To our Santa Cruz and UC Santa Cruz communities,

This letter is an official, direct response regarding the hanging of a noose at the base of the UC Santa Cruz campus (Coolidge Road and High Street) found on July 6th, 2020.

In light of the recent racist action that involved the hanging of a noose at the UCSC campus, The UCSC NAACP is appalled both by the boldness of people to intimidate Black lives by echoing the racial violence of past lynching, and by the following complicit nature of our institutional systems to not communicate effectively to the populations which may be directly impacted, such as our Black student leaders.

We know that these events echo past actions that found nooses across campus. For example, in 2011, a Black student leader was targeted and interviewed as etchings of nooses were discovered throughout the campus; she spoke to uplift and amplify the power and voices of the Black students on campus and within the Santa Cruz community. This racist action serves as a reminder of how often racist acts are practiced on the campus. In 2018, it took about 2,000 students to sign a petition to have a Jack Baskin professor suspended (and the University decided to suspend with pay) for making racist and sexual remarks about a student who was of Arab and Muslim background. In October of 2019, White Supremacist propaganda were distributed throughout campus lined with razor blades intended to harm students who tried to remove them. Clearly, a mere reporting made by the Hate/Bias Report Team is not enough to change the institutionalized racism that is distilled throughout the campus. 

Disconsolately, we point out that the response to this hanging of a noose released by Associate Vice Chancellor and Chief Diversity Officer Teresa Maria Linda Scholz and Interim Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs and Success Jennifer Baszile, falls short of describing what will be done to ensure tangible support and bolster resources for the Black community on campus. It simply encouraged students to “reach out for support” (support is not necessarily the only issue at hand here) and proceeded to list a campus-based service center (CAPS) that Black, Brown, Indigenous, POC and LGBTQA+ students may not be comfortable reaching out to. How can students who are impacted by this action be expected to reach out and contact CAPS during the summer, when CAPS is appointment-based and that offers a limited viewpoint of support for students of color that CAPS staff may not have previous experience with? Why are students expected to reach out for support when support for students should be a priority for the University, for the Hate/Bias Response Team, and the UCPD? The response goes on to state that this "[event] invalidate[s] some members of our community". This act surpasses invalidity, and merely suggesting for folx to reach out for support is not nearly enough of an action-based reaction on behalf of the University.

The response begins its closing statement with a muting, generalized call to action that serves to generalize the hanging of the noose on the UC Santa Cruz campus. “Every day we must all work toward a more just and equitable country". There are a plethora of student-led organizations and non-profit organizations who are working tirelessly each and every day to ensure the social, economic, and political empowerment of our Black and Brown communities. What steps will the University take to ensure that these students are held accountable and made an example of? How can the University claim that we all need to take steps towards a more just and equitable country when individuals who perform such racist, violent acts can simply walk and claim that they intended no harm, as was the case for the students who drew the “Diego Lynch” nooses were not punished? Is that all it takes for actors of such violating, racist, or White Supremacist happenings to be tolerated and dismissed?

The lackluster of such a response is juxtaposed with longer yet distorted statements released by local news channel Kion (“concerns over rope found at UCSC”) and by independent U.S. local news and information platform Patch (“Police Investigating Noose-Shaped Rope Hanging Near UC Santa Cruz”). To be clear, this was not a “noose-shaped looped rope” (as labeled in the response by the University); it was a noose. This did not take place “near” campus, it was on campus; it was no accident that these four students chose a location that intersects the City of Santa Cruz and the UC Santa Cruz campus. We wish to encourage and bolster our reader in initiating and continuing a calling out of the various intersecting forms of racial injustice that haunt and envisage a complicit, omnipresent oppressive system of injustice forcibly embedded within the Black and Brown communities across the nation. For an educational institution that has existed over 150 years, and as an embedded facet of that institution, students of color and folx of color attending UC Santa Cruz and within the overall Santa Cruz community deserve far more than just eight sentences in a sparse response letter. 

Therefore, the UC Santa Cruz NAACP are calling for a complete and full investigation into the perpetrators of this racist act, the University to utilize its given resources allocated to hate crimes, a full mantle of justice to question the inherent, implicit racist motives that exist in the larger Santa Cruz culture, a direct and correlated response from UC Santa Cruz and the UCPD (as there is a lack of clear investigation and communication about information about the incident), and for Black and Brown leaders and organizations (such as the UCSC NAACP and BSU) to be notified immediately, to have access to case details (when, where), all so that we can communicate with our community and protect ourselves. If a lack of accountability, transparency, and collaborative effort from the City of Santa Cruz (as this is a City issue just as much as it is an institutional issue) continues, the City of Santa Cruz, the UC system, and our allies should move forward with a community refund on institutions that don’t invest in investigatory powers for racial justice to invigorate the multi-ethnic student organizations on campus as well as Black folx within the Santa Cruz community. 

As the NAACP UC Santa Cruz chapter, we aim to build a collective movement using intersectional approaches to multicultural problems that underline the success and liberation of our Black, Brown, Indigenous, and LGBTQA+ allies, families, and friends. Whether on campus, at the Santa Cruz level, at the statewide conversation, or in the national debate, nothing will hold back the collective passion of this group to fight back against the oppressive forces that internalize injustice. 

In anticipation,

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, UC Santa Cruz

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Santa Cruz