LTE: Former executive director calls on United Campus Ministry

Melissa Wales, former executive director of the United Campus Ministry from 2004-2017, sent this Letter to the Editor in response to the termination of former Director Lacey Rogers in 2021. It has been lightly edited for grammar and style.

Please note that these views and opinions do not reflect those of The New Political.

How many letters to the editor and community members coming forward will it take for it to sink in with United Campus Ministry (UCM) leadership? UCM continues to fail all of us who want our long-standing social justice organization to live up to its mission and do right by Lacey Rogers.

I question what is happening at UCM these days regarding its promises to address the injustice with Lacey, its mission work and its programming in general. What I see seems performative and is absolutely insulting to Lacey, a tried and true social justice activist and anti-racism consultant in our community. I don't know what they're doing beyond the community meals; I don't get their emails and nothing is happening on social media that I can see. 

You can believe me or not, I am someone who has known and worked with Lacey and for UCM for many years. We have both been leaders in this community, including at UCM, for a long time. Sadly our voices don't seem to be having much of an impact in calling for accountability and justice with an organization we both gave YEARS of our time, labor and energy too. It's heartbreaking, much more so for Lacey than for me. 

But I, too, am heartbroken. 

A thing to consider, fellow white Athenians: ultimately, this isn't about how white people personally feel about the people who were and are currently involved at UCM, but about a system of white supremacy that keeps white supremacist systems and institutions intact and white people COMFORTABLE. 

We white people get bound up in our personal feelings and relationships with other white people and that gets in the way of true and hard progress for racial justice. If I've learned anything through all of this, it is this: if it's comfortable, you're not doing the work. 

I recently participated in a white ally accountability cohort. The takeaway was, "Believe BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, people of color) people when they say that racism is occurring in your institution." 

This is true in this situation. And UCM continues to deny and deflect. 

I didn't serve and work for UCM for 18 years to see it end this way. I didn't encourage Lacey to come into a staff position at UCM, expecting the organization to fail her so spectacularly. It's devastating to Lacey. It's devastating to me. And ultimately to our community and its mission.

UCM failed Lacey and missed a great opportunity to support Black leadership in our community, which is truly tragic. Black leadership matters. At the very least, Lacey Rogers deserves a public apology from UCM. 

I'll continue to support her and other BIPOC leaders locally. Will you? 

White Athens, I get it. This is uncomfortable. But it's in that DISCOMFORT where change happens, friends. I encourage you to lean into that discomfort and see where it takes you and all of us. 

I write all this with love. And as Dr. Cornel West wisely said, "Justice is what love looks like in public."