TCNJ

20 The College of New Jersey Magazine allies, it's still unclear how long the momentum will last, how long they will keep Black Lives Matter signs in their windows, donate to mutual aid funds, show up at protests, and begin to directly challenge their racist rela- tives at the dinner table. "Real institutional change is hard to come by," says Piper Williams, chair of TCNJ's African American Studies department. "People are still shocked that this country has had slaves longer than it hasn't had slaves. So in terms of progress and time, there's a long way to go." From Reconstruction at the end of the 19th century and the anti-lynching cam- paign in the early 20th century to the civil rights movement in the mid-to- late 20th century and Black Lives Matter in the 21st century, people must continue to fight for change no matter how long it takes, Williams emphasized. "Some things have changed tremendously, but racism, the underlying reason for why things are the way they are, has not changed," Williams says. While Williams is pleased to see people naming systemic racism, she says, "It's the first step, but it's not the last step. We now know it's not enough to name it because we have to repair the criminal justice system. We have to end mass incarceration. We have to remove voter suppression and gerrymandering. We probably have to get rid of the Electoral College. We have to repair education." These institutional changes might seem daunting, especially to those new to the movement, so it's important to start local, Williams says. In neighborhoods, it's key that residents examine their community's police departments and school boards to determine how their bail system works or how their public defender operates and see how equity is being stunted. Similarly, at TCNJ, students and administrators must acknowledge how long the fight for equity and inclu- sion on campus has been. According to Williams, though her department is 50 years old this year, Black students and scholars have always been waiting to be heard. They marched on campus in the late 1960s to demand that the school hire a head of the African American Studies department who would support their vision of the fledg- ling discipline. At the time, students confronted issues of race head on. A 1969 article in The Signal showed how students came together to discuss race and grapple with the meaning of Black identity on campus. Other stories explained how Black students were discriminated against in campus housing and were underrepresented in a variety of fields like nursing. Students of color come on campus and become activists because TCNJ is a primarily white space, Williams says: "Fifty years later they are fighting the same fights." That fight includes the fact that professors of color do a lot of invisible labor, like mentoring students of color, that doesn't neces- sarily get counted toward tenure. Now is the moment for the school to officially recognize them and the African American Studies department as "the intellectual center of how we do race on campus," Williams says. This value shift is already manifesting with the new social justice minor Now is the moment for the school to officially recognize the African American Studies department as "the intellectual center of how we do race on campus," Williams says.

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