Celebration In the Midst of Struggle: BGSG @ 10 at AAG
In the archives of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill are over three thousand handwritten signatures, directed to then-Chancellor Paul Hardin III in 1989. They were gathered by the university’s 89 Native students, who mobilized thousands of their fellow students to fight for Native faculty to teach Native Studies on our campus. The effort was part of 15 years of work that started with forming the Carolina Indian Circle at the university. And if we look in the pages of the Black Ink we can see lists of like-minded demands from the Black Student Movement (BSM), formed in 1967 — their first list of demands, published in 1968 has still not been well-attended. Across decades, the BSM expresses solidarity with Black workers and demands dedicated space for Black students, but even more consistently: Black faculty teaching Black Studies.
When I see national (and global) attacks on disciplines like Ethnic Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies, alongside attacks on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, I think of these students who took time away from their studies, from the social life of parties and lying on the sunny grass in springtime, in order to do this work that was really the labor of the university. When our feminist collective, FLOCK, conducted oral histories with Omololu Babatunde and Blanche Brown from the Real Silent Sam Coalition one of my most poignant memories was of them telling us how hard they worked and how they wished they had time to linger and rest under the shady trees.
At the same time, that kind of work changes our relation to one another and to place. In making our own worlds on campuses or in our discipline, we are building the infrastructure we need for a different kind of future, and also we are becoming more connected, less isolated, and more expansive versions of ourselves. When I learned I was elected vice-president of AAG, one of my first impulses was to reach out to some of our specialty groups that represent this kind of work at AAG, and it has been rewarding to continue these conversations as president. Recently I visited with the Black Geographies Specialty Group — which is celebrating their 10th anniversary — and asked for some reflections on what BGSG means for geographers. Kaily Heitz, Assistant Professor of Geography at UCLA, generously shared stories that I think will resonate with many of us who needed to find or build our own community in the discipline or at our home institutions.
Kaily writes:
I vividly recall one of the first sessions I attended at my very first AAG in Boston, 2017. I was a graduate student, fresh to the field and full of the possibility of a spatial storytelling that illustrates the relationship between race and environment imparted to me by my late mentor, Carl Anthony, and the writings of Dr. Lauret Savoy. The session was unlike anything I had experienced in the impersonal panels of climate scientists and urban planners I had poked my head into thus far. A dozen or so Black women sat in a circle here in a small fluorescent-lit room, where we openly unloaded the burdens of academic racism we had experienced. It was a raw and emotional discussion. And though the session was clearly a warning about what exactly it was I was getting myself into, it offered me something else too: a space in Geography where I knew my stories and scholarship would be heard.
“Black Geographies,” says Dr. LaToya Eaves, “healed me and heals others. I hear this all the time. This is why we need an other geography.” The other geography that Dr. Eaves created with that session, and with her organization of the Black Geographies Specialty Group, has made a thriving intellectual community of critical and creative geographers possible. Where people like my advisor, Dr. Jovan Scott Lewis, successfully forged new schools of Black Geographic thought, the BGSG created a validating space for these ideas to flourish beyond the isolation of predominantly white departments and universities.
Discussions about starting something like the BGSG at AAG began in 2012 with discussions between Dr. Eaves and Dr. Aretina Hamilton, 10 years after Laura Pulido’s “Reflections on a White Discipline” clearly named the exclusivity of the field, and a 2002 special edition of The Professional Geographer came out on race and geography. (See Willie Jamaal Wright 2024 for more on the history of the field). Attempts to bring a group like this to fruition had been made previously, but would first achieve institutional success and recognition after the BGSG’s approval in 2016.
This year, we celebrate 10 years of placemaking within the AAG; 10 years since my first experience in Boston of making other geographies and spaces for honesty, community, and professional development. We celebrate because we are acutely aware that our place within the academy has never been guaranteed. We celebrate while grappling with the enduring legacy of anti-Black racism. We celebrate that the BGSG offers a space of respite and healing while recognizing that institutionalization does not equal liberation. We celebrate the founders of this group, but also all those Black radical intellectuals whose organizing made Black and Ethnic studies into legitimated disciplines on our campuses; and we celebrate all the students we have been able to warmly introduce to geography since the BGSG’s founding.
BGSG @ 10 marks a moment of joy in the midst of an ongoing struggle. What former BGSG chair, Camilla Hawthorne said in her 2019 piece “Black matters are spatial matters,” unfortunately remains true: that the ongoing conditions of white supremacy, xenophobia, anti-Black violence, and far-right revanchist movements make the need for Black geographic study all the more necessary. Compounding crises of overt colonial expansion by war, coup, and military conquest, a fascist regime that is openly hostile toward and actively shutting down entire departments, majors, and schools, heightening climate catastrophes, and U.S. contributions to material and scholastic genocide in Palestine only sharpen the need for the contributions made by decades of Black scholarship — scholarship that has long been rooted in the spatial study of livingness and dehumanizing structural inequality. The international work that has been made possible by Black Geographic thought — and cultivated locally by the BGSG — is all the more important in a moment when we are all being compelled to radically rethink collective governance, care, and ecological relationships.
The BGSG exists in the wake of generations of anti-Black exclusion and violence; it also stands in the wake of our latest tailspin of fascist governance, which arrived on heels of the great “racial reckoning” and global health catastrophe of 2020. In this moment, when our U.S. colleagues and wider networks of Black artists, activists, and international scholars are most vulnerable to censure and harm, I encourage all geographers to take this opportunity to recommit to the promises you may have made 5-6 years ago to support Black life and creative work. Rather than retreating, lean into the solidarity and organizing that can transform not only our discipline, but our collective futures, taking these consistent actions:
- Making ongoing donations to professional, nonprofit, and grassroots organizations that support Black geographic and ecological justice, like the BGSG.
- Proactively recruiting students and faculty of Black Geographies to your respective institutions by way of graduate student program admission, supported fellowships, visiting positions, lectures, and tenure-track lines.
- Supporting junior scholars of color; work to help protect the research and writing time of those within your departments, and be prepared to support external tenure review cases as well.
- Working to integrate Black Geographies into core curriculum; our scholarship, like that of our colleagues in Latinx, Indigenous, Disability, and Queer & Feminist Geographies, is often relegated to one week in the syllabus, even though its lessons teach us how to re-read geography entirely. (For a good start, check out our suggested reading list.)
- Making geography more accessible by rewarding and recognizing community-based research and education (like the Black Ecologies Field School, led by the Black Ecologies Lab at Rutgers) as well as the disproportionate mentorship performed by BIPOC faculty.
- Continuing to advance calls to demilitarize our schools. For instance, if your school is experiencing a budget crisis, ask: how much is the administration spending on campus security or police right now compared with their efforts to protect academic freedom and departments like Black Studies?
* * *
Further Reading
Eaves, L. (2020). Fear of an other geography. Dialogues in Human Geography, 10(1), 34-36. https://doi.org/10.1177/2043820619898901
2018-2020 Updates to the Black Geographies Specialty Group Reading List.
Please note: The ideas expressed in the AAG President’s column are not necessarily the views of the AAG as a whole. This column is traditionally a space in which the president may talk about their views or focus during their tenure as president of AAG, or spotlight their areas of professional work. Please feel free to email AAG President Sara Smith directly to enable a constructive discussion.
