psc anti-racism committee fractures

In mid-March 2023, all three co-chairs of the PSC Anti-Racism Committee (ARC) resigned, as well as three other committee members. In their letters of resignation, former committee members cite systemic issues that impeded committee’s work.H ere we share the letters and emails submitted by Lawrence, Crystal, Ángeles, and Rhea, which elicited little to no response by other committee members or union leadership. The group agreed to share their resignation emails because the correspondence expose some of the systemic issues that impeded the committee to function.

Lawrence:

Dear PSC-ARC, 

After two years of serving as Co-chair on this committee I regret having to resign from a position in which I was elected. However, after months of critical self-assessment and long discussions with trusted peers (more familiar with the PSC than myself) my resignation is more than a year overdue. In the final analysis, I was more invested in making meaningful changes than what is structurally possible at the moment. I have met a few great people in the process, and I was optimistic that work started at Brooklyn College could pursued here, but the level of dysfunction starts at the very top and runs throughout the committee. 

The PSC is representative of many large organizations that like the idea of anti-racism but operates on the most basic level of contradictions: denial, avoidance, and then panic to avoid culpability. This was no more evident than in a series of email exchanges in the last week involving three Principal Officers. When critical structural analysis was being made by committee members it was reduced to testimony and inter-personal feelings. This is liberalism at its most deceitful; an appeal to my “betrayed feelings” continues to misunderstand that the only trust I had was between comrades who I worked with tirelessly, open and vulnerably. What was lost is time that cannot be recovered and was deprived from places and issues that would have been better served. 

To my fellow committee members I accept that there are honest philosophical differences of how people approach racism, especially at a time when “anti-racism” can mean anything to anybody, and if I ever came across as surly (or worse) I sincerely apologize. For the last year I have operated at a level that has been filled with frustration, the kind that mentors warn against, yet I find myself repeating a familiar pattern that leads so many to chronic health issues. That is why I will speak this last piece of truth and then I will be content to focus my PSC activity to the chapter level. 

From my first meeting with my fellow Co-chairs in April 2021 we determined that we would identify or help develop anti-racists working groups on each CUNY campus. The work of the committee would be informed by the activism on the campuses. This plan was shared with the Principal Officers at our first meeting after they took office. We were consistent that this would be a lot of work and we needed support to do it. There was general agreement between the Principal Officers and Co-Chairs that this was a sound approach. There were immediate obstacles, for example the unrepresentative manner of the committee to represent 20+ campuses, with almost 1/3 of the committee composed of EC members (including 2 Principal Officers), and then other members concentrated from a few other campuses. While we were told there’s not much we could do to change the committee, The Campus Action Teams (CAT) were introduced many months later, focused entirely on a contract campaign. This was the first sign that much of what we hoped to achieve as a committee would be undermined. 

In closing, the PSC is totally correct that CUNY operates based on racial austerity. This is something we have to be vigilant in exposing as we fight for a new contract. However, ig anti-racism is going to be real, and not ancillary, it has to be based on the fact that anti-racism is also movement politics that transforms and cannot reduced to a slogan.

Crystal:

I would like to thank you Lawrence, Rulisa and George for all of the work you have done for this committee. I would like to especially like to thank Lawrence and Rulisa for time and again going above and beyond what should have been necessary to make this work. So with that being said, I will also resign from this committee. 

It is abundantly clear why this committee was doomed to fail, like it has in the past. It was not for the lack of trying for the most dedicated of us. But with the constant micromanagement, meddling and gaslighting from some of the agents of the EC and their ardent supporters. Those of us who are actually committed to anti-racism, not as an academic activity, but as action , would have continued to work on this committee like Sisyphus in the underworld. So with that said, I am leaving to reclaim my time and my peace. I will continue to push and strive for a more anti-racist and life affirming CUNY and PSC CUNY for those in the trenches with me rather than those in the ivory tower of the EC.

Ángeles:

I want to start by thanking Lawrence and Rulisa for their frankness, both in their resignation letters and in previous email exchanges, some of which have also been referenced in this thread. I know what comes below is rather long so in case anyone wants to save themselves some time, I start by the ending: I am also leaving this committee. 

Some context. 

When I was nominated to serve in this committee, I was reluctant to accept because I had just quit the DA for reasons similar to the ones now being exposed here. I am an organizer/activist and I attempt, as much as I can, to stay away from hierarchical organizations. This is why I didn’t get involved with the union right away; I became a “union activist” in 2016, in the context on the strike authorization vote campaign, and I would be lying if I said I didn’t feel inspired by it. Not surprisingly, I was soon recruited to serve as “alternate delegate”—I was told by fellow union members that I would learn more about how the union worked, made decisions, etc. and also become more engaged in union politics, by becoming part of the DA. This was true: by attending DA meetings, I did learn a lot, and the more I learned about the way “the union” worked, the more alienated I felt—more often than not, fellow members who disagreed with the vision of the PSC leadership were called “divisive” or simply ignored. After a year or so I stopped attending the DA—I kept organizing with rank-and-file union activists and also supporting the work done by my chapter.

So when I was asked to serve in the PSC ARC committee my first reaction was “nope”—I suspected this committee would be or behave like the DA, and I didn’t want to become a PSC bureaucrat. I only stayed after I learned members from the BC-ARC had been invited to be part of it as well (Lawrence, Rhea, Crystal, people I had not seen in union spaces. To be super honest, this gave me “hope”). 

I think that, especially at the beginning, we were able to facilitate and have important conversations. I agree with Lawrence’s and Crystal’s assessment that, were it not for the structural imbalance and disfunction of this committee (1/3 principal officers in the committee, the persistent micromanaging, the attempt to deflect proposals or ideas that were not in line with the vision of the PSC leadership, and so on), perhaps we would have been able to accomplish more, or at least something. Despite all of this, at least I now know what doing meaningful anti-racism work entails—as Rulisa said, it is messy, it is complex, and clearly not everyone has the same view or ideas about how to go about it. I’ll repeat here what I said on a separate thread. This committee can have no weight, no validity, no substance, if decisions made collectively, tasks assigned to individual working groups, constructive feedback, you name it, are tossed aside, ignored, or conveniently reinterpreted by the PSC leadership. It just doesn’t work. 

So I also quit. I ask everyone, please don’t equate committee work with organizing work—to quit a committee does not mean to quit organizing. On the contrary, if anything, I feel now I will have more time to keep organizing and collaborating with comrades for whom fighting against structural racism and white supremacy within CUNY and within the union is meaningful, necessary, and urgent work.

Rhea:

First, I would like to acknowledge the sincere effort, deep consideration, integrity, and many hours of work put into this committee, particularly by co-chairs Lawrence and Rulisa. 

I am writing today less to state that I am also leaving this committee, but more to acknowledge and speak up when I either didn’t have the courage, capacity, or will, to do so earlier. But I am upset at the ways my colleagues’ analyses of this committee has been invalidated as “emotional” or simply based on “individual experience”. I have shared the critiques so eloquently expressed by Lawrence in particular, throughout this process, but also beautifully expressed in countless exchanges and the resignation letters of my colleagues and comrades Crystal, Rulisa, and Àngeles.

As some on this list may know, Lawrence, Crystal, Mobina and I worked together on the grassroots-activist initiative of the Anti-Racist Committee at Brooklyn College. I’ll just speak for myself that I hoped we could pursue similar work in the context of this committee. However, ironically enough, our efforts at BC were ultimately blocked by what seems to be the same issue we’re facing in this committee. At BC we were ultimately blocked by a refusal by the administration to even consider participatory governance. By that I mean a refusal to alter decision-making structures and power sharing so that those most affected by the oppressive structures within our institutions, have a say in decisions that most affect them. And at BC, this refusal of the admin came in the form of similar admissions of confusion or bureaucratic obfuscation as we’ve experienced in this committee from union leadership. This is why I was so inspired by the proposed action in this committee - to begin with activists groups at each campus - to work with those who already understand their work as anti-racist and whose work could then meaningfully inspire the vision of an anti-racist union. Ultimately I saw this as a disruption of top-down management and an effort to support grassroots efforts and mobilization. As Lawrence has said many times, one thing we learned, and from our own experience at BC, many activists on campuses felt alienated by the union and did not want to pursue their activism within the context of the union. If we are to be an anti-racist union, this seems the first place our efforts should be placed. If we are to be a union that represents the entirety of an incredibly complicated multi-racial, multi-classed, intersectionally-diverse constituency, I believed that we needed to be reaching out to those who already have an anti-racist analysis and figure out how to make union efforts relevant to their own efforts. However my own experience in this committee has confirmed for me that given my own, and I believe shared by my comrades who have already resigned, that the meaningful work of addressing structural racism cannot be pursued within the context of a formalized committee within the PSC - at least not how this one is currently organized and being “managed".

As many have already acknowledged, and a topic that came up at our last meeting, it is clear there is no shared understanding of anti-racism within this committee. This is how I understand the co-chairs’ request for a vision of anti-racism from PSC leadership. As I see it, this was not a request to POs or the EC to define anti-racism for the committee, but what I understand is that it was a request to ask PSC leadership, “where exactly is your skin in this game?” The request for “support” was less “what do we do?” but more of an ask “will you trust us, the co-chairs of this committee, to run this committee, with the understanding of racism as inherently structural, and will you support us in our efforts? Support us with not only resources, (which as I understand, there are funds, but requests made to use those funds to redistribute resources in a meaningful way, were blocked by bureaucratic constraints), but to support the decisions of this committee even when they might challenge the way things have been done before? Can you get behind an understanding of racism that is not only about “racial austerity” but also integral to the hierarchical bureaucratic structure of the union itself?" And this gets at the heart of what I see as the difficulty of anti-racist work within the structure this committee. Given an understanding of racism, or white supremacy in particular, as foundational to institutions, requires us to do things differently. That doing things as usual in fact maintains the “status quo” and in this country, and I’d argue across the globe, the “status quo” is white supremacy. To effectively challenge this requires deep consideration of how to do things differently, how to disrupt traditional decision making processes (power) and distribution of resources (money). What I have witnessed is the attempts to do this by those in this committee, again, particularly our co-chairs, have been met with bureaucratic constraints, gas-lighting, and infantilizing admissions of “confusion” by union leadership. What the efforts in relation to KCC demonstrated for me is that it the only efforts that might tangibly be supported by the resources and leadership of the union, are those proposed by the leadership themselves. 

Characterization of this committee as having done “nothing” isare offensive and disrespectful to the countless hours and efforts to make meaningful anti-racist change, and not window-dressing, virtue signaling, or empty statements. I end by again expressing my admiration and respect for my comrades who have spoken up - who have maintained integrity in their understanding of anti-racism and have had the courage to speak truth to power and remain principled in their actions and dedication to this difficult, messy, and divisive work, as stated by Rulisa, of anti-racism activism.