The Problem(s) with Grading: Making a Case for Contract Grading

The institute's recent initiatives are not new and are indeed part of the long slow struggle of dis-manteling systematic racism within education and society. Globally, nationally, and on particular campuses like ours, it is essentially important to situate the time as not created by the university. It was created by the protests against police violence, racism, and death that ruled the nation. Something discernable shifted last year was shifted in the national convention of racial terror and state violence. This was a movement led by black queer feminist organizers in radical liberation trajectories. Although this social shift feels new, given that the majority awareness feels new, this is misleading as the structural conditions are historical. Violence threatening black indigenous communities of color have been here for centuries and the energy, effort, and accountability did not come from our libraries, research labs, or faculty meetings. Institutions are a vital contextual factor for conversation however in the words of Angela Davis, what we think of as anti-racist as an institution--as meant not being racist--is not a statement that holds true.

Since the late 1960s, the political struggles in communities of color, working-class communities, have filtered into the campus and become political fights over the campus’s research and teaching landscape. The Third World Liberation Front coalition fought to create a College of Ethnic Studies, now fifty-one years ago, and we hopefully can acknowledge the fraught legacies to keep those intellectual spaces alive, with adequate funding and political support.

Where Ethnic Studies, its constituent programs, and African American Studies led the way, the AC curriculum grew directly out of the fight against South African apartheid and particularly the struggle to remove UC’s financial investments through its pension plans in South African businesses. These efforts, to ‘decolonize the budget’ turned (in the words of the then chair of the Graduate Assembly and now Professor of Education, Pedro Noguera) inward to UC Berkeley, into the fight to desegregate the campus, desegregate the curriculum. The result? The creation of a one-course graduation requirement for all UC Berkeley students to build analyses of race, ethnicity, and culture.

Fast forward into the years of America’s so-called "culture wars" and the high stakes of affirmative action’s repeal, the attack on undocumented communities, the dismantling of bilingual education (otherwise called proposition 209, 227, and 184 in CA), and what was a social justice politics built from global decolonial struggles and local desegregation efforts, became reduced to softer, depoliticized, ‘multicultural studies’ and an evasive maneuver against more radical efforts at mitigating inequality.  Diversity replaced equality. A reality that The AC Center and its interventions, aims at directly disrupting: one of which is the Creative Discovery Fellows program.