The University of Michigan has ignored police brutality and systemic racism for too long! Join the protest to hold them accountable. We will be creating shirts on-site, please bring a shirt to participate. We will be meeting in the Diag then the march will continue throughout campus.

Purpose

The unjust and unnecessary death of Daunté Wright is one of the most recent examples of how systemic racism has claimed the life of yet another Black person. We, the School of Social Work Community, are responding to this national, pervasive problem by saying “enough is enough,” and we need to make system-level change in our own sphere of influence. The University of Michigan must urgently move towards system-level changes by promoting more anti-racist practices and policies in our community. The University of Michigan, with its abundance of resources, should also be taking concrete actions to support the family and loved ones of Daunté Wright and the countless others who have lost someone to police brutality.

Justice for Daunté Wright looks like supporting his family as they deal with this traumatic loss; it looks like respecting his life enough to call his death a murder, not an accident. Justice for Daunté Wright looks like holding the police officer who murdered him fully accountable, and, more broadly, it looks like working to dismantle the systemic problems that lead to police brutality. While it is easy to point to implicit bias or a lack of training, the root cause of police terrorism and other systems that disproportionately harm Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) populations is hatred in the form of racism. Unfortunately, higher education is a system steeped in racism as well. Many BIPOC students are harmed while pursuing their education, and many White students move through their educational experience without learning how they are perpetuating oppression. These problems impact students, faculty, and staff.

As students in the School of Social Work, we have identified many ways that our school harms our BIPOC community members, and we know similar problems exist throughout the University. Similarly, we have identified many missed opportunities to prepare students to exit the University with the skills and knowledge to be anti-racist and disrupt cycles of harm. These are the ways systemic racism continues, and this is part of the reason we fail to make meaningful progress on complex issues like police brutality.

We demand that the University of Michigan uses its power as a leading university to take immediate action to support Daunté Wright’s family. We demand that the School of Social Work take direct action to dismantle systemic racism in our community. We demand the University broadly considers how the issues that exist in the microcosm of the School of Social Work exist University-wide. We demand that the University of Michigan and School of Social Work adopt intentional practices to counteract the harm imposed on the BIPOC Community. Enough is enough!