GSAPP Black Student Alliance on Alterity
As an organization, the Black Student Alliance at GSAPP has been both at the forefront and back end of conversations surrounding marginalization within and beyond our institution. In our publicly released letter, “On the futility of Listening” we highlighted the complicity of our administration in actively othering blackness. This protest against the violence that had been accepted as norm sparked several conversations about othering, and identity.
In her essay “Choosing the Margin” Bell Hooks describes her frustration with undiscerning conversations surrounding otherness when she writes:
“I am waiting for them to stop talking about the “Other,” to stop even describing how important it is to be able to speak about difference. It is not just important what we speak about, but how and why we speak. Often this speech about the “other” is also a mask, an oppressive talk hiding gaps, absences, that space where our words would be if we were speaking, if there were silence, if we were there. This “we” is that “us” in the margins, that “we” who inhabit marginal space that is not a site of domination but a place of resistance. Enter that space.”
Bell Hooks 1990, p. 151
In a space where we are familiar with being the “other,” we will continue to embrace alterity while promoting the interests, scholarship, and creative production of black students, alumni, and future students at GSAPP, as well as black faculty, designers, scholars, and practitioners.
