A message from Director Terrion Williamson

This fall, I have the enormous privilege and responsibility of becoming just the second director in the history of the Social Justice Initiative at UIC. SJI was founded in 2012 by my dear colleague Dr. Barbara Ransby, who will be retiring at the end of the current academic year after a 30-year career at UIC. In the nearly 15 years since SJI’s founding, Barbara and her incredibly talented team have worked diligently to establish a critical community of scholars, students, organizers, artists, activists, and practitioners, both internal and external to the university, who are committed to the cause of justice and have devoted their work and their lives to the vision of a better world yet to come.

When I first arrived at UIC as an undergraduate student in the late 1990s, SJI did not yet exist, but the groundwork for its existence was clearly being laid. I took my first course in what was then the African American Studies Department with Dr. Ransby, and that first class inspired in me a lifelong commitment to the study of Black history and culture. I eventually graduated from UIC with a double major in African American Studies and English after having worked with and learned from a number of Black Studies scholars—Dwight McBride, Sharon Holland, Duriel E. Harris, James Hall, and Sterling Plumpp among them—who provided me with an intellectual foundation that continues to guide my approach, not just to my research, but to my thinking about the world and my place within it.

I returned to UIC in 2022 as a faculty member. My return to UIC was motivated in large part by UIC students—ours is a student body largely made up of working-class students and students of color, many of whom, like me, were among the first generation in their families to attend a four-year college or university. I was also motivated by the critical cohort of faculty and staff at UIC who remain committed, both in their scholarship and in their organizing lives outside of the university, to liberatory, world-building, life-sustaining work. I believed then and continue to believe now that there is a significant opportunity at UIC to engage the classroom and the community as constitutive spaces where meaningful social change is being envisioned and enacted.

Even at a moment when the university has come under tremendous political and financial strain, when its very existence has come under question and departments like those where I have spent the majority of my career—gender studies, women’s studies, American studies, and, especially, Black studies—have been increasingly threatened and disparaged and defunded and dismantled, I hold firm to the belief that the university is a site of both radical struggle and radical possibility. This does not mean that institutions cannot fail us. They can and they do. This does not mean that the university is or should be the sole site of knowledge production or social mobilization. It is not and it cannot be. The university alone will not save us, but neither is it reducible to its many structural deficits.

In 1969, the indispensable Black feminist writer and activist Toni Cade Bambara told us that “ain’t no such thing as instant guerillas.” Collective struggle, movements for liberation, contesting and transforming the mechanisms of power—all of it demands much of us. And one of the most urgent demands is that we do the work, not just the physical labor, but the heavy intellectual labor that endures well beyond the limitations of our physical bodies. This is about more than stepping up to the dais, joining a street protest, writing a list of demands, or publicly calling out the powers that be. “It is so much easier to be out there than right here,” Toni said. Being right here also demands that we do some personal, individual work. It demands that we examine our biases, that we root out all our own inconsistencies, and that we, if a callback to my faith tradition can be indulged, study to show ourselves approved. But that “self” work does not happen in a vacuum, and it cannot be disconnected from the work we must do together in our classrooms and reading circles and organizing meetings and all the places where we gather in the name of study. Here, what I mean by “study” is not what we do to secure a grade in a class or earn a degree but is akin to what Stefano Harney and Fred Moten refer to in The Undercommons as an “invitation to pick things up” with and in relation to other people.

When I arrived at UIC from the South Side of Peoria as an aspirational eighteen-year-old, I had a lot of learning to do. I also had a lot of unlearning to do. At UIC, I had the space to grow. I found an intellectually diverse collective of faculty, staff, and students who were doing the work, and who were willing to correct me when I got it wrong, encourage me when I got it right, and to stand beside me as I endeavored to pick things up and figure out some things about myself, my people, and my community.

My vision of SJI is of a place that is deeply invested in doing the hard, imperfect, sometimes messy, and absolutely imperative work of nurturing the next generation of freedom dreamers. Drawing from the lessons that have been imparted to us by thinkers and organizers like Barbara Ransby, I envision a kind of training ground for social justice work that isn’t indebted to exclusionary top-down protocols but is grounded in a grassroots approach that recognizes the intellectual capacities of people whose learning takes place both within and beyond the university. I am invested in an SJI where we don’t just come to perform what we already know, but endeavor to create space for those who don’t yet have it all figured out. And the commitment I make as SJI director is that not only will we continue fighting back against the various interlocking forms of oppression that make our work so critically necessary, we will also be fighting for what the eminent historian and friend of SJI Robin D. G. Kelley refers to as “the world that could liberate and sustain us all.”

I hope you will join us in doing the work.

Terrion L. Williamson, PhD
Director, Social Justice Initiative