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.

Aping Blackness: Reading and Evaluating Racialized Images in Cartagena, Colombia

Why are residents of a city racialized as Black overwhelmingly in favor of representations of Blackness that caricature Afro-descendants as subservient, hypersexual and licentious, jovial, uninhibited and libertine, primitive (folklorized), and violent? This article bridges the literatures on the sociology of culture and cognition, racial signification, and frame theory to explore the various sociomental lenses and schemata that people use to perceive racial symbols and evaluate their legitimacy. It uses semi-structured and open-ended photo-elicitation interviews, primarily with residents of a largely-Afro-descendant community in Cartagena, Colombia, to systematically generate a collection of readings and evaluations of racialized imagery, resulting in an empirical example of the socio-optical construction of race within the Colombian cultural context. These readings and evaluations of external cultural primers such as photographs of racialized performance and ritual reveal (1) how a Colombian Atlantic Coastal “optical community” connects the signifiers and signifieds of Blackness; (2) that racial frames evoke three primary schemas (personal, spatiotemporal, and explicitly ideological), which interpreters use to decode and evaluate images; (3) that interpreters read the racial frames transmitted by cultural producers (e.g., performance artists and festival goers) via the visual language of racialized imagery as collectively credible and/or personally salient, and that this visual resonance is how the racialized imagery gain legitimacy and; (4) that personal experience, cultural knowledge, and social location account for variations in whether people consider racialized imagery credible and salient and, as such, legitimate forms of recognition.

Debtors’ Blocks: How Monetary Sanctions Make Between-neighborhood Racial and Economic Inequalities Worse

Although recent scholarship has enumerated many individual-level consequences of criminal legal citations and sentences involving fines and fees, we know surprisingly little about the structural consequences of monetary sanctions or legal financial obligations (LFOs). We use social disorganization and critical race theories to examine neighborhood-level associations between and among LFO sentence amounts, poverty, and racial and ethnic demographics. Using longitudinal data from the Washington State Administrative Office of the Courts, and the American Community Survey, we find LFOs are more burdensome in high-poverty communities and of color, and that per-capita rates of LFOs sentenced are associated with increased future poverty rates across all neighborhoods.

Racism and Confederate Monument Construction: Temporal Regimes Distinguishing the 1900s, 1960s, and Contemporary Decades

The bulk of Confederate monuments were constructed by White southerners in the early 1900s, but some were built much later. Recent research has assessed average relationships across the decades, but comparable evidence for distinct peaks in construction is lacking. My objective is to determine whether the timing of monument construction is connected to unique social contexts, particularly different manifestations of racism. I use multinomial regression analysis and a rich dataset spanning the U.S. South. Results confirm the central role of the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC), but also suggest stronger attachments to slavery and greater reliance on lynching increase the risk of erecting a monument in the early 1900s. In contrast, the resurgence of construction in the 1960s is unrelated to the presence of a UDC chapter and positively related to the presence of an National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) chapter. Construction in the decades after the 1960s shift again, suggesting the renewed importance of the UDC (in addition to the location of Civil War battles), but no role of racialized dynamics. Results suggest three distinct regimes of Confederate monument construction that broadly reflect the structural racism that dominated the early 1900s; the group threat/countermovement dynamics of the 1960s; and the “colorblind” era of racism associated with contemporary decades. This research contributes to knowledge of the factors associated with Confederate monument construction and provides a foundation for public and academic discussions of how racism is intertwined with these divisive public symbols.