Rights movement. One of those trailblazers, educator/alumni/colleague Dr. Sharon Egretta Sutton has narrated in When Ivory Towers were Black how she and classmates forged institutional change, brought Black and Latinx students into the school’s disciplines, and initiated community-based design and planning studios that worked with Harlem residents and organizations. And yet by the 1980s those radical pedagogies and curricular changes disappeared within GSAPP as the whiteness of the school’s disciplines was reconstituted into new versions of old racist paradigms, discourses, and practices. It is our belief that unless white supremacy is first, recognized and second, dismantled within this institution, then the goals professed and desired by many of the GSAPP community to eradicate anti-black racism will fail.

We believe that GSAPP should spend the coming academic year 2020-21 understanding anti-black racism through a deep analysis and investigation of whiteness and white supremacy. Faculty, students and staff should work toward understanding how it operates, its historical legacy, and how it is perpetuated in the school across all disciplines and within the culture of the school itself. To this end, we believe that it is not the job of Black faculty and students to explain anti-black racism as a surrogate for interrogating white supremacy. Race must be understood not as a natural occurrence but instead as a modern social construct, one that underpins the European humanism which serves as the very foundation of our respective disciplines extending from Vitruvius to the present. 

As author Toni Morrison eloquently stated in a 1993 interview, the practice of racism is a profound neurosis that no one examines for what it is—“it feels crazy, [because] it is crazy.” Hence, it’s important to ask these difficult questions about white supremacy in order to learn what it enables and what it destroys, so that we can become a more equitable and just academic community.  Rather than quick-fix solutions, this reckoning will require hard work, committed leadership, and shared goals from all those who make up our school. 

To undertake this unlearning process GSAPP shall:

1. Conduct an inventory of the school’s current and past work on race and the built environment and how to make that work more visible and representative of the field and society by the beginning of the fall 2020 semester;
2. Complete an assessment of each program in terms of its complicity with systems of white supremacy —identifying and understanding the work that whiteness does;
3. Develop a set of resources and readings for faculty and students on whiteness and white supremacy;
4. Develop pedagogical approaches and curricular content that no longer advance white supremacist values or practices;
5. Dedicate public programming to stimulate dialogue about whiteness and knowledge of its impact on our disciplines and the school’s culture;
6. Allocate the necessary funds to initiate and sustain this effort, which should support those faculty and students engaged in this work, with the understanding that this must also be a school-wide undertaking; this will require support in the form of funding, human resources, decision-making power, and the time/space to achieve tangible outcomes;
7. Use GSAPP’s influence and agency to engage and lead in the work beyond the school that is needed in the field and its practices and associations to unlearn and challenge whiteness and white supremacy;
8. Acknowledge and address GSAPP’s role in the erasure, exclusion, and marginalization of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color’s knowledge, work, and voices;
9. Actively transform the culture of the school into a culture that promotes safe, authentic, transformative care, practices and dialogue while dismantling white supremacist, patriarchal and ablelist power dynamics at all levels;  
10. Work to break down the barriers between GSAPP and the community, especially Harlem;
11. Make public GSAPP’s work on unlearning whiteness at the end of the coming academic year;

Furthermore, we demand that the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation set precise goals for becoming an anti-racist institution. This includes increasing black student enrollment, black faculty and staff, financial support for black students, and pedagogical and curricular changes to  each of its programs.

In “Letter From a Region in My Mind” (1962), James Baldwin writes, “It is this individual uncertainty on the part of white American men and women, this inability to renew themselves at the fountain of their own lives, that makes the discussion, let alone elucidation, of any conundrum—that is, any reality—so supremely difficult...Therefore, whatever white people do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves.” Yet, racism and white supremacy are not just consigned to America’s troubled history, we must also recognize whiteness as a global product of European and American colonialism and imperialism. As such, it is incumbent upon all GSAPP faculty and students within the global context of Columbia to do the work of unlearning white supremacy and anti-Black racism.  Given that we teach, learn and work within an academic institution, in the heart of Harlem, this endeavor should be undertaken in the spirit of an intellectual proposition whose outcomes are not yet known. It will be a project that requires thought and creativity, individual reflection accompanied by collaborative action. 

Amina Blacksher
Lance Freeman
Mario Gooden
Jerome Haferd
Malo Hutson
Gordon Kipping
Justin Garrett Moore
Mabel O. Wilson

On the Futility of Listening

This statement bears witness to a profound and intolerable lack of vision, awareness and imagination from the administration of the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, including its program in Real Estate Development at Columbia University. While calls have been made urging action, black members of this community have already recognized a deliberate and persistent commitment to willful ignorance in the ways the administration has historically and continues to operate. The actions and inactions of the GSAPP Dean, faculty, and administration leading up to this moment reveal the degree to which the school is steeped in protocols of obstruction, resistance to committed and conscious transformation, and overt anti-blackness. The glaring lack of forethought and inability to recognize how its own actions are complicit in regimes of racial construction that work diligently to mark black students as outsiders, while simultaneously exploiting our presence when deemed beneficial, are testaments to GSAPP’s disinterest in seeing black students. Declarations of the foundational significance of listening and providing spaces to hear voices are merely ruses, futile efforts by the administration to absolve itself and avoid confrontation with its own biases, assumptions, and blindnesses. The absence of the voices of black students, alumni and faculty from recent conversations that have taken place are testaments to this. Promises to look beyond itself by consulting “external diversity, equity, and inclusion experts”reinforces this. Our voices are not owed, however, it is indefensible that they have not been sought after. This ongoing aversion to critical self-assessment, to challenging its rhetoric, underlying ideology, and ethos from within, actively hinders efforts towards meaningful and sustainable transformation.

GSAPP has made it clear across its many disciplinary boundaries that it has little interest in the critical, creative, or scholarly work of black students unless it aligns with preconceived notions of blackness. Its comfort with rehearsing well-worn narratives that equate blackness only with narratives of dispossession, subjugation, or poverty render black bodies and black experiences flat, without nuance, ignoring and invisibilizing the full range of black creative production. Black students’ voices cannot be called to the fore, recognized as valuable, “amplified” or “uplifted” only when it is deemed necessary to speak to so-called black issues. This rhetoric and practice is constantly othering, nurturing a culture across the broader GSAPP student body that blackness is alien to its immediate interests. Further, it is an unconscionable act of performative allyship. Amounting to paternalistic gestures that dehumanize and trivialize our presence, this desire to uplift recognizes our voices on narrowly circumscribed terms, if at all. Efforts and programming initiated by the Black Student Alliance at Columbia GSAPP have been directly slighted in this way. Arguments made spouting the need for “equality” in the distribution of resources among student groups reveals a severe lack of understanding, deliberate disregard, and outright contempt for the difference between equality and equity.

Retreating behind the bureaucratic inefficiencies of Columbia University at large, and ultimately reproducing them, has been strategically and intentionally deployed to evade visionary thinking. The administration must recognize that pedagogy is political and has a sociocultural obligation. Neutrality is a political stance, untenable and unsustainable. Recognition of this moment as a moment of “intense racial trauma” obscures the banal and mundane machinations that have and will continue to infiltrate the daily lives of black students at GSAPP, its modes of thinking, production, instruction, training, and administrative practices and policies when left unchecked, unchallenged or unaddressed. GSAPP cannot continue to boast a commitment to engaging the so-called “crucial issues of our time,” when its administration cannot articulate what those are. The institution’s rhetoric, and as such, its underlying ideology and ethos, require radical transformation and redefinition of what it values. GSAPP, as an institution, must recognize that the resurfacing of these “crucial issues” is not a trend that can be addressed with a single seminar or as a prompt for student projects. The issues black students and faculty face are in part purposeful and systematic slights to the black community, which must be addressed at the root of the institution. GSAPP must also contend with the historic anti-black and white supremacist underpinnings of the architectural, planning, preservation, and real-estate development professions, and its own complicity in creating and perpetuating anti-black environments beyond the university campus.

We implore the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, including the program in Real-Estate Development at Columbia University to consciously institutionalize ongoing efforts to thwart anti-black sentiment, acts, and ideology; recognizing that the academic experience and environment offered is compromised, diminished, and incomplete when the histories and experiences of black, indigenous and peoples of color are actively invisibilized. To these ends we demand the following:

1. Transparency,  Vision, and Imagination. There has not ever been a moment when bold plans and actions were not required from the Dean of the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation and her deputies. This moment only more forcefully reveals the dearth of such vision. In this moment, we urge the GSAPP administration, program directors, and faculty to align audacious and imaginative action with stated aspirations “to inspire and to foster an open and generous intellectual environment” by breaking down structural and endemic forms of anti-blackness and its less attended to conspirator, white supremacy, that permeate GSAPP’s curriculum, pedagogy, and administration. 
2. Curriculum and Pedagogy Decolonization. Restructure all courses at GSAPP to include the scholarship and creative production of black theorists, historians, philosophers, practitioners, professionals, and artists. Direct examination and confrontation with colonial, anticolonial, postcolonial, and decolonial practices around the world that exist in relation to modern built environments and their histories and theories, must be directly confronted and made available for scholarly and speculative analysis and evaluation. This includes the makeup of syllabi, guest lectures, guest critics, coursework, etc, but also transformation of how pre-existing texts and scholarship, often decontextualized, are taught. At a minimum, an introduction of at least 50% black, indigenous, and other under-represented minorities into the reading lists for every course at GSAPP. Professors should be prepared to teach these works and engage them without exception. This includes the establishment of an ongoing, legitimate curriculum committee that regularly assesses curriculum development across all GSAPP programs to ensure inventive and realistically representative curricula.
3. Support Sustained Access to and Development of Legitimate Scholarly and Professional Resources. Appraisal of the tools and resources made available to support academic and professional growth must be an immediate and ongoing endeavor. Remediation of the lack of black voices present in the scholarly and design materials available at Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library is essential to this. Further, to foster professional development, GSAPP must expand professional practice training to reflect the systemic and economic barriers to establishing professional practice faced by black, indigenous and peoples of color. Further, GSAPP must expand and qualify its commitments to sponsoring black student attendance at scholarly and professional conferences and symposia, particularly those led by black scholars, thinkers, practitioners, and makers. GSAPP must commit to sponsoring at least five black students to attend at least one conference per annum, which may include the annual conferences of the African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS) and the American Studies Association (ASA), as well as AfroTech, Black in Design, and NOMA, among others. Further, GSAPP must support and encourage the development of workshops, conferences, symposia, and panel discussions, among other public forums from within that foreground, interrogate, and engage the work of black historians, theorists, philosophers, practitioners, and makers. To these ends, black owned firms must be included in career services initiatives and workshops in all departments affiliated with GSAPP.
4. Reform Recruitment and Admissions Processes and Provide Continuing Support. Feeding the so-called pipeline to design and allied fields is unethical in the absence of legitimate protocols of support. Full tuition grants must be made available to black students and a sustained commitment must be made to foster a community that does not perpetuate academic alienation once recruited students arrive on campus. Rather than looking beyond GSAPP for support, we urge GSAPP to recognize its own institutional history, where concerted efforts were once made to recruit black students that had long lasting effects across GSAPPS’s professional and disciplinary spectrum. In addition, the composition, objectives, and articulation of what admissions committees value in selecting students to constitute the GSAPP “community” must be evaluated and reformed. When external “expert” support is sought in the name of so-called diversity and inclusion, we demand transparency of who those experts are and how their services have been retained.
5. Hire More Black Faculty, Research Assistants, Teaching Assistants, Administration, and Staff. Support and require development of innovative and uncommon approaches to curriculum and pedagogy for all GSAPP studios and seminars. Minimize the invisible labor and undue burden carried by existing black, indigenous, and other underrepresented minority faculty. Review the research interests and geographies of all existing faculty regardless of racial categorization. Where there are inadequacies, the school is to hire black, indigenous or other underrepresented minority scholars and experts in these topics and geographies, particularly across Africa and the Caribbean. This simultaneously requires that all future non-black, indigenous or underrepresented minority hires at GSAPP demonstrate some proficiency in dealing with diverse classrooms and studios and how to critically engage issues of culture, society, difference, and politics. To this end, staffing for research assistants and teaching assistants has historically been non transparent and biased in favor of students with the capability for networking within the school’s largely white faculty body. Faculty must be equipped with the tools to recognize their own internal biases to allow for the promotion of black students internally to faculty or faculty adjacent roles.
6. Program Directors Must Outline Strategies for Confronting and Combating Anti-Black Racism. All GSAPP Program Directors must outline their strategies, in terms of curriculum and pedagogy, to actively eliminate anti-black racism and reckon with white supremacy in order to  marshal their respective programs towards anti-racist aims. Program Directors across GSAPP must be empowered to institute change and in turn held accountable to the student body by documenting critical, exploratory objectives, and ultimately, openly assess performance, failure, and success. 
7. Include Black Guest Speakers and Critics in GSAPP Courses, Design Studio Reviews, and Lecture Series. The inclusion of at least 50% BIPOC speakers in classes where guest lecturers are invited, at design studio reviews, and as part of its signature lecture series with a minimum 25% of whom are underrepresented minorities. Many of these invaluable voices can be directly culled from GSAPP alumni. These speakers are not to be tokenized, but should be regarded and included as part of an impactful, critical, and inventive series of conversations, debates, presentations, reviews and the like that a legitimate scholarly and creative academic environment is to provide.
8. Critically Engage and Exchange with Black Communities, Scholars, and Makers. Recognize, engage, and establish forms of exchange with black communities beyond GSAPP; foremost engaging, the surrounding context of Columbia University, including Harlem and the The Spitzer School of Architecture at City College, as well as HBCUs, the Caribbean, and the African continent for recruitment, participatory justice initiatives, along with scholarly and creative projects and programming.
9. Demonstrate and Provide Financial Accountability, Transparency, and Most Importantly Support. Provide for all students in regards to costs of printing, model materials, software, and hardware required to be competitive and successful in studio and other making courses. This effort removes barriers to the profession that disproportionately affect black people, and is a move towards equity across GSAPP.
10. Provide Training on Histories and Regimes of Anti-Black Racism and Strategies for its Confrontation and Eradication. GSAPP must deploy resources across the student population, faculty, and staff to provide frameworks and training that critically reckon with the specific racial context of America for domestic and international students, and that attend to global ideas of race and racial construction steeped in anti-blackness. Black and other underserved students bear the brunt of addressing systemic racism and class issues while students from vastly different backgrounds are able to avoid these taxing issues in the classroom and studio. Black students, who do not constitute a monolith, should not be burdened with this labor or exasperated by having to confront this ignorance. This means that adequate recourse, council, and support must be put in place and adequately responded to when black students are confronted by anti-black sentiment and deed by fellow GSAPP students, faculty, and/or staff. 
11. Proactively Cultivate a Strong Network of Black Professionals, Alumni and Students. Black students at GSAPP must have access to black alumni. Updated contact information must be maintained, indicating willingness to mentor and hire. Black alumni must be sought out as speakers, presenters, panelists, lecturers, and instructors, normalizing, rather than tokenizing, their presence across GSAPP.
12. Authorize BSA+GSAPP to Donate. Authorize BSA+GSAPP to donate unused allocated funds for spring programming that did not take place for donation to select black organizations outside of GSAPP. We call on other student groups who have remaining funds from Spring 2020 to join in if able. This should not affect the amount of money allocated to the respective student groups in Fall 2020.

This historic moment, at the confluence of a global pandemic and national revolt in the face of simultaneously casual and brutal extinguishment of black life, demands unhesitant, fearless vision, imagination, and recognition. Listening is futile when the full range of voices is merely not present and even more so in the absence of position and foresight. What this moment lays bare for those previously unaware or privileged with being unconscious of, are the thick entanglements of racial subordination, white supremacy and militarism wrought against black minds, bodies, spaces, lives. These entanglements do not lie beyond GSAPP. The academic environment, curriculum, pedagogy, and administration at GSAPP are complicit in them. Herein, we offer several ways forward, but this work is not ours, the onus is on you, Dean Amale Andraos, and the GSAPP faculty and administration to orchestrate good faith efforts towards ongoing, reflective, innovative, and radical transformation. This work is not daunting, but may be perceived so on your part as this work should have been always and already under way. As a school that champions “pushing the limits” with the aim of generating “a more equitable, sustainable, and creative future,” this moment should be furiously embraced for the opportunities it affords to fully mobilize these statements towards visionary planning and action. Fall programming and initiatives planned for the full academic year must reflect more informed thinking and invention. Continuing to avoid and ignore black voices across the GSAPP community and failing to enact bold reimagining and reenvisioning of how GSAPP educates and trains all students will only inspire sustained, magnificent ferment and future insurgence.