"We must stand firm in our opposition to any act that marginalizes individuals on our campus

and in our community. All of us have a role to play in stopping this intolerable behavior."
- SOU President Linda Schott, written in an email to all SOU Students on 11/8/2020
 This document was authored by Tamara Heuer, SOU Student, 11/29/2020

In her email condemning the recent hate crime against a BLM poster on campus, Linda made a bold call to
action. I'm here to answer it and raise awareness on several issues in the process.
SOU's Upper Administration has made it abundantly clear they are not interested in being authentic allies or
accomplices for minoritized people. Instead they engage in performative allyship. Privileged people use
performative acts because they're overt, don't require commitment, and can be used as evidence to uphold
their image as a typical socially conscious SOU employee (1). Performative activism is manipulative and
maintains systems of racial privilege by whites centering their desire to seek comfort over addressing racial
injustice (2). When performative allyship embeds itself into organizational culture, particularly at leadership
and managerial levels, it sends the signal that it is right to show affinity towards racial equality, but that it is
not important enough to do much, if anything about it (3).
On the morning of Monday, July 27th, I found the dead body of a Black community member on SOU’s Student
and Family Housing property. His name was Michael Ewell. He was an US Air Force Veteran who lived in an
apartment across town, and his grandmother just one street over from our place. She was the last person to
see him alive. Before he left, he told her he felt that someone was after him, and he was going to try to go
deal with that. His grandmother was grew worried when he didn’t return home, but she was hesitant to call
the police to report him missing because she knew he had his gun on him when he left, and she was afraid if
the police did find him alive they would see him first and foremost as a Black man with a gun, and didn’t want
to put him in danger. My partner and I along with some of the neighbors here believe we heard a gunshot
outside the previous night around 11pm or midnight but can’t say if it was related.
We met Michael’s mother and two of his brothers the Saturday after I found him, and she filled me in on all of
this. She’s a wonderful woman and we remain in close contact. She told me Michael was loved, and I didn’t
doubt it for a second. I didn’t get the opportunity to meet him when he was alive, but I’m grateful to learn
about who he was, meet his family, see pictures of him smiling. That’s how he deserves to be remembered.
Attached to this post is a photo of the little memorial we had here.
*CW: I’m going to provide a short description the scene when I found him, it’s not terribly graphic, wanted to
give a respectful warning though
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I found him positioned flat on his back in the shrubbery that used to run alongside the driveway for Student
and Family Housing directly across the street from Garfield park. His legs were both out perfectly straight, his
arms were both bent at the elbow, with his hands up near either side of his head similar to the pose made for
“hands up, don’t shoot!” but his fingers had relaxed in towards his palms. No pools of blood, not a drop or
splatter on his clothes, the curb, or on the white fence surrounding the shrubbery. His mouth was wide open,
some point after he was prone and still, a dark substance of some kind flowed out one side of his mouth and
down his cheek. It was dried by the time I found him, may have been blood or could have been a consequence
of the decomposition process.
I called SOU Campus Pubic Safety immediately upon finding Michael’s body, I called 4 times in 2 minutes,
during their regular business hours, but no one ever answered or called me back. So, I had to call Ashland
police myself and wait for them to drive over so I could show them to where I found him. Two APD officers
responded, one on a motorcycle and one in a squad car. I showed them to Michael’s body, one did a quick
interview with me, took down my name/address/phone number, and then walked back down the block to
meet my partner who was just getting home from work. I was having a pretty hard time and was so sad for
this man. I was glad the kids who build their forts back there didn’t find him first. Other than that, I tried to tell
myself at least I was able to call for help and start the process that would eventually get his body off the
ground and into a resting place with more dignity.
Michael didn’t get dignity at all though, not from anyone in a position of authority here. What he got a was
contaminated with bee spray before being callously dragged out of the bushes and across the blacktop where
he lay uncovered for over an hour, in plain view of children and families across the street at Garfield park as
well as many student residents and a crew of student workers. Since they dragged him out into the driveway
and left him there swelling in the sun, several students were for forced to have to drive their cars directly
beside him if they wanted to leave as our lot only has that one point of access. Eventually another student
resident (and member of SOU student government) brought down a bedsheet from her apartment and
covered him up while she berated the police for their disgusting mistreatment and disregard for Michael’s
body.
From the second they found out a dead Black man was found on their property, all SOU wanted to do was
make him disappear. It didn’t matter who he was or what happened to him, from their perspective, it was as if
Michael was a problem that happened to them by having the nerve to turn up dead on their property. So, they
just made up a new story that he killed himself at an off-campus location over on the bike path because that
made them feel more comfortable. They erased me from the story altogether so that Campus Public Safety
was on the scene with APD in order to create the illusion of having a functional and responsive security team.
“Since their arrival in America, black people have been forced to abandon their truths in order to reduce the
discomfort white people felt in addressing them. If we don’t talk about it, then it doesn’t exist, right? If we
don’t see it, then there’s nothing to observe. If we don’t acknowledge it, it will just go away. So, with their
hands squarely over their ears and eyes, white people have been complicit in invalidating, gaslighting, and
perpetuating the structures that serve to keep the marginalized quiet.”- Dr. Barbara Ford Shabazz
And then, because performative allyship propagates lying as solidarity- SOU Leadership, Student and Family
Housing Management, The Executive Director of the Health and Wellness Center, Campus Security all adopted
the new story as the truth. Student and Family Housing even sent an email addressed to me by name,
breaking the news about what happened with their alternate version of location and events. They don’t care
that these lies are clearly false and disproven by any of the many witnesses. They don’t care that Michael’s
mother had the Quincy St. apartments address already memorized when I first met her because it’s the
address listed on the paperwork she was given about where her son’s body was found.
Meanwhile, the student body, staff members, faculty, those folks were just plain never told about Michael all.
We ran into someone recently who knew him, and he assumed he had just left town because he didn’t see
him around anymore. Good job, SOU. A few of the neighbors and I made sure to have flowers out on the
corner of the fence near where I found him since the first day. Then on Saturday his mother and brothers
arrived all the way from Key West to lay flowers for him, and they arrived to find our flowers already there.
My partner and I were just lucky enough to meet them because they showed up at the same time, while we
were taking the dog for a walk. It meant a lot his mom that there were people here holding space for her son’s
memory since he was found.
I found Michael 125 days ago. Our relationship with the school has never been the same as it was before that
day because we continued to try to hold them accountable and make them acknowledge what happened here
instead of lying. We submitted a complaint to the US Department of Education’s Clery Group for violations of
the Clery Act. The Clery Act is intended to protect students by forcing schools to be transparent about campus
crime. The complaint was accepted and is still being worked all this time later because part of the process is
also to bring an institution into compliance if it’s found to have been in non-compliance.
The US Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights is also involved now. All we have ever asked of this
institution is to tell the truth publicly about what happened here, students and the community deserve to
know, and Michael does not deserve to be erased. They didn’t even provide folks with crisis counseling
services after so many people saw his body laying out, because requesting the services would be admitting a
crisis happened. But they also chose not to send a lockdown email asking people to stay their homes while
there’s an active crime scene because that would also be acknowledging the incident.
My partner and I both have disabilities related to mental health which SOU is well aware of. We weren’t able
to complete our summer classes because I found Michael on week 2 of a four week class, and then spent all
week in my now supercharged PTSD brain demanding this institution provide some mental health services for
myself and others here who were badly in need of them. The most they did was finally include a few phone
numbers at the very end of the week, at the bottom of their shiny new false narrative that they still haven’t
corrected yet. The Dean of students and Associate Dean both acknowledged the truth of what happened here,
way back just 9 days after I found Michael, but they would only acknowledge the truth in private on a couple
zoom meetings, and then it was back to this dissonant world where other people in positions of authority at
SOU maintain their preferred version. I gotta give it to SOU, they sure had us thinking this was going to be a
good educational experience but instead it’s just bunch of people who get paid way too much money to
gaslight us until we’re brain sick and lying about a dead person I found so that they don’t have to feel
uncomfortable by telling the truth.
It’s a real shame there are so many leadership positions at SOU being occupied by people who refuse to
engage with calls for accountability and when they do engage, you can’t be sure they’re telling the truth
because you know don’t have your best interests in mind. 125 days and the President of Southern Oregon
University says not one single word about the dead Black veteran found on her campus, but she makes a call
to action following a hate crime against a poster. This is exactly the problem with performative allyship.
Michael Ewell was a real Black life that mattered but there’s not been a single person in upper administration
at SOU who genuinely cares about that enough to even say his name just once.
1. https://www.columbiaspectator.com/opinion/2017/10/17/hey-hey-ho-ho-white-performative-allyship-has-
got-to-go/
2. https://zora.medium.com/performative-activism-is-the-new-color-blind-band-aid-for-white-fragility-
358e2820a4e1
3. https://www.forbes.com/sites/carmenmorris/2020/11/26/performative-allyship-what-are-the-signs-and-
why-leaders-get-exposed/?sh=610f7a7b22ec