Racism Lives Here

This website, entitled “Racism Lives Here,” is a response to the University of Rochester's “We’re Better Than That” campaign. Rather than focusing on interpersonal racial prejudice, our aim is to address some of the limitations of “We’re Better Than That” by talking directly about the socio-historical structural forces that are crucial to understanding the nature of racism in the United States. Our goal is to situate racism at the U of R in a much broader context—to help demonstrate how, for many people of color, racist posts on Yik Yak cannot just be shrugged off. They cut deep, as they are indicative of centuries of oppression and discrimination displaying themselves in one of countless ways. We hope exploring this website can provide a framework for understanding how racism is much more than its most explicit manifestations (e.g KKK member in a white hood).

Our website has been curated to present a broad education on the issue of racism through multiple lenses and medias. By clicking on the links and dropdown menus at the top of the page, you will find posts written by the authors on topics such as micro-aggressions, notions such as “Black on Black” crime and “reverse racism,” housing discrimination, police violence, and more.  You will find portraits of students with accompanying quotations describing their relationship to race and racism. You will also find links to other websites we have found useful.

Finally, we want to recognize the limitations of our own project. We are four students with limited time and resources. We are not here to provide “every side of the argument.” We acknowledge and recognize our biases, and we embrace them. We feel that for far too long, issues of systematic racism have been guarded from the public eye and left out of the conversations about race. This website is an attempt to provide educational information specifically geared towards U of R students. Our hope is to  help shift the discourse around race to be more historically informed and structurally situated. We welcome comments and criticism which you can leave at the end of this page.  We will continue to update this site. Please click on some of the photos below to hear testimony from members of the University of Rochester community and read the "Materials" to learn more.