ABSTRACT
The living and the dead. On November 24, 2014, after a grand jury chose not to indict Officer Darren Wilson for the murder of 18-year-old Mike Brown, which was two days after Officer Timothy Loehmann took less than two seconds to shoot 12-year-old Tamir Rice and a day after Tamir Rice died, I started thinking about a collective response from Black professors to Black students. We were angry and grieving while we witnessed the necessary uprising in Ferguson that had begun August 10, the day after Wilson murdered Brown. At the time, I was an assistant professor in English at Michigan State University (MSU), where I’d been working for about two and half years in a department with a storied history of White male department chairs. For two and a half years prior to the non-indictment of murderer Darren Wilson, I listened to the prideful rhetoric of an institution unashamedly market itself as “The Nation’s Pioneer Land Grant College” (a sign I passed every day on my way to work), with not even a low-bar, cursory recognition of the Anishinaabeg lands the university occupies, of the Anishinaabeg alive today, or of the Anishinaabeg living near the Red Cedar River when the university began classes over 160 years ago. 1
