In this interview, Intersections editor Jason Mahn talks with Augustana College alumnux, Dezi Gillon, to learn more about the callings to justice-work among students of color, and how he and other white professors can better support them as they live out those callings.
Jason: I remember vividly the die-in that you and others at Augustana organized as part of the emerging Black Lives Matter movement five years ago. Would you please describe some of your other activism in college and how you started to think about protest and activism in relation to who you are, and who and what you feel called to be?
Dezi: My urge to participate in activism at Augustana came from my desire to be heard and to find community. This was after the acquittal of George Zimmerman, Trayvon Martin’s murderer, and my anger and desperation couldn’t be ignored. The moment swept me and others into a whirlwind of organizing and disrupting systems of oppression that affected us and those we loved.
The beginning of the BLM movement was a moment that encapsulated feelings of anger and resentment I had towards white people growing up in Chicago and Evanston. I also grew up with two parents who were very active in their local Black communities. My father was a community organizer and social worker and my mother did outreach work through the church we attended. At the beginning of my junior year, I could feel the support of my family back home and my community at Augustana. I felt as though I needed to do something.
I was fortunate to be surrounded by friends who also felt a call to action. The idea to organize protests at Augustana came after a number of seminars addressing the current events involving the Black Lives Matter movement. I remember walking away from those discussions feeling underwhelmed and frustrated at the lack of attention this matter was getting at our school.
What I loved so much about our community was that it was student led, trauma informed, and centered Black students. Although we reached out to Augustana faculty and staff for advising, we also had the guidance of writers and activists such as Angela Davis, Alicia Garza, bell hooks, James Baldwin, and so many more. We led various demonstrations on campus as well as a die-in. We also worked with the local Black Lives Matter chapter in the Quad Cities where we participated in a few local protests.
Jason: You talk about the “call to action” of you and your friends as emerging from places of disappointment, anger, and resentment. But you also speak of positive influencers and mentors, including your parents’ engagement with Black communities and famous Black writers who inspired you to act. Thinking back on those college years now, did your call to activism feel more like filling a void and emerging out of pain or following those who gave you hope and courage?
Dezi: While there was and is deep pain, for the most part my call to action came from a passionate desire to feel more connected to my community of fellow Black and Brown students. I love us, and I wanted to fight for us—for our love and existence, as well as for our representation at Augustana. I was also very grateful for fellow white students who joined our organizing and care work. I felt inspired by folks in my community and people I was meeting in Chicago and following on social media. There was no time to be silent or to cater to requests to be more gentle with white professors and students. Even though there was pain, we were determined to fight for one another in community.
Jason: Did the calling you felt to fight for and support a community of Black and other students of color carry over into your life and work since graduating from college?
Dezi: Yes! That time in undergrad has had such a significant impact on my life. After finishing my bachelor’s degree I decided to go to Union Theological Seminary in New York City. There I participated in organizing for undocumented folks who were seeking asylum in church and in school as well as accompaniment in court proceedings.
During my time in NYC, I also deepened my exploration into spirituality and Blackness. There was such a diversity of Black experiences in that city. I started becoming closer to my West African roots in my spiritual practices. I started grappling with very complex questions regarding my Christian identity.
While doing social justice education and programming with the Sadie Nash Leadership Project, I also discovered that work with youth and environmental justice were large parts of my vocation. This work and so much more brought me to do the restorative justice work I do now. As I am now settling back into Chicago, I want to continue to learn more about transformative justice and youth work. Using art and transformative practices and following the leadership of youth, I want to invest myself in justice for the communities that I am a part of.
Jason: You mention how art, spirituality, and activism all compose parts of your identity and calling. Can you give us a sense of how those three go together—especially for the younger communities in which you are a part?
Dezi: I actually found these fit together quite easily for me. I have always been an artist. Sometimes I am a very active artist and other times my creativity seems blocked. Creating art and being fascinated by the art around me has informed my calling for justice and my connection to the spirit.
“Tying together art, spirituality, and activism was second nature to me.”
When I moved to NYC and started school at Union Theological Seminar, I had access to so much art and spiritual faith practices. These were woven together so tightly that at times I couldn’t tell them apart. Being around other artists, especially artists whose work tied directly to their spiritual life, helped me unravel the cultural aesthetics of Black Christianity and Black American lived experiences. I became fascinated with the arts and spiritual life.
I began to prioritize art and garden-based learning in my facilitation style as well as in my academic and personal life. Art became a portal into understanding and storytelling and I wanted to incorporate that into the way I taught. I also want folks to think more critically about the land and their relationship to it and to the people in their local community. Tying together art, spirituality, and activism was second nature to me. Any limitations did not come from me, but from the boxes that other people put me in. I wanted to break out of those boxes and into something that documented the lives of my community.
Jason: What advice would you give to Black students studying at predominantly white institutions? How about to white teachers like me who are trying to learn how to better support students as they fight for change in an unjust world?
Dezi: Whew, these are big questions! The advice I would give to current Black students at PWIs is to try to find your people. Find people who support all of you—not just some of you. I am so grateful for the leadership of Black students and the space they take up on college campuses. Don’t let white people and non-black POC put you into boxes that stifle your strengths. And if you feel like you are doing work you should be getting paid for, chances are you are. Know your worth and demand your seat at the table.
“By staying silent you actually speak volumes.”
When I think about the advice I’d give to teachers, I think of the Maya Angelou quote, “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” You have the power to shape the way Black folks feel on your campus. I experienced not only the silence of my fellow students, but also of my professors. I remember the silence being frustrating and cruel. At times, the silence was almost louder than words of solidarity. There is no neutral ground. By staying silent you actually speak volumes. You are a resource to students, and should use the power that you have to open doors for students and support students when they need you. Do not become another barrier to voices who are learning to speak out.
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Mark Wilhelm
Wilhelm argues that the “hackneyed” expressions of higher education — “you are not just a number,” “the college experience,” “risen to the challenge” — tell the simple truth about NECU institutions even as the Covid-19 pandemic has pushed budgets, employees, and campus life to the breaking point.
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Editorial
From the Editor
Jason A. Mahn
Mahn narrates a year of crisscrossing pandemics — Covid-19, economic collapse, partisan politics, and the long pandemic of white supremacy revealed anew by the murder of George Floyd — and argues that Lutheran liberal arts schools, by educating for vocation, are uniquely poised to help students respond with character and capable callings.
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Pairing Wartburg’s Lebenskreuz sculpture with the Matthew 25 acts of mercy and the commitments of Rooted and Open, Riswold reads the calls to feed the hungry, welcome the stranger, and care for the sick as urgent summons for Lutheran higher education in a year of overlapping pandemics — and as a call to dismantle the structures that produced them.
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Carl Hughes
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Krista E. Hughes
Writing from Newberry College’s campus on land once home to the Cherokee and within a day’s drive of Mother Emanuel A.M.E., Hughes argues that NECU’s call to “practice radical hospitality” demands that predominately white institutions open themselves to the hauntings of racism — pursuing belonging rather than mere welcome, and risking kenotic transformation of institutional identity itself.
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Thompson draws on Luther’s theology of the cross and Shelly Rambo’s theology of trauma to sketch a Lutheran model of leadership for a season of pandemics — one that is attentive to pain, responsive to need, and intentionally nourished by food, friends, and deep conversation.
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Reflecting on Augsburg’s 150th-anniversary motto “Through truth to freedom,” Pribbenow argues that in a season of three pandemics — pandemic illness, economic collapse, and the racial sin laid bare by the murder of George Floyd — higher education’s most authentic work is to educate for truth and freedom by way of confession and reconciliation.
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Lena R. Hann
When the pandemic hit her new public health professionalism course, Hann recalibrated her teaching from the “how” of professional preparation to the “why” of vocational reflection — and recounts how Augustana public health students and alumni found purpose in the chaos through food banks, disaster response, palliative care, and research on health inequities.
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Reflection
The Long Pilgrimage of 2020-21
Kara Baylor
Drawing on Martha Stortz’s definition of pilgrimage as “intentional dislocation, for the sake of transformation, where the body teaches the soul,” Baylor invites students and educators worn out by the 2020-21 academic year to ask what is essential, to listen to what their bodies are telling their souls, and to be more open to the transformations the dislocation might still yield.
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Article
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Mindy Makant
Drawing on Lenoir-Rhyne’s core value of Care, Glennon Doyle’s Untamed, Darrel Jodock’s “Gift and Calling,” and Luther’s plague-era practice of opening his home to the sick, Makant argues that flourishing is interdependent — that self-care is a means to extending care, and that an ethic of care is the meaningful, transformative work to which Lutheran liberal arts education is called.
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Article
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W. Kent Barnds
After a derecho ravaged Iowa in August 2020 and Pastor Katy Warren preached on 1 Peter 4, Barnds watched line workers, neighbors, and Augustana colleagues simply show up where they were needed — and proposes that the true vocation of a Lutheran college may be making the case for “meeting immediate need with a deep willingness” alongside the longer work of vocational discernment.
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Article
The Future of Lutheran Higher Education
Mark Schwehn
No. 1 · Summer 1996
Schwehn’s keynote, framed against Otto Paul Kretzmann’s October 1940 inaugural at Valparaiso, organizes itself around four topics: the idea of a Christian University (Lutheran schools as a tributary of the Christian intellectual tradition, voices in a conversation in the spirit of H. Richard Niebuhr and Alasdair MacIntyre rather than phases of James Burtchaell’s devolutionary scheme); the pursuit of truth (against Foucauldian reduction of truth to power, with Hilary Putnam, toward a cruciform discipleship that discovers truth ambulando); the critique of knowledge (developing Christian theories of knowing in conversation with Benne, Lotz, Wolterstorff, LeClerc, and Augustine); and Christianity and liberal learning (objectivity refurbished as Thomas Haskell’s ascetic self-discipline, and the recovery of texts that have claims upon us).
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Book Review
The Courage to Change: Creating New Hearts with Palmer and Zajonc
Martha E. Stortz
No. 39 · Spring 2014
Stortz reads Parker Palmer and Arthur Zajonc’s The Heart of Higher Education from the landscape of Lent and notes that the book’s strategies all target students, not their professors. Drawing on her own Faculty Formation Group at Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary and the Ignatian Colleagues Program at Jesuit institutions, she asks what a Lutheran analogue might look like that would form the educators who teach for transformation.
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Article
Mentoring in the Academy: Of Gurus, Coaches, and Sponsors
Faith Wambura Ngunjiri
No. 41 · Spring 2015
Ngunjiri urges faculty, staff, and administrators in faith-based institutions to assemble a “personal board of directors” of mentors — connectors, sponsors, taskmasters, motivators, dreamers, sages, and proofers — and reflects on how race and gender complicate mentoring in predominantly white, male-led ELCA institutions, where women and minorities must reach out to build the “cloud of witnesses” they need to thrive.
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Institutional Focus
Sharing the Gift of Vocation at (and beyond) Augsburg University
Paul C. Pribbenow
No. 55 · Spring 2022
Pribbenow, drawing on a 2022 NetVUE panel with Dorothy Bass and Jodi Porter, considers how the gift of vocation forged with undergraduates can be extended — beyond undergraduate campuses to graduate students, faculty, and staff; across the vocational lifespan from high schoolers to alumni navigating the “gig economy”; and into accompaniment of faith communities through Augsburg’s Riverside Innovation Hub.
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Response
Hitting a Moving Target
Harry Jebsen
No. 3 · Summer 1997
Jebsen, former Provost of Capital University, responds to Reichenbach by arguing that the institutions, the ELCA, congregations and pastors, students, and curriculum are all moving targets. Drawing on Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock and his own fifteen years of hiring as Dean and Provost (a candidate who hoped the cross out front didn’t mean anything), he traces the drift from the “Mr. Chips” faculty who personified Dana and Midland Lutheran to a campus culture where “everybody is nice to each other” has replaced theological substance, and where MBA programs, conservatories, law schools, and adult-education programs further dilute the focus of the residential Lutheran college.
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Article
Educating for Peace: 21st Century Models for Thinking Globally and Acting Locally
Janet E. Rasmussen
No. 18 · Fall 2003
Rasmussen opens with a rabbinic story about the one-step distance between East and West and describes Pacific Lutheran University’s four-phase “Global Education Continuum”—Introductory, Exploratory, Participatory, Integrative—developed with Teagle Foundation support and grounded in Perry, Bennett, and Musil. She illustrates intentional global/local partnership through three case studies: Barbara Temple-Thurston’s Trinidad-and-Salishan initiative; the China Partners Network with the Amity Foundation, Good Samaritan Hospital, and PLU’s Wang Center; and Ann Kelleher’s three-institution “Norway in Namibia” partnership with Hedmark University College, the University of Namibia, NAMAS, and the Ondao mobile schools for the Himba people. She closes with Daloz, Keen, Keen, and Parks’s Common Fire research and Lee Knefelkamp’s call to be “communities of peace.”