The Association of Black Faculty, Administrators & Staff (ABFAS) will hold its next monthly community lunch on Wednesday, December 2nd from 12:00 PM to 1:15 PM in the African American Studies Resource Center: The Paul Robeson Room, George W. Johnson Center, Room 240A (phone: 703 993-4085) on the Fairfax Campus. Feel free to bring your lunch and participate! Also, don't forget to mark your calendars and join us for the ABFAS Meet-n-Greet on Friday, December 4th from 6:00 PM to 8:00 PM at Brion's Grille in the University Mall, 10621 Braddock Road, Fairfax VA (phone: 703 352-7272). For more information about the Association of Black Faculty, Administrators & Staff at George Mason University, visit our website today at http://www.abfas.gmu.edu/ or email us at abfas@gmu.edu. Thanks to all current members for your continued support of ABFAS!

Dear Mason Colleagues: 

As the president for the Association of Black Faculty, Administrators, and Staff (ABFAS) at George Mason University, I would like to welcome you to the corresponding website.

The purpose of this organization is to sustain a university environment as a neutral place for pedagogy and research, free of clandestine apparatuses of structural racism employees, but also students, may be affronted with. To do this work requires building a “healthy,” functioning community on all levels that exist at GMU where the exchange of ideas isn’t blocked by impenetrable layers of hierarchy. Indeed, ABFAS does not exist to form barriers between departments, offices, employees, and students, but on the contrary, to form alliances around Mason’s campuses, to safeguard equitable hiring and recruiting practices of potential professionals, and of course, to empower students through their educational experiences. For there is truth in the words of the “Father of Negro History,” Dr. Carter G. Woodson (d. 1950), who writes in his seminal 1933 work, The Mis-Education of the Negro: “Real education means to inspire people to live more abundantly, to learn to begin with life as they find it and make it better.”[1] Echoing the thoughtful words of Woodson, cultural critic, bell hooks, writes in her book, Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope: “Educating is always a vocation rooted in hopefulness.”[2] I emphasize ‘education,’ because it is the commonality we share at the university regardless of our backgrounds, ethnicities, genders, or any other category that individuate us.

Finally, ABFAS, our organization, i.e. mine and yours, exists to ensure that the Black professionals at this fine institution of higher education are able to work in an environment where pedagogy is the highest priority not their race. So, as you take a look at this website, and hopefully, make your way to our monthly meetings, my hope is that you will discover an organization that is at the service of the Black staff, administrators, faculty, and students of this university. And if you find me genteelly rolling up my sleeves, and taking a deep breath, I kindly encourage you to do the same to make our organization, and this university, better.

In community,

Mika’il A. Petin

Mika’il A. Petin

Associate Director, African American Studies and African American Research & Resource Center (Paul Robeson Room)

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LAST UPDATE:  11/12/09