Open Letter to University of Iowa and the Iowa Board of Regents: Call to Action

The University of Iowa as an institution and the Iowa Board of Regents are not being responsible citizens–the campus and U community overlap with the community as a whole; the: City bus interchange is right next to a main center of campus! You endanger all, against our freedom, by not requiring masks indoors, as the CDC recommends, and vaccination just, like you require the flu and other vaccination.

I am a former student and employee; my family lives there in Iowa City, Iowa, including loved ones who have who have medical conditions, but who work or have business or medical appointments near or on campus, and/or must commute on public transit through the interchange that shares air with campus. The Cambus, University’s bus system, is open to the community. Even if these transit systems were not so distinctly campus and community integrated, University students and community come into contact with the entire community, via interacting with people and via location. Lack of any of these blatantly encourages disease spread, entirely unnecessarily–the only Big 10(14) school displaying such a dangerous lack of critical thinking and applications, in a global pandemic, to boot.

Regents and University leadership, you must mandate masks, require vaccination as people are able, and allow remote course instruction and work, as staff and faculty, who are put at most risk, require for health and safety, of themselves, their children and loved ones, and the entire community. Additionally, those paid the least, adjuncts and graduate student employees, face the most exposure–so you need to listen to them and heed their assessments and those of the researchers at the Iowa College of Public Health. Students, too, cannot do their best work nor bring achievement, prestige, glory, and ever-lauded money to the university when they have to navigate such huge pointless risk to health and impediment to balance of functional or family life and contact. The same goes for even athletes…and fans. No one can drink to the Hawkeyes or buy game tickets if they are grieving for their grandparents; season ticket holders can’t buy next season passes for their kids and grandkids when they are hospitalized or dead.

https://chng.it/yjpQVHVzYS

PLEASE SIGN. Thank you.

image from Concerned parents, students, educators, and staff Iowa’s petition on change.org

Urgent Recommendation: Claudia Rankine’s CITIZEN

CITIZEN: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine

Not racist? Hear, listen, and grasp social and race issues with the renowned author, playwright, and poet. “I don’t think we connect micro-aggressions that indicate the lack of recognition of the black body as a body to the creation and enforcement of laws.” Claudia Rankine said last fall in BOMB.
Wait, what’s a “microaggression”?? These words matter.
CITIZEN: An American Lyric divulges and dissects day-to-day, often sub-surface racism and its effects beyond the moment. Her fifth poetry book, it made history, nominated for two National Book Critics Circle Awards, for Criticism and for Poetry; it won the latter, along with the NAACP Image Award, PEN Open Book Award, and others, and is the only New York Times nonfiction bestseller of its lyric kind.
CITIZEN calls out in solidarity if you’ve ever been run into by an armored tank of racial marginalization or been caught in a nasty traffic jam of intersectionality. Rankine calls you to action if you give a hoot or are susceptible to participating in systemic racism. Cultural theorist Lauren Berlant described in the BOMB interview, “Citizenship involves metabolizing in the language of your flesh what you call the ‘ordinary’ injury of racist encounter.” Rankine’s prose details scene by the millisecond, along with internal reaction, piling on inevitable, immediate, smacking social resonance in fell swoop after fell swoop. Each scene rounds out with that “metabolizing” as it happens, or as its consequence plays out within black bodies and minds constrained by white hegemony and apathy.
Los Angeles’ Fountain Theater produced an adaptation in August, spotlighting the versatility of CITIZEN and Rankine’s multi-form and -genre work. Her dialogue and descriptions came to life on stage particularly smoothly: The ensemble cast rove among different characters, black actors facing white actors, playing out scenes of surprise verbal, contextual complicity or attack and slow-motion, time-stopped response, outburst, or restraint. Sitting, watching in your red theater seat became complacency; cringing and squirming in it were not enough.
In interactions of daily and professional life, how can white people stop colluding to enact racism, even if unintentionally? How can all people not commit and not accept racial microaggression? Recognition of such words and acts is a start.

Protected: “The Roast of Iowa City” endcaps the Festival of the Book

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