Independent Research Project: “White Guilt and Whiteness: Ghost from a Colonial Past.”
Robin graduated from Carleton College in 2013 with a B.A. in Women’s and Gender Studies. Currently, she is a labor organizer with Education Minnesota and a Ph.D. student in Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies at the University of Minnesota. Robin writes about her experience at Carleton and on the WGSE program, as well as about her early and more recent activism, in her article “The Revolution is My Boyfriend.” One of the revelations Robin had while studying on the WGSE program was that “the struggle for liberation from racist, capitalist, and imperialist systems stretched way beyond the US. Black and Brown folks in Europe, Asia, and Africa had been screwed over by the same culprit–wealthy, greedy, white capitalists and imperialists.” After graduating from Carleton, Robin received the prestigious Watson Fellowship and traveled to Canada, Australia, South Africa and Ireland to study local anti-recidivist efforts and movements. By then, she had become passionately engaged in the prison-abolition movement in the US. Today, Robin divides her time between her Ph.D. studies and her anti-capitalist and anti-racist activism. Here are Robin’s thoughts on the prison abolition movement: “Mass incarceration cannot be reduced and/or eliminated without radically transforming the structure of our global society. Equity and democracy cannot happen under our current system of racial capitalism: a system that thrives off of concentrated power, exploitation, displacement, dispossession, and violence. The US could create millions of re-entry programs, but if we send the recently-released back to communities that don’t have fully funded schools, quality good-paying jobs, or adequate healthcare facilities, then we are simply setting those folks up to fail” (from “The Revolution is My Boyfriend”).