“Self defense is not just a set of techniques; it’s a state of mind, and it begins with the belief that you are worth defending.” – Rorion Gracie
After 9/11 the New York Police Department formed America’s first counterterrorism units housed within a police department. The stated mission of this department, “The NYPD Counterterrorism Bureau (CT) is the city’s primary local resource to guard against the threat of international and domestic terrorism in New York City.” To do this required the NYPD to “develop its own significant in-house counterterrorism infrastructure, operating throughout the city, throughout the United States, and even the world to share intelligence and develop techniques to combat this continually evolving threat.” Make no mistake about it, HBCUs and HBCU conferences need to do the same to deal with racial terrorism that has a very real possibility to impact our campuses.
Almost all HBCUs are located in or near populations that openly do not care for African Americans, our property, or our lives. Those populations use everything from hostile policies to local police to terrorize our institutions, our faculty, and most importantly – our students. Remember, Sandra Bland was arrested in Prairie View by a non-city of Prairie View nor Prairie View A&M University police officer, then transported to a Waller County jail where she died under at best mysterious circumstances in a county that has been openly hostile towards African Americans in every way possible. The problem unfortunately is much larger than even just traffic stops. Since the rise of Trumpism, “The number of white nationalist groups rose for the second straight year, a 55 percent increase since 2017, when Trump’s campaign energized white nationalists who saw in him an avatar of their grievances and their anxiety over the country’s demographic changes,” a 2019 Southern Poverty Law Center Report said. Make no mistake about it, those groups are in HBCU backyards and should be viewed as a real and present threat. The problem is HBCUs can not simply rely on local and state officials, who they themselves both historically and presently are often complicit and purposeful in not coming to the aide of HBCUs or the lives on our campuses – and sometimes downright aiding and abetting. We must take matters of self-defense, strategy, and intelligence gathering into our own hands.
HBCU police departments have a unique opportunity and they always have. Students arriving on HBCU campuses for the first time in their lives can see a dynamic where African Americans feel like the police are actually there to protect them not punish them. That task has become even more grave as the reemergence of outright racial hostilities takes the United States by storm. HBCU police departments must form intelligence units that gather information about groups in their geographic sphere of possibility and share that intelligence among each other. If that means deploying intelligence assets across an entire state that have even the most remote possibility to do so, then it is worth knowing about their whereabouts and capabilities. It may also mean that HBCU conferences have to become more than just athletic bodies. HBCUs can use the conference structure as a means of sharing the financial load of these intelligence units as well as make it easier to share information. White nationalist groups are often “chapters” and exists in multiple states so concerted efforts among our police departments is paramount. This is even more true with HBCUs heightened profile after receiving hundreds of millions from philanthropists in 2020. Being beacons of light that our enemies would love nothing more than to dampen.
The presidents of HBCUs and HBCU conference commissioners must now realize they are operating more than just college campuses. They are operating small nation-states and part of the job of commander-in-chief is to see that that nation is defended against foreign forces outside of its walls that seek to do harm to not only the institutions, but the citizens they were so entrusted to protect. For once, we must act with proactivity and not reactivity. Our very lives may depend on it.
HBCU Military™ 