I, Too, Am Harvard: A Black Higher Education Narrative

On November 2nd, 2012 Sarah R. Siskind wrote an opinion editorial for Harvard’s student newspaper that initiated critical and frequently demeaning conversations on campus about the place of minorities in higher education. In this thesis, I examine a response to this editorial and the conversations that surrounded it, a response which began with 50 black students at Harvard, but expanded to include (as of November, 2014) students in at least 45 different universities in 9 different countries. I argue that this response, entitled the “I, Too” campaign, serves as an example of an empowering social justice movement. In particular, I assert that this campaign uses a (re)mix of virtual, discursive rhetoric; embodied, material rhetoric; minority histories, traditions, and values; contemporary technological resources; and activism on the ground, in order to challenge dominant and oppressive theories of ethos and structures of knowledge in the university. In using the remix, I argue that “I, Too” offers conceptions of ethos and knowledge-production that are rooted in the values and experiences of minorities, and thus that the campaign provides a way forward for both the field of Rhetoric and Composition as well as academia more broadly.