To Western Reserve Academy Head of School Suzanne Buck, 

We, the alumni of WRA, are writing to express our dissatisfaction at Reserve’s response to the epidemic of racist police brutality across the nation. In your recent email, you write that WRA is undertaking the following: 

“Over the last few days, WRA has posted on Instagram, welcomed voices, and invited students and faculty to ‘Race Space’ virtual conversations. We have spoken with young alumni who have offered ideas for supporting and enriching the community. Our Diversity, Equity and Inclusion committee has provided an extensive and rich reading list for faculty. We have reached out to our local police department to partner with positivity. We are engaged in conversations with educational consulting experts to help us develop workshops to foster inclusivity and anti-racism in our community. We are examining our academic curriculum and asking how and where to create more opportunity for current events, an array of perspectives, and topics of relevance. We look to increase diversity within our faculty and staff.” 

The time is past for us to be impressed by social media posts and vague gestures toward diversity and inclusion. Workshops and committees do not foster justice or anti-racism if they do not result in material actions. Often, they are empty exercises that allow white and non-Black people of color to congratulate themselves for being socially conscious, even though they have not benefited any Black lives. What are the measurable results of these committees? 

We are most appalled by the fact that WRA has reached out to local police departments for partnership. The cause of the recent nationwide protests is the murder of George Floyd by Officer Derek Chauvin, as well as countless other murders of Black individuals by police and white vigilantes (Breonna Taylor, Ahmed Aubery recently, and Tamir Rice in Cleveland, 2014.) How dare you reach out to partner with the perpetrators of oppression? Have you reached out to Black-led organizations fighting for justice? Have you made donations to bail relief funds for protesters in Cleveland? Have you taken steps to center Black voices? If not, you have been acting to serve optics, rather than justice. We hope you will instead partner first with Black-led organizations and follow their guidance on if and how to engage with law enforcement. 

It is admirable that Reserve is willing to acknowledge the existence of racism as part of both our past and present. We ask that teachers and administrators expand their vocabulary to include discussion of white supremacy, police brutality, and systematic oppression. We must engage these narratives in the classroom by adding texts by Black authors and creating space for Black speakers. It is not enough to condemn hatred and violence; we must identify the originators and perpetrators. In this case, the police and broader law enforcement system unambiguously inflict violence upon Black citizens, which is evident not only in the public murders that have become hashtags, but also in the day-to-day policing and incarceration of their communities. To expand the curriculum and address these issues in history and English classes is the bare minimum. We must examine how instructors frame this information. What information and perspectives do they foreground? What resources do they share?

Though Hudson, Ohio has ties to abolition through the Underground Railroad and John Brown, it is a predominately white suburb. The de-facto segregation of many of our towns and cities is not accidental, but rather the active result of racist policies such as redlining and “white flight.” Here, we are not neutral observers of racism, but active beneficiaries of anti-Blackness. We must confront the ways we are complicit in the oppression of Black folks, instead of absolving ourselves with the claim that we are “good people” and “not racist.” 

Western Reserve Academy is a predominately white institution that feeds students into other predominantly white institutions, many of which enriched their endowments from the labor and enslavement of Black people. Of our 146 listed faculty and staff members, two are Black. We hope you will not be satisfied with graduating alumni who pass respectfully through society, avoiding controversy and quietly turning away from the plight of our Black brothers and sisters. After receiving a Reserve education, are your students currently more concerned with police brutality or destruction of property? Is their support of racial justice predicated upon respectability politics? Reserve students are from predominantly upper socioeconomic class backgrounds. Are they well-versed in perspectives on oppression based on class, race, sexuality, and immigration status? Are they aware of how local and state legislation endangers Black lives, such as Ohio’s pending Stand Your Ground laws, or minimum sentencing drug laws? Are they willing to raise their voices to defend and uplift people who often go unheard?

Reserve’s motto, “Excellence, Integrity, Compassion,” has resonated with us long since leaving campus. We share it in our own classrooms, and we live by it in our professional and personal lives. We must be unflinching as we confront what it means to have integrity and compassion in light of the events of 2020. We love Reserve. We believe in WRA’s capacity to be better, to be on the right side of history.

As alumni, we beg you to take the following actions: 

• End partnership with local police departments
• Avoid creating or publishing propaganda featuring “good cops” 
• Offer trauma-informed counseling by Black counselors  
• Financially support local bail funds and Black-led organizations for justice both nationwide and locally 
• Examine campus security policies. Are police being disproportionately called on people of color?
• Actively recruit Black faculty and students
• Include literature by Black authors at each level of the English curriculum
• Create a speaker series dedicated to issues of social justice, and invite people of color to speak 
• Partner with underrepresented minority-owned businesses and nonprofits that serve historically underserved minority populations
• Create ongoing cultural competency training for faculty and staff beyond a reading list
• Create a civil rights in America class
• Ensure that the diversity and inclusion committee is made of a majority of people of color

We appreciate that you are willing to enter this conversation, and we urge you to take further concrete steps.   

Signed, 

Alumni and Friends of WRA