BIPOC Graduate Students’ Coalitional Healing in Writing Programs and Colonial Institutions

Abstract

In 2020, 31 graduate students in Michigan State University’s (MSU) Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures department published their Graduate Student List of Demands in response to violence on Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) lives both within and outside the institution. More than three years after the statement was published, we find that the department’s response(s) to graduate student intellectual knowledge and lived experiences have been performative at best—revealing an on-going dilemma of the conflicts that arise when anti-racist and pro-Black initiatives ( Jones, Gonzales, & Haas, 2021) are presented within white organizations (Ray, 2019). Thus, this article addresses the need to support BIPOC graduate scholars—particularly those who exist within a multitude of intersectional and marginalized identities—in relation to graduate program development, curriculum, and writing program administration. We employ a narrative approach to 1) show folks why we need to be attentive to collegiate sponsored oppression against multi-marginalized graduate students; 2) forefront graduate student knowledges as intellectually viable (Browdy et al., 2021; Prasad, 2022); and 3) understand that even as graduate students ask writing programs to engage in anti-racist practices, those same students must be mindful of the resistance in contemporary academic writing programs and the impacts therein to their well-being (Carter-Tod & Sano-Franchini, 2021; Perryman-Clark & Craig, 2019). We conclude by considering a Black feminist approach to healing (Carey, 2016; Ohito, 2021) given the material and social impacts of institutional violence on graduate students and we forward a need for writing program administrators to contend and reckon with white resistance at white colleges and universities.