In August 2017, the nation looked on as white nationalists descended on Charlottesville, VA and the campus of the University of Virginia (UVA). Under the banner âUnite the Right,â thousands of members of Nazi/neo-Nazi groups, the Ku Klux Klan, and armed white militias mobilized as a show of force to oppose the removal of a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee. On August 12, a day prior to the formal rally, participants gathered in Charlottesvilleâs recently renamed Emancipation Park with picket signs, merchandise, and regalia featuring swastikas, Confederate flags, and other symbols of white supremacy. Later that night, carrying outdoor torch lights, âalt-rightâ persona Richard Spencer led dozens of white supremacists through campus chanting anti-Black, anti-immigrant, and anti-Semitic slogans. Among them, âwhite lives matterâ and âyou will not replace usâ were rallying cries that reified the desire of white supremacists to maintain their âproperty rights,â including the right to exclude (Harris, 1993).
Upon reaching a statue of Thomas Jefferson, the Universityâs founder, Spencer and others were confronted by a contingent of mostly Black UVA students. Having locked arms with other non-Black Students of Color and several white students, the collective of courageous counter-protestors faced down Spencer without so much as campus police presence to ensure their safety. Not surprisingly, the fragility of white supremacy, when met with the immoveable solidarity of anti-racist students, yielded violence. Although no serious injuries were reported, several students were sprayed with chemical irritants, shoved, and even punched before first responders eventually intervened. In the immediate wake of the demonstration, University President Teresa Sullivan released a 4-sentence response:
As President of the University of Virginia, I am deeply saddened and disturbed by the hateful behavior displayed by torch-bearing protestors that marched on our Grounds this evening. I strongly condemn the unprovoked assault on members of our community, including University personnel who were attempting to maintain order.Law enforcement continues to investigate the incident, and it is my hope that any individuals responsible for criminal acts are held accountable. The violence displayed on the Grounds is intolerable and is entirely inconsistent with the Universityâs values.Teresa A. SullivanPresident
The next morning, Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe declared a state of emergency, citing concerns for public safety and the need for additional support to safeguard residents. The Virginia State Police even declared the assembly âunlawfulâ after observing escalating violence incited by white nationalists before the formal rally, but these responses were too little too late. Just two hours following the declarations, in an area adjacent to the park, James Alex Fieldsâa self-avowed white supremacistâdrove his car into a crowd of counter-protestors, killing Heather Heyer, and injuring 19 others.
As one of the most visible and collective manifestations of overt white supremacy in recent years, this watershed moment further revealed the extent to which this nation remains seemingly incapable of, as Barbara Jordan (1976) once put it, âbeing as good as its promiseâ (https://âwww.âamericanrhetoricâ.âcom/âspeeches/âbarbarajordan197â6dnc.âhtml). To be sure, neither the sentiment of white nationalism or a public rally of white identity extremists (Davis, 2018) are newly occurring phenomena. The materialization of ideological white supremacy rests at the very foundation of the United States and its many institutions, including higher education. While much about the Charlottesville moment can (and should) be attributed to the deeply racist political rhetoric of the 2016 Trump presidential campaign and, later, the Trump Administration, colonial dispossession of Native lands, genocide of Indigenous people, and the holocaust of African enslavement remain antecedent. In Virginia specifically, we are reminded of the arrival of the âWhite Lion,â a Dutch ship with â20 and odd Negroesâ (Kingsbury, 1933, p. 244) to Point Comfort from Angola, West Africa in August 1619.
It is precisely because and in spite of this history of racial colonial terror that American postsecondary institutions continue to embrace the vestiges of our Nationâs violent past. Whether the dispossessed Indigenous land turned plantation grounds on which institutions were built or the names of slave owners and segregationists on classroom buildings, the historical legacies of racism (Harper & Hurtado, 2007) are ever-present on postsecondary campuses. This brings me to my point: American colleges and universities are, in addition to their educational functions, sociopolitical organizations where disenfranchisement and structural disempowerment of racially minoritized people is institutionalized.
Returning to Charlottesville, many of us, myself included, watched the breaking news reports with concern and even intrigue. Having processed the moment with various people, including individual educators and larger audiences at a variety of national conferences since 2017, nearly all of us shared a sense of outrage at what had transpired. Some of us raised questions of dismay and disbelief: âHow could this happen?â And, unless one is a direct stakeholder in higher education, the institutional context of the University of Virginia and its administrative response might have easily gotten lost. At minimum, Thomas Jefferson was himself a slave owner who actively participated in racialized sexual violence against the Black women he enslaved. Richard Spencer, once the leading voice for the âalt-rightâ brand of white nationalism, is twice a graduate of the University of Virginia, as are many white alum who likely were never educated about or forced to confront their own ideas regarding race, Whiteness, power, or privilege. Or, they simply chose to ignore it.
According to the current Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System reports, UVA, as a state-public institution, enrolls only 6.5% Black students in a state that is 22.3% Black (Harper & Simmons, 2019). The same data show faculty is 73% white. Taken separately, these details may appear disparate and unrelated. Together, however, the once-obscured everydayness of institutionalized white supremacy is revealed and the peculiarity of postsecondary institutions as sites of contemporary racial terror becomes normalized. What is more, this institutional response did nothing precise to address the deeply racist nature of what transpired, failed to identify who was made more vulnerable (i.e., racially minoritized students generally and Black students specifically), and merely attempted to distance the institutionâs espoused values from the terroristic events. Such responses to campus racism and racial terror have become the status quo for postsecondary institutions, especially in the Trump Era. Rather than communicate an understanding of their respective and proximal relationships to white supremacy and educational violence (Mustaffa, 2017), institutions repeatedly choose to misremember the past and deny the racial realities of the present.
In this volume, Roth and Ritter have brought together an important contribution to the organizational literature on higher education. In particular, this text critically interrogates the relationship between status quo racism, the skyrocketing use of adjunct faculty, the loss of academic freedom, and the increasing reliance on monied interests and their implications for the stated values of Americaâs higher education institutions. In an era in which colleges and universities are increasingly expected to redefine their answerability (Patel, 2016) to a racially and ethnically diverse public, a focus on racialized systems, structures, and institutionalized practices is as timely as it is important. Furthermore, todayâs expectation for acknowledgment and atonement emerges at a time when student participation in activism and organized resistance, on-campus and beyond, is at an all-time high (Eagan et al., 2015). The current sociopolitical moment in which higher education finds itself has, again, revealed the unapologetic truth about this nation and its institutions: That is, the genocide of Native and Indigenous peoples and the enslavement and exploitation of Black Africans lay at the foundation of school and societyâs sociocultural symbiosis.
The longstanding question of whether society produces school or school produces society fails to fully recognize the extent to which both school and society remain indelibly guided by systemic white supremacy and, therefore, remain in service to one another to protect the property of Whiteness (Harris, 1993). This is especially important in the wake of the global COVID-19 pandemic, which, over time, may redefine higher education in unprecedented and unpredictable ways. What is evident thus far is the enduring inequities within and across institutions and society. Further, many institutions, due to the growing influence of monied interests, reopened campuses without a legitimate vision to address the disparate impact the 2020 public health crisis hadâand will continue to haveâon Black, Latinx, and First Nation students, staff, and faculty and their communities. As healthcare and case data have shown, these groups have been most impacted by COVID-19, both in terms of rates of infection, mortality, and community disruption. In addition, as links between the origin of the novel coronavirus and an open market in Wuhan, China escalated in the national discourse, colleges and universities offered little with regard to protecting Asian and Asian American members of campus communities from the xenophobic attacks to which many have already fallen victim. At the time of publication, innumerable racial and class inequities in higher education were glaringly evident (i.e., student indebtedness, retention and attrition, and learning efficacy), and none of them have been addressed during the hurried return to normalcy demanded by the economic imperative to reopen campuses.
Such inattention is yet another peculiar signal of the expendability of some for the benefit of the greater white good, a signal that neoliberal ideologies and academic capitalism have once again compelled institutions to place profits, productivity, and prestige over people. This is in large part due to the desire of many postsecondary leaders to return to normal operations, a status quo in which deeply harmful systems of prejudicial exclusion, discrimination, and violence remain unchanged. Higher education stakeholders need not look any further than hiring freezes, furloughs, and layoffs affecting race-based epistemologies and academic units (e.g., African and African American Studies departments), some of which have been either indefinitely suspended or closed entirely, to see higher education institutions are resuming their denial of complicity with a long-festering and broadening white nationalism. Much like the people who have been disregarded, their ways of knowing also have been deemed disposable for the sake of institutional solvency and addressing the financial woes of institutions for which they, neither in part nor alone, are responsible. What, then, can be done? How can higher education reimagine itself and devalue its operations that have been employed and served certain interests so well for so long?
For starters, perspectives offered in this volume help move educators and postsecondary stakeholders closer to understanding the enduring and endemic nature of racial capitalism and the status quo of white supremacy in contemporary higher education. To be sure, today, the thinly veiled mask of white liberal post-racialism, which has long obscured the ongoing pain and suffering of racially minoritized peoples in the United States, has been all but stripped bare. The seemingly daily threats to the dignity and power of marginalized peoples, in the United States and elsewhere, regardless of race, has forced upon college and university educators the urgent responsibility to reimagine the form and function of the US university in a time of controversy and challenge. Beyond the many calls for investments in social justice, commitments to diversification, and rhetorical (but not structural) value of âinclusive excellence,â a meaningful deconstruction of both where and how Whiteness paradoxically undermines the presumed public mission of higher education is desperately needed. Furthermore, and as demanded by generations of concerned stakeholders, the need for educators and administrators to remediate and improve their literacy regarding structural racism (and their place within it) is critical. Yet, even the consummate postsecondary professional remains without many of the necessary analytical and practical tools to identify racial problems, attribute and accept responsibility for racial inequities, and enact transformative organizational change. For these reasons, and innumerable others, this volume is an important step in closing that gap.
References
- Davis III, C. H. F. (2018). A year after Charlottesville, white identity extremism still reigns supreme. Retrieved from: https://âmedium.âcom/â%40hfdavis/âa-year-after-charlottesville-white-identity-extremism-still-reigns-supreme-821...