It’s 8 a.m. “the morning after.” Do you know who’s woke? Marginalized Students, Neoliberal Institutions, and White Settler Colonialism

It’s 8 a.m. on November 9, 2016—the morning after. Like so many others, I want to stay in bed and maybe never get up. Instead, I’m sitting in silence with one of my students in my windowless, wood-paneled office in a midsized public university in the rural South. We meet early because he is carrying a full load, working 50-plus hours a week and caring for a family of five. He is an African immigrant who (in his spare time) has been trying to put his education to use organizing against systemic employment discrimination of his community, Swahili-speaking African refugees and immigrants. He is one of the first students to sign up for the social justice minor I created, and I’ve had him in two associated courses. This nontraditional student is a man of few words, and those are often soft-spoken but heavily weighted. That morning he tells me his young son woke up, and his first words were, “Who won?” Hearing the news, his son asked, “Are we going back?” His dad probed as to why he would think that. His son said kids at school said that, if Trump wins, he and his family would have to “pack their bags.” Neither my student nor I knew what to do in that moment. We had no way of knowing all that was coming, but we felt the weight of it through the questions of his young son. Many of my students were students of color, immigrants, first-generation, queer, working. I felt the weight of their anticipated questions that morning as well. In the weeks that followed, I was repeatedly disappointed by, but not surprised by, the response of institutions and some colleagues.