Early on the morning of April 22nd we vandalized Emory University in protest of their continued involvement in the Cop City project and the genocide of Palestinians, among other things. We spray painted slogans and wheat-pasted a letter to the university on the quad, along with photos of the university president saying he “had blood on his hands.” Later this morning we learned near all our efforts had been papered over by thing brown paper, already peeling and falling off. This paper is symbolic of Emory’s attempts to mask its role in the gentrification of Atlanta, the increase in police violence and the continuation of several genocides and colonial occupations across the world. Just as this paper is flimsy, so too will be Emory’s attempts to suppress and repress dissent against those who seek to oppose it. The following the message we wheat-pasted, posted here to ensure that Emory will not so easily be able to ignore our words, or our actions.
************************************Letter*********************************************
Dear Emory, Eat Shit and Die
Emory is complicit in, and an active supporter of, cop city and the genocide of Palestinians. For over a year now we, students from universities across Atlanta, have watched as Emory students, among others in the city, especially Emory Stop Cop City and Emory Students for Justice in Palestine, have protested, wrote letters, and held events on campus, calling for Emory to divest from cop city, the gentrification of Atlanta and the genocide of Palestinians, among other violences.
What have these efforts gained us? Nothing.
All we have seen in response is repression: handed down from President gregory l(oser) fenves and the emory board of trustees. Since calling the Atlanta police on students protesting cop city last spring, to calling those protesting for a free Palestine anti-semitic, to enabling the doxxing and harassing of Palestinian students by zionists, Emory has answered its students only with force and violence. We watched board of trustee members laugh as ESCC berated them for their greedy, individualistic and parasitic modes of existing.
This administration, this board, these people do not care about anyone or anything but themselves. How dare they lecture us on how to resist their unrelenting violence! How dare we allow ourselves to be subjugated by them!
Whatever violence they throw at us, we must throw back ten-fold.
As for the faculty, what role have they played? At best, they have confined themselves to existing university structures to “protect” students who “protest” peacefully. These efforts, just as those of ESCC and ESJP, are in fact reformist and only aid in confirming the power of the institution while diverting attention from the actual goal of these protestors: stopping cop city and ending university involvement in local and global oppression.
Moreover, this nihilistic apathy is embarrassing for Emory professors who are by and large classroom radicals, which is to say, not really radical at all. Professors working in the legacy of Foucault and Derrida do little to challenge the disciplinary nature of the institution. Those who lecture on climate change, environmental health, and “green chemistry” simultaneously refuse to act against Emory’s complicity in defacing the very forest and roots of their discoveries. Scholars of Fanon, Wynter and Mbembe, not to mention the dozens of professors whose work covers everything from capitalist oppression and exploitation to afro-pessimism to revolution, are willing to discuss all of these issues from the comfort of an arm chair, yet do nothing to combat those systems and Emory’s involvement in them.
For over a century now, students across the globe have engaged in various forms of resistance against different masks of these same issues. Many across this nation, galvanized by those at Columbia, occupying green space and liberated zones remind us of our forbears who did the same in decades past, most recently 15 years ago in occupy wallstreet. In early writings from that movement, California university students denounced what they saw as the university’s capture by capitalist systems. Calling for what is often labeled direct action, they wrote “We must begin by preventing the university from functioning … and bring work and class to a halt. We will blockade, occupy and take whats ours,” adding, “Calls for unity are fundamentally empty. There is no common ground between those who uphold the status quo and those who seek to destroy it.”
We, students from across Atlanta, affirm this stance of our forbears and contemporaries, and must think and move beyond them. While these calls to confront and act against the immediate issues of capitalism and imperialism are certainly justified, they simultaneously conceal the true problem, which is an ongoing erosion of our being leaving us without meaning and only with words.
Though we can point to the lies of our politicians– Biden claiming he is against killing civilians while constantly supplying Israel with thousands of bombs, Dickens claiming that cop city will increase public safety, yet identifying non-policing interventions as actually having made the city safer– we do not need to look farther than the societal microcosm that is the university to most clearly see the manifestation of these issues in our faculty refusing to engage in revolutionary struggle – either with one another or with us- and in the hollow statements of our presidents.
At the same time the majority of other students along with the faculty have, at best, been apathetic toward the world, their peers, and their education. The institution churns us out as some kind of product; a statistic to be discussed in board rooms. Learning is being taken from us and instead being used to conceal a system which traps us into pursuing degrees so that we can get jobs, wasting our lives for the highest bidder (donor to the university).
The same wealthy, white, institutions hold seats on nearly all Atlanta University Boards, including the AUC, in an egregious abuse of the word community; which when used by these institutions seems to mean anyone with a .edu email. If, however, we remember the true essence of community, we find that it is a group of people who come together to define themselves as a collective- a people willing to struggle with one another for the betterment of itself- and against enemies who would seek to destroy us. To create a genuine community means exiting a world which separates us, erodes our being, and erases meaning, forcing us to exist in empty individualism. In a world, in this world, which structures its survival through force and violence, what is required is its destruction.
Put another way: the creation of a genuine community requires a genuine revolution. Such a revolution, which seeks to subvert fundamental structures of the being of this world, is necessarily illegible. As such, to be revolutionaries, we too, must first become illegible and by no means define our community based off our status as students. Whether you are a student or a movement elder, a black radical or a so called white anarchist is irrelevant to us. If you stand by and for us, by and for this world we are trying to create, then we stand by you.
Our call is simple. It is not the meaningless call of liberals who tell us to talk softly to gentrifiers or genociders, nor is it the call of liberals masked in radical words who speak of joining formal organizations, or “radical joy and rest”. Our call, rather, is the call of the riot, resistance, real revolution. It is the call to act which we feel from deep within ourselves at every sign of oppression and injustice– and we intend to heed it.
We know that many of you reading this might agree with us but are scared and do not know the way. Neither do we. We are not special. We do not expect never to be caught. On the contrary, our best hope is for all who agree with us, who feel the same loss we feel, to ignore the chains binding you to a rational way of thinking, which prevents revolutionary action, and join with us. We have watched as forest occupations and tree sits and homes have been raided, as dozens of people have been charged with domestic terrorism. 61 with RICO. We have watched tens of thousands massacred in Palestine, many of our own murdered here. We do not think we are immune to these retaliations and repressions, these wanton acts of destruction, we simply think it is worth it to risk our lives to create a better world.
To claim the reason for not engaging in revolution is the fear of expulsion or other such consequences is ridiculous. The only reason for not engaging in revolution is the belief that risking your life is not worth the possibility of a different world without cop cites and without cops, without colonial occupations and genocide. Anything but such a risk can never be defined as solidarity with those who are facing these violent actors and systems, whether by choice or happenstance, and losing their lives in doing so. To risk your life is to take it up into your own hands, and thus enter into a revolutionary way of being, even if revolution itself is not yet presencing.
To those of you who wish to stand by us: The first steps are simple. Join in resistance. Don’t simply shout at the next protest. Join with those attacking the university, refuse to cede power, defend yourself and those joining in struggle around you, against the police, and against anyone standing in the way of real revolution and community.
For those of you who stand in our way or are unwilling to struggle with us, our message to you is simple: Get the fuck out of Atlanta.
Sumitted Anonymously Over Email