Before the fall 2024 semester, I had room for one more class, but couldn’t decide what to take. My advisor eventually gave me a recommendation: “AFRSTY 350L: Race, Class & Gender.” I read the class description and thought the class seemed entertaining, so I enrolled.

The first day of class came and I saw the professor. Nothing stood out about him except for the fact that he passed as White. I thought that it was strange for him to be teaching an Africana studies class but realized that it was equally strange for an Asian person to be taking an Africana studies class, so I relented.

I don’t remember the events of the first class well, but I remember how I felt. I came out feeling like my time had been wasted. I thought I spent an hour and fifteen minutes watching a White man rehash Black poets and intellectuals. The cherry on top was his claim that somehow, the knowledge project that he engaged with was more valuable than traditional American education.

I couldn’t believe it. I asked myself, “how could the words of slaves surpass those of the people who built the world?” At this point I knew that the straight-male-centered, Eurocentric world we lived in had its issues. I also knew that as a Filipino person with a colonial history of my own, I had more in common with enslaved Africans than the colonizers.

Despite what I knew, I couldn’t envision a world where people like me — those susceptible to prejudice — could ever create anything of value. I was content with keeping my head down, being willfully subordinate so long as my desires were met. As a student at a public university, I desired one thing more than anything else: I wanted a stable, high-paying career. I thought that anything that didn’t contribute to that desire — “the words of poets and the enslaved” — were meaningless. At the end of class, we were tasked with picking out a quote from the syllabus which resonated with us. We would then share them with the rest of the class, along with a brief explanation as to why we picked them.

The day of my presentation came. I picked my quote out and had notes written down. I was going to say some B.S. about how, as people of color, we should stay united because it’s “the right thing to do.”As other students presented, a feeling welled up inside of me. I could not keep it to myself. When my turn finally came, I impulsively picked out a different quote despite not having prepared an explanation for it at all.

The quote was written by Saidiya Hartman from her book, “Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route.” She writes, “For me, the rupture was the story.” Although it was brief and without context, it resonated with me. For me, the rupture was the unplaced turmoil living inside of me. It was waking up at six in the morning and going to sleep past midnight. It was driving through an hour and a half of traffic every day. It was investing four years of my life into something that didn’t guarantee my happiness.

After my presentation, professor Jones instilled a new lesson into the class. He asked us, “whose desire is your desire?” For me, these words became a guiding principle and a call-to-action. It isn’t just a challenge to investigate the past, but to keep asking questions about the world around us: to challenge what we’ve been taught.

Thanks to professor Jones, I’ve come to realize that I have value and that the world we live in — where some people don’t have value — doesn’t have to be the way it is. This is why I was shocked to learn that the university has decided to terminate him.
In UMass Boston’s mission, the university claims to promote an anti-racist culture. They state, “We are intentional in cultivating antiracist values—in our curriculum, across our research enterprise, in the transdisciplinary scholarship we produce, and in the community[]university partnerships we build.”

To fire the man who helped me cultivate a healthier relationship with my race and the way I view the world is not only hypocritical, but detrimental. I can say with confidence that if I never met professor Jones, I would still view myself as having less value as a person of color.
If professor Jones disappears, then more students run the risk of not being instilled with anti-racist values. If the university is serious about upholding their mission, then I urge them to reconsider their decision to terminate professor Jones.