Dr. Rema Vassar is a Michigan State University trustee and a professor of educational leadership at Wayne State University, and on October 23, 2026 she published a column about a public disagreement she is having with another Black woman. She wrote it to say what she will not do with it.
“I feel an allegiance to us that will not allow me to tear us down, even in defense of myself,” Vassar wrote.
She did not name the other woman. She did not relitigate the disagreement.
“I will be honest, because honesty is the only foundation sisterhood can stand on,” she wrote. “I’ve experienced a public disagreement with another Black woman. It is the only one of its kind in my life, and I do not want it.”
She allowed herself one line of want, and.
“Sure, I want to be understood,” she wrote. “However, I do not want to hurt Black women. We’re connected, like it or not, and when I hurt any one of us, I hurt myself.”
She set it against what she called a month of magnificence: twenty years of Black Girls Rock, and three Black women earning doctoral degrees in two weeks. “I watched each of them become,” she wrote. “Together.” She quoted Dr. Paris McCarthy: “We need each other.”
Vassar founded the Sankofa Scholarship Collective.
“I am choosing collabs and duets with dope Black women,” she wrote. “Sisters, keep the music playing.”
