It’s 8 a.m. “the morning after.” Do you know who’s woke? Marginalized Students, Neoliberal Institutions, and White Settler Colonialism

It’s 8 a.m. on November 9, 2016—the morning after. Like so many others, I want to stay in bed and maybe never get up. Instead, I’m sitting in silence with one of my students in my windowless, wood-paneled office in a mid-sized public university in the rural South. We meet early because he is carrying a full load, working 50-plus hours a week and caring for a family of five. He is an African immigrant who (in his spare time) has been trying to put his education to use organizing against systemic employment discrimination of his community, Swahili-speaking African refugees and immigrants. He is one of the first students to sign up for the social justice minor I created, and I’ve had him in two associated courses.

This nontraditional student is a man of few words, and those are often soft-spoken but heavily weighted. That morning he tells me his young son woke up, and his first words were, “Who won?” Hearing the news, his son asked, “Are we going back?” His dad probed as to why he would think that. His son said kids at school said that, if Trump wins, he and his family would have to “pack their bags.”

Neither my student nor I knew what to do in that moment. We had no way of knowing all that was coming, but we felt the weight of it through the questions of his young son. Many of my students were students of color, immigrants, first-generation, queer, working. I felt the weight of their anticipated questions that morning as well. In the weeks that followed, I was repeatedly disappointed by, but not surprised by, the response of institutions and some colleagues.

I had a leading feminist scholar share a story with me three days after the election about her young daughters crying over the lost opportunity at having a woman president. I knew I was being interpellated in that moment as a proper white neoliberal feminist. Michaele L. Ferguson writes that “framing this election exclusively as a feminist failure obscures the many ways in which the election is symptomatic of the extraordinary success of one particular kind of feminism in the US: neoliberal feminism” (2017, 53).

And then administrators became obsessed with the comfort of Trump voters on our campuses and in our classrooms. False equivalences popped up everywhere; marginalized communities were cautioned against “marginalizing” Trump voters. We were advised not to be angry but to be “positive” and to have “constructive dialogues.” The Women’s Studies Center on my campus announced itself as a “safe space,” defined as a space for “all” where “we show mutual respect.” This rang as incredibly hollow at a moment when safe spaces and material support specifically for students who were traumatized and terrified by Trump’s election were so needed (for example, the large number of Muslim and immigrant students on campus). Then, perhaps realizing the level of trauma in marginalized communities and the violence they were experiencing, liberal white people came up with the safety pin idea and a number of faculty jumped on board until activists of color and their accomplices put a quick end to it (Keelty 2016).

Frustrated and following the model of progressive colleagues at another institution, I created “Dear Student” fliers that I posted in my classroom and in the hallway outside our faculty offices the week after the election. Recognizing that the messaging was imperfect and incomplete, I determined not to let perfect be the enemy of the good, to use an old aphorism. I believe this was the right call as attacks on marginalized students sharply increased on my campus after the election. These included being hit with bottles of urine, being yelled at from cars, being confronted with “go home” graffiti in campus buildings, and being assaulted by racial epithets literally carved into dorm hallways. The signs I posted read:

Dear Undocumented Students:

At this institution there are no walls.

Dear Black Students...