SUNY series, Critical Race Studies in Education

Power, Diversity, and the Emancipatory Struggle in Higher Education

Bianca C. Williams, Dian D. Squire, Frank A. Tuitt, Bianca C. Williams, Dian D. Squire, Frank A. Tuitt

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781438482699
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Higher Education

Plantation Politics and Campus Rebellions provides a multidisciplinary exploration of the contemporary university's entanglement with the history of slavery and settler colonialism in the United States. Inspired by more than a hundred student-led protests during the Movement for Black Lives, contributors examine how campus rebellions—and university responses to them—expose the racialized inequities at the core of higher education. Plantation politics are embedded in the everyday workings of universities—in not only the physical structures and spaces of academic institutions, but in its recruitment and attainment strategies, hiring practices, curriculum, and notions of sociality, safety, and community. The book is comprised of three sections that highlight how white supremacy shapes campus communities and classrooms; how current diversity and inclusion initiatives perpetuate inequality; and how students, staff, and faculty practice resistance in the face of institutional and legislative repression. Each chapter interrogates a connection between the academy and the plantation, exploring how Black people and their labor are viewed as simultaneously essential and disruptive to university cultures and economies. The volume is an indispensable read for students, faculty, student affairs professionals, and administrators invested in learning more about how power operates within education and imagining emancipatory futures.

Part 1

Capitalism and Colonial Vestiges of White Supremacy in Higher Education

Chapter 1

Framing Plantation Politics

Allochronism’s Pull on Contemporary Formations of Higher Education

DIAN D. SQUIRE

In the newest edition of Critical Race Theory in Education, Garret Albert Duncan (2017) wrote, “Contemporary forms of racial oppression and inequality are expressions of allochronic discourses that inform ‘ontological Blackness,’ or the Blackness that whiteness created as Western civilization began to emerge as a prominent force in the world” (p. 67). Allochronism rejects the contemporaneous existence of object and subject, and therefore places the object in another time. That is to say that Black people are seen, understood, and treated by others as existing in a space that is not contemporary but rather situated in material and nonmaterial realities of time and place as originally defined by their captors centuries ago. In essence, Black people are seen as savage, and nonhuman, and having a “debilitated mental capacity” (John, 1999, p. 45). As a result, the policies, programs, and realities of today’s white supremacist society act and reproduce in accordance to the racist epistemologies of another.

Duncan brings this anthropological concept into the educational fold to provide us an apt language to explore the phenomenon more clearly. The goal of revealing and critiquing allochronism is to bring into better alignment time and place, or coevalness. The project of a plantation politic is to define the ways in which the organization of a plantation society instructs higher education as a system to maintain and perpetuate white supremacy and anti-Black racism as well as other forms of racial formation projects that subjugate people of color.

As Bianca Williams, Frank Tuitt, and I (2018) wrote previously:

The vestiges of those colonial, imperialist mindsets still exist in the many “neos,” that scholars and experts speak of today, namely, neoliberalism, neoconservativism, neocolonialism, and neofascism. Each has transformed across time (indubitably appropriating the preface neo-) and continue to influence policy, behavior, and culture within the United States. … Furthermore, they are connected to the many ways in which universities reach beyond borders and engage in economic globalization. Recently, The Movement for Black Lives and the Indigenous communities that organized at Standing Rock repeatedly made visible the legislative and economic linkages between the not-so-long-ago past and the colonial and imperialist present. We follow the lead of these organizers, arguing that the institutional logics of colonialism and imperialism—which were essential to the establishment of this country, and led to the creation of plantations and the enslavement of Black bodies—exists within our higher education institutions today. (n.p.)

A project such as this allows one to begin to paint parallels between time and place and illuminate the ways that allochronism works to make normal the dehumanization of Black people in modern times. Craig Steven Wilder (2013) provided us with an extensive history of the ways that higher education was quite literally built on the backs of Native peoples and enslaved Black people starting in the 1600s (this book should be required reading for all students of the field). Wilder (2013) wrote that “colleges were imperial instruments akin to armories and forts, a part of the colonial garrison with the specific responsibilities to train ministers and missionaries, convert indigenous peoples and soften cultural resistance, and extend European rule over foreign nations” (p. 33). This project is not an extension of Wilder’s but rather an epistemological exploration of the ways that anti-Black racism of the 1600s and beyond continues to poison the waters of today’s colleges and universities.

Katherine McKittrick (2013) called the plantation the “ongoing locus of anti-Black violence and death that can no longer analytically sustain [dehumanizing violence]” (p. 2) and posited that a “spatial continuity between the living and the dead, between science and storytelling, and between past and present” (p. 2) exists and must be “unearthed” in an effort to restore Black people’s respect, dignity, and humanhood. In her formation of a “Plantation Future,” McKittrick (2013) argued that the linkage between Blackness, violence, and resistance to dehumanization has always been present and continues to exist today in racialized geographies. In her analysis of these “racial geographies” (p. 3), the “socioeconomic logic of plantocracies” (p. 3) transcends the time of the enslaved Blacks’ emancipation and creates racist anti-Black logics that infuse contemporary society ideologically and materially. Additionally, it creates what is understood to be normal; this normality is not linked to Blackness. With normal comes its antithesis, abnormal, deviation, and aberration. Through this lens, one may explore the role of historically Black colleges and universities and how their racial geographies link to a plantation politic, as Steve Mobley Jr. et al. do in chapter 3.

The project of white supremacy in this country, and globally, was born out of colonial competition between European nation-states. This project aimed to extend religious rule, build economy, and redefine politics based in Machiavellianism that defined “state” as a “sovereign body politic ruled by a government exerting definite power over its people” (Dessens, 2003, p. 9). This project is multimodel and mobile, thereby integrating itself in a variety of institutions, including universities.

The globalized capitalism that created colonial structures around the world has transformed itself into what may now be encapsulated by the term “neoliberalism.” And much like the capitalism of early times, neoliberalism is inextricably linked to racist ideologies that work to exploit Black bodies in the name of economic production and excellence, including on the college campus (see Hamer & Lang, 2015; Osei-Kofi et al., 2013; Squire et al., 2018). In their exploration of structural violence, Jennifer Hamer and Clarence Lang (2015) identify the “conditions and arrangements embedded in the political and economic organization of social life that cause injury to individuals and populations or put them in harm’s way” (p. 899). Neoliberalism as a set of ideologies, practices, and policies that leverage a free market, privatization, co-optation of diversity, profit-driven culture, an erosion of public goods, and an increase of contingent labor degrades the potential for the liberatory possibilities of education and creates a dependency culture, or involuntariness of membership, by restricting the option of leaving the system and imposing consequences on those who try (Wilson Okello discusses as much in chapter 4; Giroux, 2002, 2015a; Hamer & Lang, 2015).

Unlike slave plantations, which created conditions that restricted movement outside of the boundaries of property, modern universities create the circumstance that socially stratify, ostracize, and minoritize those who leave its system. The long-running narrative of education as the great equalizer and a necessity for upward mobility implores anybody wishing for “ ‘success’ ” to engage the university and makes one a slave to “anyone who would feed them” (Morgan, 1972, p. 11). “Them” in this case being the university as a place that defines itself as the only place that can provide higher learning, thereby creating a dependence on the University (capital U, a system). Those who leave the system are made to believe that they cannot succeed (and they might not); but the narrative prescribes only one pathway of purpose and success, and makes one believe that one is not enough without it. The university is a technology of domination in this case, a domination that is then internalized (Foucault, 1977), normalized, and defined and redefined as an economic driver of this country. As Cheryl Matias (2015) wrote about faculty of color in a “neoplantation” state, “Under the surveilling eyes of the college’s administration, like trained dogs we are expected to bark a false truth about the romance of being faculty of color in the academy” (p. 60). The false truth is rooted in the involuntariness of membership.

This dependency must be maintained in order to reproduce and grow the academic enterprise, including the academic-capitalist knowledge-regime (Cantwell & Kauppinen, 2014; Slaughter & Rhoades, 2004), the military-industrial-academic complex (Giroux, 2015b), and, most glaringly related to Black bodies, the athletic-industrial complex (as an example of modern day slavery; Hawkins, 2013), and must be maintained by larger social systems that strip people of their opportunities for upward social mobility economically and social stratification racially. Beverly John (1999), in her analysis of slave plantations, noted that white people created a hegemonic understanding of “the power of the slaveholding planter class to construct reality in a fashion that justified their every action” (p. 45). In this example, the slaveholding planter class is the university, and its actors and their construction is the narrative linking prosperity to university. This is to say that the parallels that are drawn within this book do not explicitly derive themselves from the physical manifestations of plantations but rather from the paradigmatic threads that run across time and space. It is the sinews of that anti-Black racism that continue to structure the web of neglect, exploit, hate, death, pain, and fear for people of color widely and Black people specifically.

At this point, I must acknowledge that this book will not spend significant time discussing plantations in the Caribbean or South America (outside of Saran Stewart’s chapter); however, it is important to recognize that the trade of Black people is the beginning of modern capitalism and the global economic market (see Dessens, 2003; Mintz, 1969; Morgan, 1972; Trouillot, 2016). We recognize that economics, politics, social norms, imaginings, and even emotions (e.g., longing, trauma, fear, sadness) are diasporic and transnational and cross and transcend (ever-changing) imagined national boundaries. Enslaved Africans were aware of this in ways that the white people who captured them were not, as Africans were forced to imagine, yearn, fantasize, and create culture across national boundaries, from Africa to the Americas, and throughout the Middle Passage. The structures, traditions, and cultures that were created and institutionalized on US plantations were influenced by the cultures, traditions, and structures that took place on plantations in the Caribbean and South America. These plantation locales were not completely separate. While they were distinct, they were also interconnected. Culture and power are not bounded entities, and all involved became ever more aware of this. These realities are true today in our globalized world and on our internationalized campuses.

For example, policies and legislation that influenced how US plantations operated were influenced by the fear white people had about the possibility of the Haitian Revolution happening in the United States. Enslaved Africans freeing themselves in Haiti led to changes in strategy and policies in the United States (such as miscegenation laws, and laws around literacy/education), particularly in the South, where white plantation enslavers were afraid of insurrection and rebellion, a major theme and site of analysis of this book. And enslaved Africans on these Southern plantations heard the rumors of this Haitian Revolution and reimagined their own plantation lives with the knowledge of this case study in rebellion. This might parallel the ways that contemporary campus rebellions in South Africa, Puerto Rico, Colombia, Brazil, Argentina, and the United States are connected, particularly as the neighborhoods surrounding these campuses engage in Black Lives Matters protests against police violence and state-sanctioned violence (Maira & Sze, 2012). In discussing transnational coordinated responses to rebellion, these rebellions are reactions to “contemporary globalization of policing as a technology of repression that is part of the transnationalization of the security state apparatus in which models of securitization are shared and developed collaboratively among repressive nation-states” (p. 324). While the language and culture of protests and resistance on college campuses in the United States may be distinct (particularly with respect to a US brand of racial politics), the ideologies, strategies, and imaginings of rebellion and resistance are interconnected. The neoliberalism that runs rampant in US institutions is also at the heart of many of the plantation politics that are at play in these other countries, even if they are different forms of plantation politics (Squire et al., 2018). The globalization of higher education and the labor exploitation of people of color for capitalistic gain is undoubtedly a legacy of a plantation politic (Maira & Sze, 2012; Lee & Rice, 2007; Squire, 2019).

Additionally, we must acknowledge the fact that people of color (as an entire community) are being exploited by institutions, and that plantation politics puts a particular emphasis on anti-Black racism. Despite the ways that people of color individually and collectively are subjugated, there is an underlying foundation to these forms of racism that are built upon anti-Black racism. For example, OiYan Poon et al. (2015) explored the ways that the model minority myth is a tool of anti-Black racism utilized as a racial wedge to uphold white supremacy and maintain Black oppression. In my work with multiracial students and their desires for acceptance by both white and racially minoritized group, colorism and phenotypic superiority are all based in the need to be seen as both white enough and Black enough, for example, a harkening to ongoing racial formation project based in white supremacy and the subordination of Black people (Omi & Winant, 2014). So, while all people of color are exploited and oppressed, they are experiencing these oppressions differently in relation to anti-Black racism, which is essential to an understanding of plantation politics. This is not to say that an oppression Olympics must ensue; rather, there is a contested racial hierarchy, and the analysis of the ways racialized oppression operates in higher education requires a focus on the Black experience in relation to the plantation system. The buying and selling of Black bodies, the extraction of their labor, the constant threat of Black death, and the fear of Black resistance are central to plantation politics, which is different (and yet not more important), for example, than the colonization, displacement, and genocide of Native Indigenous peoples who helped build some of the first universities some of whom were slave-holding themselves, complicating a racialized and classed society (Durant & Moliere, 1999).

In the next section, I spend some space exploring the characteristics of plantations as systems and begin to connect the lines between historic plantations and modern universities in order to support the reader in their conceptualizations of contemporary institutions under this framework. This is not meant to be a deep, or even complete, dive into the framework, but rather a jumping off point for the rest of the authors to construct their analyses. Elinor Miller and Eugene D. Genovese (1974) urge us to recognize the technologies of domination of the past in order to deconstruct the technologies of the present and to test our understandings of plantation life. An explication of the system allows for an apt foundation to engage those understandings.

Plantation as System

As hinted earlier, plantations existed differently depending on size and demography of plantation, slave population, topography, culture (e.g., management style), geography, crop, local culture, and colonial rule (Dessens, 2003; Durant, 19...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction “Carving Out a Humanity”: Campus Rebellions and the Legacy of Plantation Politics on College Campuses
• Part 1. Capitalism and Colonial Vestiges of White Supremacy in Higher Education
• Part 2. Institutional Rhetoric and the False Promises of “Diversity” and “Inclusion”
• Part 3. Resistance and Repression: Campus Politics and Legislative Acts of Anti-Blackness
• Afterword Against Higher Education: Instruments of Insurrection
• About the Editors
• Contributors
• Index
• Back Cover