As of May 2nd, 2017, the Afrikan/Black Student Alliance at the University of California at Santa Cruz (UCSC) has Reclaimed Kerr Hall.

Who We Are:

The Afrikan/Black Student Alliance is an Afrikan/Black/Caribbean (ABC) student-­led and
student-­run organization on the campus of the University of California at Santa Cruz. It was founded and it serves as a place and space for ABC students to learn together, to teach together, to offer support for the various racialized macro-­and-­microaggressions, and also to challenge each other around some harmful ideologies we may hold toward practicing a fuller love for ALL Black people. We are an organization that’s about centering the liberation of ALL Black people. We do realize and are aware of many of our limitations as well as the power we hold as an organization that is contextually specific in and to a Western academic institution in the United States of America.

We are undergraduate and graduate students in the Humanities, the Arts, and the Sciences. We are on-­campus and off-­campus workers. We are Muslim, Christian, Atheist, and independently spiritual. We are queer and trans, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and straight. We are from working poor, working class, and middle and upper class backgrounds and those attendant realities. We are Black Nationalists, Black Internationalists, Pan-­Africanists, Afro-­futurists, Afro-­pessimists, and Afrotopians. We are migrants, immigrants, refugees, and American-­born. We are the descendants of forcefully enslaved Afrikan people in “The Americas”, as well as the first, second, third, fourth, fifth, and sixth generation immigrant and migrant children. We are capitalists, anti-­capitalists, and Anarchists. We are everything because Blackness is everything.

With this said, and with the Liberation of all of us on our minds, we know that we can not tolerate anti-­Black racism and colorism;; sexism and misogynoir;; homophobia, transphobia, and queerphobia;; or heterosexism and patriarchy. We can not allow these forced impositions to go unchecked and unchallenged in our space. We are committed to this. We believe in the power of unity across intra-­communal differences, which means that we believe in the power of unity experienced in and through calling each other to be accountable to one another. We understand that to rebuild our communities sometimes things will have to fall apart — or, at least it will appear that way. We are well aware that we are in one of the many re-­building stages of the process with A/BSA, and we invite all Afrikan, Black, and Caribbean (ABC) students to come (and to come back) into the space to build and rebuild across all the differences we have among us. In so many ways, we’re all we have here, and the Chancellor’s response to the demands we put forward should be a clear indication of this very real fact.