History of the Collective
An Overview
The UHP BIPOC Collective was created in August 2020 by Black & POC students after months of conversation with UHP administration, staff, and faculty.
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After feeling othered in Honors spaces, we realized the power that connecting with other students of color in the program had in our success and feeling of belonging. However, cultivating these relationships proved difficult because of the UHP’s utter lack of diversity and support of students of color. Thus, we were inspired to create this collective to more easily facilitate strong and meaningful relationships among students of color in the UHP.
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In June 2020, a group of students of color sent a letter to Director Bethany Cobb Kung regarding the program’s lack of response to the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and countless other Black lives. Within the letter, students asked the UHP to release statements condemning the murders and taking accountability for their harm and neglect toward students of color, diversity core Honors classes and upper-level course offerings, institute bias training, and create a diversity and inclusion (D&I) committee.
The UHP created the requested D&I committee, prompting participants of color to organize amongst themselves to create a more unified front. Within this, we sought to create a group exclusively and explicitly for students of color in the UHP. Though this idea was voiced by students in 2018, it wasn’t until the 2020 D&I meetings that the administration supported it.
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We felt that gaining program support was imperative to the Collective, as we are seeking not only to support individual students of color, but also push the program towards structural change. Doing so requires, at times, working within official UHP channels and spaces.
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We are committed to creating spaces for students of color, holding the UHP accountable, and raising our collective voices.
Student Testimonies & Timeline
To ensure that our experiences as students of color in the UHP is documented, we have created this timeline detailing various experiences within UHP spaces, such as classrooms, events, and living spaces.
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This timeline is a working project. If you would like to anonymously add your experience to be shared with the Collective and on our social platforms, fill out the form here.
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Disclaimer: Experiences shared through these testimonials are the personal reflections of students and are not to be tokenized, intellectualized, or extrapolated. Racial gaslighting in response to these testimonies will not be tolerated within the Collective or on our social platforms.