Opening the Gates to Global Racial Justice

In January, when Gregory Pardlo visited Africa for the first time, he made plans to tour a site in Senegal where captured men and women and children were shackled, sold, and forced onto slave ships.

Pardlo, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and acclaimed essayist is who is both an alumnus of and an associate professor at Rutgers University–Camden, had hoped to approach it with a professorial detachment to avoid becoming emotional while contemplating the horrors of its history.

He held it together through most of the visit to the House of Slaves, a museum on Gorée Island in Dakar, Senegal’s capital city. His visit included standing in the infamous “door of no return,” the doorway where captured Africans were led along a gangplank and onto slave ships leaving the island, which for four centuries was the largest slave-trading center on the West Coast of Africa. But at the end of the guided tour, when Pardlo held in his hands the dense weight of an iron ball that was chained to the legs of the captured to keep them from escaping, he said, “I crumbled. All of my intellectualization just evaporated. It was a real, visceral bodily experience. I wept uncontrollably.”

In addition to his associate professorship, Pardlo is Rutgers–Camden’s co-director of the universitywide Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice. The primary purpose of his trip to Senegal was to establish partnerships between Rutgers and two universities to host a symposium on translation, but he said visiting the House of Slaves was essential for him. “It was a necessary trip for me because it seared into my mind where the seeds for so many of the troubles we are experiencing were sown,” Pardlo said. “It was a reminder of why it is important to do global racial justice work.”

Global Racial Justice Projects

One upcoming example of the work the Rutgers institute has dedicated to global racial justice is The Dakar Translation Symposium: Africa and Her Diasporas, which Pardlo has helped to arrange. It connects Rutgers with two Senegalese universities to bring together speakers and participants invested in the Black Diasporas in hopes of fostering transatlantic dialogue. The symposium, scheduled for June of this year, will culminate with a gathering on Gorée Island to mark Juneteenth, the annual holiday on June 19 commemorating the end of slavery in the United States.

Another institute initiative is the Poets and Scholars Summer Writing Retreat, an annual event which began in 2021 and will continue this summer. It features 10 days of sessions addressing global racial justice, as well as a radical reimagining of traditional writing workshops open to those who may or may not consider themselves writers. Participants in the first year included writers and scholars of all disciplines, genres, and backgrounds committed to anti-racist writing practices. “It was a really broad population of folks who came together,” Pardlo said.

One of the writers who attended was Candida Rodriguez, a Camden resident who works in a local preschool. She participated in a poetry workshop, which included not only writing instruction but sessions on social justice and racial inequality. “It was enlightening,” she said, noting that she doesn’t have a graduate degree in writing and had never been part of a formal writing workshop. “It opened up for me a different view of the world.”

The expanded focus of the conference helped Rodriguez to “express myself, especially with poems that have to deal with my identity as a Latino woman,” she said. She added that the approach of the conference “allows the writer to really be heard, and the audience to understand. It’s a shared power.”

Pardlo, a 1999 graduate of Rutgers–Camden who won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize in poetry, said this year’s Poets and Scholars retreat will focus on Black bodies and medical justice in connection to another universitywide institute initiative, Black Bodies, Black Health: Imagining a Just Racial Future.

Making Waves with the Quilting Water Project

The Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice was established at Rutgers in fall 2020 with a $15 million grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; the grant supports postdoctoral scholars and a range of research projects in areas such as policy reform, social justice work, public health, and criminal justice. In January 2021, Pardlo and fellow Rutgers–Camden professor and poet Patrick Rosal were named co-directors for the Camden campus.

The institute’s mission “all comes back to how we think about ourselves and others,” said Michelle Stephens, a professor of English and former dean of the humanities at Rutgers–New Brunswick who is the founding executive director of the institute. “The need to redefine the concept of being human and move toward racial global justice begins by understanding and addressing the ways we resist recognizing people who live under different circumstances than our own.”

Pardlo said he hopes to cultivate means for productive conversations on difficult and often divisive questions around race, noting how the idea of critical race theory has become so controversial in many places in the United States. He said he’s not interested in pointing fingers at who is right or wrong, but instead that “I’m interested in finding ways to have language facilitate good faith examinations of who we are and what we want to be.”

He also noted that the institute’s perspective is global. “We want to look at structures of oppression around the world, not simply in the U.S.,” he said. “When we are studying racial justice, we are not studying the people who are the victims of racial inequality, we are studying the mechanics of the social forces that produced that inequality.”

Rosal, Pardlo’s co-director, is leading Quilting Water, one of the institute’s signature initiatives that will meld global stories of water with the talents of Camden quilters in a public art project. He said the efforts of the institute will help bring people of all backgrounds together to understand one another. “We could imagine the study of global racial justice as the expansion of the modes of inquiry that we can use to examine literature and art and therefore our own lives,” Rosal said. “I don’t see the central mission of the institute as corrective—I see it as expansive. We can think of the instantiation of justice as simply a revision of the gates, or we can imagine it as flinging the gates wide open and seeing what happens when that mix comes together. It’s the latter that interests me.”