Rundgang usually ends with the closing and certainly involves emotions, but it is incomparable to the emotional and affective labor that was invested by the students before, during, and after the Rundgang 2020 protest. Some people have had a difficult few months afterward and are still recovering emotionally, so the work hasn\u2019t stopped yet. Can you relate to this and talk about invisible labor? How much work this protest was actually, and still is, up until today? <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n\u2192 How the situation unfolded and the emotional labor it required was the worst. It\u2019s a painful process. In any form of activism, you must get used to people telling you that what you\u2019re doing is no good and you should stop doing it and be ashamed for doing it in the first place. They\u2019re going to find ways of convincing you of this and really getting under your skin. It will be like that anyway. And you can get very stressed about it, it\u2019s not a nine-to-five job. You\u2019re not going to get away from this emotional payment, it\u2019s going to be there for sure. But there should be some moments in which you reach out to each other. Ultimately, many people were doing that. However, there should also be moments when you have these conversations collectively; meetings where you talk about how you feel as a group and discuss any doubts that might have occurred. That just never happened and I think that\u2019s what is needed. But when I got into this, I didn\u2019t even think it would get that far. I didn\u2019t come with expectations that we will change anything. I think this is a very big misconception that many people have when they go into activist work, they think they will be alive and there to see the fruits of their labor, but it\u2019s really not like that. Don\u2019t expect that much if you want to be an activist. You\u2019re not doing this for a sense of success.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u2192 The problem is that, for people who don\u2019t suffer from structural violence as an everyday experience, the more they want to look away, they can. Sometimes they will misunderstand their attention to a problem as a charitable act of fixing somebody else\u2019s problem and not as fighting a system one is always already a part of. As a white person who was somewhat involved in the antiracist protest, I\u2019m in danger of misunderstanding a situation like that. I was exhausted, but I was not a fraction as exhausted as my BIPoC-friends. On a personal level, I tried to give the assistance I could, but it\u2019s clear that it hasn\u2019t taken the same toll on me and that the aftermath hasn\u2019t been as long for me as it was for some of my friends. I can also only assume how the invisible labor for my BIPoC-friends often means staying nice and accommodating while watching their white friends processing racist realities they were never forced to deal with. Here I think it\u2019s every white person\u2019s task to keep learning, even after the hype is over, but to do so on terms that don\u2019t put further work on the shoulders of people who have to live with racist violence directed towards them every day. Do your own research, talk to fellow white people about ways to deal with your own racist socialization, things like that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Looking back on the protest with today\u2019s perspective \u2013 what were the issues, and what do you wish had been done better or differently? What is important to pay attention to when working collectively for a social change? <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n\u2192 The protest was a process as democratic as it could have been. I don\u2019t think we could have done it differently, but we definitely should have. I think the first steps to do something like this are to acknowledge that we are a heterogeneous group of people with different traumas and discrimination experiences, talk about how we want to work together, and how we want to speak to each other. The group needs to split responsibilities and not put a lot of mental pressure on a few individuals. If we want to work together, we have to raise our sensitivities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u2192 One of the main issues is fear. People on the payroll of the university are scared of losing their jobs and won\u2019t say anything. I have spoken to some professors about it, and they have been very supportive, much more than they were publicly. I don\u2019t think it\u2019s disingenuous; I just think that some lecturers without permanent employment are scared of losing their jobs or getting bullied. They\u2019re not in the position to help. The only people that can really do something are students. It\u2019s the students who have the best chances of saying their truth, being heard, and creating this kind of movement. But amongst students, there is a lot of fear as well. Some fear that there will be consequences because their professors disagree. Ultimately some risks must be taken, and many have taken them. You need to stand strong in solidarity and have a sense of collective energy, not of your singular position inside it. You have to have trust and rely on each other. What I would definitely do better is the final part of the process when the action takes place. This must be discussed more thoroughly so that everyone is on the same page and we all understand that we are going to take a huge risk together. The strategy for that moment and some kind of emotional support of each other should be planned before. I also had the feeling that, in the end, everyone was tired and kind of annoyed. You always see this kind of mentality when you work voluntarily for a cause when, all of a sudden, people realize that they have more important things to do and everybody should be happy that they helped at all because they\u2019re not even getting paid for this. That\u2019s the moment when things go wrong because somebody else who is also not getting paid for it, who already has enough on their plate, has to finish it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u2192 I wasn\u2019t really in the center of the organizational part, so I can only report as a bystander. I think for me, it has become clear on what precarious grounds self-organization is materializing. The meetings in the weeks before the protest were a real practice in basic democracy; everybody was invited to participate. And that\u2019s hard work. I think this society does not necessarily prepare one for more democracy, so every time we find ourselves in positions where we are able to make more self-determined decisions, it\u2019s also always a process of reflecting on one\u2019s own limitations and learned behavior. Personally, this experience has inspired me to read up on theories and histories of past and present revolutionary movements. I think it\u2019s important to understand oneself as participating in a history of people who have voiced dissent on how things are. People who have tried to find ways to establish relationships built on solidarity and equality and not on competition and artificial scarcity of resources. The more we study our revolutionary predecessors, the better we are prepared to find contemporary solutions on how to organize resistance in a fucked up world.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
During the #exitracismudk protest at the UdK Rundang last year, the student actions laid out some necessary blueprints for changes at the university in the direction of social justice, anti-discrimination, and decolonization. To understand how the situation developed since then and how it might influence further progress, I asked four of the involved students to reflect on the events and their own thoughts and feelings.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":513,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_eb_attr":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/criticaldiversity.udk-berlin.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/512"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/criticaldiversity.udk-berlin.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/criticaldiversity.udk-berlin.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/criticaldiversity.udk-berlin.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/criticaldiversity.udk-berlin.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=512"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/criticaldiversity.udk-berlin.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/512\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":577,"href":"https:\/\/criticaldiversity.udk-berlin.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/512\/revisions\/577"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/criticaldiversity.udk-berlin.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/513"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/criticaldiversity.udk-berlin.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=512"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/criticaldiversity.udk-berlin.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=512"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/criticaldiversity.udk-berlin.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=512"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}