![]() ![]() Without this work, itself an act of self-preservation, we struggle to see any place for ourselves as part of this community and discipline. But we can only host so many conversations, workshops, wikipedia edit-a-thons, and lectures. This summer alone, we have led research with our Rotch Librarian to produce the BIPOC Design Archive Project, taught a class titled What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Architecture (WWDTAWWTAA), held weekly meetings, and co-organized town hall discussions. We as students and leaders in NOMAS can only do so much as we push for an actively anti-racist department and attempt to make architecture engaged with the lives and experiences of BIPOC communities. We continue to ask ― what’s next?įar too often, the burden of anti-racist work falls upon students, faculty, and staff of color. ![]() While this is a start, we need far more commitment from much more of our community. This garnered a swift reply from our Department Head and Associate Department Heads, who outlined broad next steps and timelines, as well as the creation of a Strategy & Equity team comprised of one faculty, two staff, and one student. ![]() We presented our list of demands (expanded below) and fielded questions from fellow students and faculty. In this spirit of dialogue, while students at many of our peer institutions wrote public letters demanding change earlier this summer, we (NOMAS MIT) co-hosted an internal town hall meeting with our Architecture Student Council for all students and faculty in the Department. But one distinguishing aspect of our department is its tight-knit community in which open dialogue and trust are described as central to the learning process. Neither the Institute nor the Department are unique in this way. Despite years of calls for change, whiteness remains the neutral background against which narrow visions of merit, education, and community are valorized at MIT and the Department of Architecture. The ongoing pandemic and continual violence enacted upon Black lives has once again highlighted what Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) communities have always known: that the systemic violence of white supremacy exists in every facet of life. To the Faculty of the Department of Architecture at MIT, ![]() Trivial fact: The bumblebee man from the Simpsons is most likely based on the superhero character from chespirito called "El Chapulín Colorado" (The red cricket).Do the Work: Demands for Action and Accountability in the MIT Department of Architecture This was classical humor by repetition a phrase that some silly TV character said OVER-AND-OVER-AND-OVER until it became part of popular culture, not only in Mexico, where this comes from, but all over Latin America, where the TV show in question ("Chespirito") has been hugely poplar and has been airing for waaay too many years. The funny part is (I guess) that once you think somebody has said "welcome" to you, they keep going with some out-of-context nonsense. The second phrase would be an answer you could get at a street quesadilla stand where they've ran out of cheese for the day. "No hay de queso, nomás de papa" = "We're out of cheese, we've only got potato left". "no más" = "no more" but in this context you couldn't use it because the sub phrase "no más de papa" ("no more of potato") would be missing a verb to make any sense. The word in the phrase should be "nomás" and not "no más". Ok guys, there's one very important piece of this puzzle which is wrong in the discussion so far: ![]()
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