Oral History Interview with Jabrina Robinson

Title: Oral History Interview with Jabrina Robinson
Interviewee: Jabrina Robinson
Interviewer: Walker Robinson
Description: Jabrina Robinson of Chapel Hill, North Carolina was interviewed by Walker Robinson, a Sewanee student, on November 29th, 2023 on Zoom. While their conversation was primarily on the Black Lives Matter Movement, other topics included experiences with various immigrant communities. We hope that this conversation will assist scholars with a further understanding of race in the United States during the early twenty-first century. Please click on the link to see the full interview.
Transcript: 0:00 Walker Robinson: Okay, so this is Walker Robinson from Suwanee, the University of the South. It is November 29th, 2023. Wednesday, 12:06 PM Central Time, and I'm with

0:21 Jabrina Robinso...: Jabrina Robinson here in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

0:25 Walker Robinson: Thank you. Thank you Jabrina Robinson for being here. Let's get into some general questions first. So where are you originally from?

0:34 Jabrina Robinso...: So I have lived all over the us so the states that I claim as where I'm from are California and Tennessee because I spent most of my childhood in California and I finished high school in Tennessee.

0:46 Walker Robinson: Okay. Is where you currently live different from where you were raised?

0:52 Jabrina Robinso...: So I used to say that North Carolina was much less culturally diverse than California, but actually the diversity has definitely increased. One thing I do enjoy here is the percentage of African-Americans in community here. So I would say that that's different climate's, different, the pace of life is different in a good way. Cost of living is different. Those are some of the things.

1:24 Walker Robinson: Yeah. And where did you find community as a child?

1:29 Jabrina Robinso...: As a child, I always found community kind of wherever I lived. So because I moved around a lot, I was pretty adaptable at kind of just going outside my house and being friends with whoever was within walking distance. So I always had friends from everywhere based upon just putting myself out there and meeting people who lived around.

1:50 Walker Robinson: Mostly just people from your neighborhood and stuff like that or

1:53 Jabrina Robinso...: From school.

1:55 Walker Robinson: Nice. And where do you find community today?

1:58 Jabrina Robinso...: So today I'd say there are a couple places that I find community. I find community based upon extended friendships that I've made through work, through neighbors actually who've become more like friends to community through friends of friends and cultural organizations. I'm part of a sorority. I volunteer with different nonprofit organizations and I feel community with them and also because of my kids I'm in community with the school communities that they're within.

2:40 Walker Robinson: And what kind of communities are those

2:44 Jabrina Robinso...: For my kids? So that would be, typically it's going to be athletic team communities, so the parents that I've built friendship with and relationships with alongside the sidelines, but also I volunteer at my son's high school or formerly my other son's high school as well. And so building connections as well through the people I've met through those organizations.

3:15 Walker Robinson: Okay. And what is your occupation? What was your journey to this role?

3:22 Jabrina Robinso...: Great. So my title is Assistant Dean of International Studies at Duke Law School. I guess you would call me in higher education professional. I'm not a professor, but I'm on the administration side. So I deal with recruiting, admitting, and then supporting our students once they arrive, basically from orientation to graduation and everything, but actually being in the classroom. So I help them with career services, academic advising, navigating being in a different part of a country, understanding, not different part of country, different country in itself. I came to this career path. I have had several career kind of shifts. I always say that my careers have been anchored in wanting to help others. So I'm a lawyer by training and I worked in affordable housing development here in North Carolina and I also grew up as kind of a higher education baby. My father was a college administrator and my mother was a professor, and so higher education was kind of always in my blood, let's say. So I found a way to partner kind of my love for supporting people during their academic journeys in higher ed with my training as a lawyer, and that's kind of how I ended up in this role. And also the international component was something that's just really personally important to me, like the importance of being a global citizen and having to experience and connect with people from all over the world.

5:23 Walker Robinson: Speaking of being a global citizen, how have you experienced international cultures in your life?

5:28 Jabrina Robinso...: So I've experienced international cultures. I would say even from a young age. Growing up in California, a lot of my friends parents were first generation parents, so I would go over to their houses and learn how to make dumplings from a Taiwanese family or something else from a Korean family or something different from a Puerto Rican family. So in that just engaging and understanding, there's so much that we all bring to the table with our different backgrounds. And then fast forward, living abroad for two years in Dubai was really kind of a pivotal experience for me. I had never lived abroad for an extended period of time, and Dubai is very global. About 80% of the population is expats, so people from all over the world and building those connections and then really just traveling and traveling globally is something that is one of the things that I love to do, and I also think it's important for me to have perspective and understand how I fit into this larger world.

6:42 Walker Robinson: And what type of traveling have you done?

6:45 Jabrina Robinso...: So I don't know how many countries exactly I've traveled to. I want to say maybe 30 or 40, and I have been to every continent, but Antarctica that's still on my list, but I hope to go there within the next two years. So I've been to parts of South America, north America, Africa, Europe, and Asia. So it's been great.

7:12 Walker Robinson: Who or what inspires you and why?

7:16 Jabrina Robinso...: Who inspires me and why? There's two paths to that question. So I'm really inspired by people that are living their calling. So it can range from an athlete who is talented, but also working really hard and dedicated in a skillset to an artist either who I know or don't know, and hearing them kind be amazing and excel in their range in kind of a music either singing or playing an instrument or I really love contemporary art, so seeing an artist produce different work that makes you stop and think. I also love poetry, so I'm really inspired by people that are just finding excellence in whatever their calling is and it can be a mechanic. I just think that it's amazing that there's so many different ways that we can all be amazing and excellent. It makes me want to be amazing and excellent in the little corner of the world that I live in. Then I'm also inspired by my kids because I think that they're both so unique and they have so much to offer and it makes me want to be better to nurture and also get out of the way for them to do great things.

8:53 Walker Robinson: Yeah. Let's get into some of the Black Lives Matter questions. So do you remember when you first saw the video of George Floyd?

9:06 Jabrina Robinso...: Yes.

9:08 Walker Robinson: How did you come across that? How was the media for you to see that video? Did it get sent to you or?

9:21 Jabrina Robinso...: I think that I was either alerted through Facebook, probably at that time, Facebook or it might've been a text from somebody about what happened. There was a quick talking and then I don't think I saw it on Facebook. I think I then searched for it to see what happened. So that's kind of how I found out about it. Word of mouth, I can't remember if it was via text or via social media.

9:52 Walker Robinson: Do you remember your initial reaction when you first saw it?

9:57 Jabrina Robinso...: Yeah, it hurt. I remember feeling like the air was kind of taken out from underneath me, and it was this immediate fear, anger, pain and disappointment. It just reminds me of when you see people, I remember seeing images of people hanging African-Americans from trees, and it just felt like it is just a different new age cycle of it.

10:43 Walker Robinson: Yeah, absolutely. What has been your experience with social media?

10:51 Jabrina Robinso...: What do you mean?

10:55 Walker Robinson: How have you experienced it? How has it affected you or basically what do you think about social media?

11:05 Jabrina Robinso...: Okay. I think social media is dangerous. I remember when it first started, but I remember Facebook and it was fun and it was updates from people from everywhere in all these backgrounds. I remember having 500 friends or whatever it was, and you could hear what they were all doing. And then it changed to becoming this directed version where you just saw the same 25 or 30 people and it just wouldn't no longer felt like this open platform to connect with people. It felt like a curated and controlled and directed platform. Same with Instagram. And so one, I find it much less enjoyable, but it also limit how much I use it now because I think that it's dangerous and it's not as helpful anymore. Now I only let myself look at it on Saturdays and Sundays, and then I delete the apps. It's also a complete time waste, and I hate the targeting of advertising through it.

12:32 Walker Robinson: Absolutely. Yeah. And what was your first encounter with the Black Lives Matter movement?

12:44 Jabrina Robinso...: I think that after George Floyd, I was working on a college campus and the students really wanted to do something in response. Our African-American, but not just African-American, our students wanted to do something in response, and there was this tie in information in the research as we were trying to help guide them with how they could do that, what outlet and what type of protests they wanted to do that. Some of the work of the Black Lives Matter movement came to light for me, I feel like at that time.

13:26 Walker Robinson: And what would you say your community's reaction to the Black Lives Matter movement? This can include the area you live in as well as your communities and the people that you keep around yourself.

13:40 Jabrina Robinso...: I think that it's shifted, right? I think that initially it was this great catalyst, well, I think initially there was skepticism. Then it was like, oh, this is this solid movement and momentum. And then at some point it got hijacked by corporations, in my opinion, to be a placating tool that allowed for the visual appearance of change without actually ing change or true commitment.

14:25 Walker Robinson: Like the signs and people's yards and

14:27 Jabrina Robinso...: The signs and the sentiment behind the, I actually didn't mind the sentiment behind the signs and people just was great. And the idea that corporations were like, oh, we're going to hire DEI professionals, especially as someone that's kind of seen or worked in that space. And I was just always so skeptical because as they now, once the wind shifted, they fired all those people, which part of me at the time was like, what? Get as much as you can out of this movement because it's not going to last. People don't really care. And that's exactly what happened. I don't know that we got as much done during the time of the whim of people being behind the sales because I think some people were hopeful and we're trying to do transformative change and transformative change takes time. So yeah,

15:25 Walker Robinson: Going along with that, with saying we didn't do nothing the time, what were the successes of the movement, do you think? And what do you think the failures were?

15:36 Jabrina Robinso...: I think the successes were that a lot of these issues had been going on, but the credibility to giving voice to what was happening was not there. So I think that when people brought up, oh my God, this happened to someone, people would so quickly respond with, well, they must have done something for this to happen. That person was definitely to blame. And I do think that the success now is that it became very clear that there was a pattern of problematic behavior and that people couldn't dismiss it as, oh, it's just an individual actor causing it or triggering it.
16:24 So I think that is a success. I think that there's been a lot of reform, criminal reform. I think that both within the police system but also within, there's a reevaluation of what crimes were being prosecuted, what kind of evidence was being used. I do think that from a criminal side, there has been some transformative work that I think over the longterm, we'll hopefully see changes even from just not prosecuting marijuana use in the same way. There are a lot of different things that I think came out of that. I also think what was good that came out, it is people being able to identify issue disparities in a way that were silenced before. Just even the fact that black maternal health issues are so much higher, so many other issues that are problematic. There's more credibility I think now when those are brought up.

17:35 Walker Robinson: Yeah, that's very good. What generation do you think was most impacted by the Black Lives Matter movement?

17:50 Jabrina Robinso...: I would say that the tweens to teens, to young adults were most impacted from the Black Lives Matter movement in the sense that they grew up in an otherwise quieter period of racism. So my parents' generation grew up in the civil rights movement, so they grew up actually going to different water fountains actually being hosed, actually being spit on. They experienced that directly. My generation was on the cusp. We experienced that less, but we had the ingrained stories of our parents, like our grandparents who couldn't go. They weren't allowed to go to schools that were not segregated and things like that. Our generation was going to integrated schools. We were the first kind of generation of that. And so our experience was kind of, I want to say on the cusp, so that the issues were always really prevalent for us. I think that the generation after us, I'm not sure that the issues were as prevalent, and so this just brought it to be prevalent in their cycle of life. So that's why I think it might've impacted them more.

19:25 Walker Robinson: That's very interesting. How has the Black Lives Matter movement impacted your life specifically?

19:39 Jabrina Robinso...: I think that, I remember my parents always kind of commenting that when I talked about how different things were, they kind of wrote it off as I was naive and I didn't really understand what was happening. And I think I was so hopeful in progress. But now the Black Lives Matter movement really just made me, I don't know if it's age or the movement, but I would definitely say it was age and the movement was a catalyst made me now feel like I'm where they were and that I don't think things are better. I think they're just hidden differently and it's a huge disappointment. So that's probably really because I actually thought that we were making the world a better place for the next generation. And I think about my kids and I am not confident of that anymore. And the Black Lives Matter movement solidified that for me to make me really understand. No, we haven't. And the level of resistance is so deep that I underestimated the level of resistance for equality and equity.

21:19 Walker Robinson: Where do you think that comes from?

21:22 Jabrina Robinso...: What the resistance? No, I don't know, because I thought that it was a lack of education and a lack of exposure. So if you haven't been exposed to black people or Latino people, then maybe you think whatever, but your generation has had more opportunity to be exposed. I think that our society places such an emphasis on individual success, and that individual success has to come at the expense of others' success. It's seen as kind of for you to do well, you have to do better than others or more than others. And that drive allows people to hold on to distinctions whether they're valid or not, to try to achieve that.

22:51 Walker Robinson: And how do you think that impacts, what would you describe the current state of race relations in the United States?

23:20 Jabrina Robinso...: I would say the state of race relations is one, and this is kind of the negative output of the black white movement, is that because it showed light, then people also just got tired of it. And I think it's that people don't want to talk about it, they don't want to hear about it, they don't want to hear about inequities. They want to move on and believe that racism and the impact of racism is over, and that's just not true.

23:57 Walker Robinson: And going along with that, how was the Black Lives Matter movement changed how you one interact with people of other races and two, talk with your family and friends?

24:08:00 Jabrina Robinso...: That's a great question. I'll say that with regard to people of other races, it made me, at the same time, I am less trusting of people of races generally, but I am able to be more vocal about issues of racism with people of other races so that I, in my opinion, can suss out who's on my team, as you would say, and am closer to those who are on my team, if that makes, so it's like this dual, the larger group, I'm less trustworthy, I believe I trust less, but the group that I pull together of other races is probably larger because I talk and suss out to know who's on that team.

25:29:00 Walker Robinson: Okay. Okay. That's nice. And what do you think is the future? What do you think the future holds for the Black Lives Matter movement?

25:48:00 Jabrina Robinso...: I think it'll be dormant and will reemerge and may be rebranded in a different way. Right? It is a civil rights movement, just really the Black Lives Matter movement of the sixties, will it just have a different name? You know. But I do feel like it's going in a cycle of dormancy because we're going to go in a cycle of losses. I think that historically, with regards to equity and equality, we are going to go through a period of loss and regression, and then at some point we'll cycle through again. I think a movement will trigger, and then hopefully we'll go from there. Yeah.

26:44:00 Walker Robinson: Well, thank you so much for your time. We'll have to conclude there. Thank you so much.

26:51:00 Jabrina Robinso...: Thanks. It was fun talking to you.

26:52:00 Walker Robinson: It was good talking to you as well.

Part of Jabrina Robinson