Settler Simultaneity and Anti-Indigenous Racism at Land-Grant Universities

Moments of performative racial consciousness, however urgent and necessary, often fail to reckon with long-standing demands against injustice from communities of color. In the case of Indigenous Peoples in higher education, these demands frequently include an end to derogatory mascots and racialized campus violence. This article attends to those issues by merging and extending settler-colonial theory and racialized organization theory to examine how the logics of Indigenous elimination and dispossession permeate higher education. With a specific focus on land-grant universities, I argue that racialized organizations are embedded in institutional fields and that both operate within a broader settler-colonial project. I introduce the concept of settler simultaneity to further historicize the study of racialized organizations and uncover how they target persons, collectives, and ideas that pose obstacles to settler goals of subordination, extraction, and profiteering both locally and globally. I look to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as a case study that illustrates how these logics work across time and conclude by considering how critical engagement with the logics of elimination can help us to better understand, and hold accountable, the policies and programs of racialized organizations in other areas of social life.

Racist and Raciolinguistic Teacher Ideologies: When Bilingual Education is “Inherently Culturally Relevant” for Latinxs

Many schools attempt to address the needs of “English-language learners,” who usually are Spanish-dominant Latinxs, by offering dual-language (DL) bilingual education. While undertaking a larger ethnographic study of one such secondary-level dual-language program, I examined how dual-language teachers understood the program as equitable for Latinxs. I found that teachers believed DL met Latinxs’ needs by providing Spanish-language/biliteracy schooling, which deemphasized the need for explicitly enhancing youths’ critical consciousness. This teacher ideology of assuming DL is “inherently culturally relevant” led to significant issues. For example, teachers believed DL would improve Latinxs’ academic achievement, but when teachers perceived Latinx achievement was not on par with White dual-language students’ outcomes, teachers made sense of Latinxs’ underperformance in DL through racist explanations and did not interrogate the program’s cultural relevance. Specifically, teachers pointed to the program not providing Latinxs the needed Spanish input even though the Latinx students self-identified as bilingual and were the “Spanish-dominant” students, and teachers pointed to Latinxs’ cultural and familial deficits. I argue teachers overlooked critical-racial consciousness as an important component of an equitable education. Implications include for teachers to cultivate their critical-racial consciousness, interrogate raciolinguistic ideologies, and define an equitable DL as centering critical-racial consciousness.

Transformation of the Self in a Time of Chaos

This essay looks at the intellectual relationship between author Angela Gilliam and Afro-Brazilian scholar-activist Abdias Nascimento. In 1968, both Gilliam and Nascimento were involved in self-examination and reinvention in terms of the positive affirmation of blackness and politicization of racial consciousness. This was a crucial time of social change and political struggle for equal rights to citizenship in Brazil and the United States. It was in her interpreter-translator work for Nascimento that Gilliam’s relationship to cultural and political expressions of peoples of African descent became deepened. This essay is a longer version of the lecture she delivered during the 2015 Abdias Nascimento symposium held at Brown for which she sent to us to include in this special issue before her passing in September 2018.

Racial Disintegration: Biomedical Futurity at the Environmental Limit

Illuminating how biomedical capital invests in white and Asian American populations while divesting from Black surplus populations, this article proposes recent Asian American dystopian fiction provides a case study for analyzing futurities where healthcare infrastructures intensify racial inequality under terms that do not include race at all. Through a reading of Chang-rae Lee’s On Such a Full Sea (2014) and other texts, the article develops the term studious deracination to refer to a narrative strategy defined by an evacuated racial consciousness that is used to ironize assumptions of white universalism and uncritical postracialism. Studious deracination challenges medical discourse’s “color-blind” approach to healthcare and enables a reconsideration of comparative racialization in a moment of accelerating social disintegration and blasted landscapes. Indeed, while precision medicine promises to replace race with genomics, Asian American literature is key to showing how this “postracial” promise depends on framing racial inequality as a symptom, rather than an underlying etiology, of infrastructures of public health.

“To Be Called a Free Colored Man in the States Is Synonymous with What We Here Term Slavery”

In chapter 1 Murray establishes the trajectories of several Liberian settlers’ during their travels in the United States, what they wanted to accomplish, and what they actually attained. He traces how the settlers’ whiteness became entangled with arguments regarding their relative “civilization” and the power that discourse provided to certain well-positioned settlers to make claims for an elevated status. These settlers sought a liminal position between antipodal whiteness and blackness; they hoped to remain undefined and unfixed and, in this manner, slip through American society’s racialized norms. The same ships that returned Liberian settlers to America also brought native Africans across the Atlantic to America. The resulting exchange between the two societies shaped racial consciousness not only in the United States but also within the Liberian colonies themselves.

Jamaican cultural symbols as transethnic artifacts: How black immigrant vendors construct boundaries of racial consciousness at a Caribbean festival

This study demonstrates how black immigrants strategically deploy symbols of nationality within the context of black spaces to construct a politics of solidarity, rather than ethnic distance, with African Americans and other blacks. It draws from the ethnographic data of black craft vendors at a Caribbean festival and shows the way Jamaican cultural symbols become transethnic artifacts – racialized objects that could be adopted by black people from a range of ethnicities to signal black diasporic consciousness. This study reveals that black immigrant vendors construct boundaries of racial consciousness through transethnic artifacts in three overlapping ways: (1) by explicitly connecting Jamaica to Africa instead of privileging the Caribbean; (2) creating boundaries based on black racial consciousness instead of shared ethnicity; and (3) by prioritizing psychic income, the non-economic returns on their entrepreneurial efforts. This article argues that, within the context of the festival, the symbols that black immigrants wield to signal nationality are neither inconsequential forms of symbolic ethnicity nor are they anti-African American distancing mechanisms, but are, instead, transethnic artifacts that facilitate black place-making. This process reveals the way black immigrant vendors forge diasporic meanings of blackness, rather than foster black ethnic exceptionalism.

Again Awake: A White Researcher’s Iterative Positioning for Entering Black Spaces

In this blend of critical annotation and personal reflection, the author narratively frames a selection of works comprising a contextualized reading list for White researchers confronting and positioning their whiteness for the first time. Built around 21 influential texts, this personalized collection of what to read and possible directions for contemplation reflects one educator’s awakening to the crucial situating of White research in Black spaces. The texts include academic journal articles, magazine pieces, and book chapters covering topical and methodological considerations, in addition to monographs and popular press books. The narrative and annotation are interwoven, creating a mini literature review that is grounded in the author’s iterative forays into research with Black students as her own awareness of race as a power construct (Kendi, 2019) and of her whiteness are continually challenged and developed through classroom, community, and campus experiences. This iterative process is necessary and natural, but requires a zigging and zagging of racial consciousness for which semester-length course models and individual books do not automatically provide adequate guidance. The intended audience for this paper is any graduate student or professional researcher who is taking on not only the steep climb of antiracist activism out in the world, but also the internal, sincere, and cyclical self-education that comes with authentic racial awakening.

From a Hashtag to a Movement: Black Women Movement Actors’ Challenges to Leading a Radical Movement in a “Postracial America”

There is limited literature on the connections of local political organizations affiliated with M4BL, led and facilitated by black women movement actors (BWMA). To address this gap in the literature, I conducted five focus groups in Maryland and the District of Colombia in 2016 to identify the challenges facing BWMA (i.e., leaders, organizers, and protestors) in local organizations connected to the Movement for Black Lives. Theoretically grounded in intersectionality and Black radical social movement theories, themes emerging from these focus groups identify a deep racial capital, but challenges a broader vision for movement work rooted in a global analysis. Findings also reveal the challenges presented to BWMA are the following: social media activism as a dominant participation mode, participants’ goals toward colorblind reform policies, and challenges to class-consciousness and coalition-building that signal a racial consciousness among these focus groups and healthy skepticism toward national and global coalitions. This research provides a nuanced discussion of the struggle to build a global working-class movement in local anti-racist organizations which would outline the schism from theory to action. The disconnection between global and local goals is a persistent theme. Implications for future research are discussed.

The Rise of the Modern White Nationalist Movement

Chapter 3 traces the rise of the modern white nationalist movement and the process by which it was mainstreamed in American politics. The chapter describes the ideology of white nationalists and the variety of racialized political narratives utilized by movement leaders to foster white racial consciousness. These narratives became increasingly resonant among white racists due to observable increases in racial diversity, which was portrayed as a threat to white supremacy. Nonetheless, because of the relatively closed nature of the political opportunity structure, white racists had few vehicles open to them to express their frustration. From the 1980s until the election of Obama in 2008, white racists became increasingly disillusioned with contemporary politics. Most white racists sat out of politics altogether as an increasingly angry minority fueled a rapid growth in white nationalist groups that were relegated to the extremist fringe.