As one of the three new internal senate committees this academic year, ASUO’s Black Lives Matter committee is working to support Black student organizations and Black culture on campus through a legislative resolution.
“For the past few decades, Black student groups on campus have been voicing demands that they want change to happen on the UO campus,” said committee Vice Chair Ginni Gallagher, “and the majority of those demands have not been met by administration. We see that as a really big problem.”
The committee is following the lead of a letter to the UO community that ASUO senators shared in June. The letter declared their solidarity with UO’s Black students, faculty and employees and committed to “advocacy and action” on behalf of UO’s Black community members.
In the document, the senate pledged to write a resolution in support of Black members of the UO community. “Our first commitment is to actually doing this resolution,” said Kriti Ganguly, a member of the Black Lives Matter committee who contributed to the letter in June.
The group met for the first time on Oct. 18. Committee Chair Asa Ward estimated the committee will spend between two weeks and a month brainstorming definitive demands, as well as drafting and finalizing a proposed resolution to take to the senate. The senate will then discuss and vote on the resolution. If approved, the senate will send it to the UO student body, and the committee will begin talks with administration about how the university can put their plans into action.
“It’s a work in progress,” Ward said. “Definitely some time needed to make sure we get this right, because it’s kind of a one shot type of thing. You don’t want to mess that up, but definitely looking forward to a lot of the things that we’re doing, a lot of the things that we’re discussing.”
The committee is operating independently from the executive branch group working to disarm the University of Oregon Police Department, but Ward said there is some overlap between the BLM committee and those working on the disarm memorandum. “Disarmament will definitely be in our resolution,” he said, “but exec is handling the more nitty gritty details of it and the more thoroughly outlined plan for what they’re looking for and what they want.”
Although the committee has not finalized the resolution, Ward expects that it will draw on unmet demands from Black student groups in the past — specifically the list UO’s Black Student Union proposed in 1968 and the items the UO Black student task force put forward in 2015.
In addition, Ward said he wants to prioritize ASUO funding for Black student groups and the Lyllye Reynolds-Parker Black Cultural Center on campus. He said his objectives were to “one, put funds into these organizations that are on campus, two, make sure that their voices are heard, and three, make sure that the administration knows that these are things that need to be carried out.”
“This isn’t us asking,” Ward said. “This is us demanding that you do it.”
