Mapping violence, naming life: a history of anti-Black oppression in the higher education system

Abstract

The article will provide a historical overview of anti-Black violence in the higher education system across three time periods: Colonial Era, Post-Civil War, and the mid-to-late twentieth century. Mapping violence demands a focus on how higher education historically has practiced anti-Black oppression coupled with how Black people have practiced resistance and life-making. Both the terms education violence (how systems of schooling limit and kill Black lives) and life-making (how Black people engage in alternative self-definition and self-care) are introduced to name pivotal moments in this history. Defining violence at structural, cultural, and direct levels, the paper accounts for how higher education has been an engine and reflection of racial hierarchy. The article ends with the implications history has for issues of anti-Blackness and movements for Black life-making in the higher education system today.

Keywords:

• Anti-Blackness
• violence
• higher education
• history
• activism
• racism

Notes

1. I intentionally trouble the objective voice in this article. I use pronouns such as ‘us,’ ‘our,’ and ‘we.’ These pronouns represent how personal this history is to me as a Black person and that my primary audience is other Black people who for too long have been dynamically marginalized in the field of higher education and wider academia.

2. I lower case white throughout the paper to demonstrate that we must challenge the oppressive invention of whiteness not only in actions but also in language and framing. I uppercase Black because, unlike whiteness, it is a political identifier to represent a group of people who have to overcome in a country invested in anti-Blackness.

3. See Du Bois (2001), Watkins (2001), and Anderson (1988) for the ideologies of industrial and liberal or normal education that shaped and govern HBCUs. In addition, these scholars offer nuance investigations into the extent Black colleges developed from colleges only in name to providing collegiate-level education in regard to funding, curriculum, and facilities.

4. In 1947, several Mexican American families sued in Mendez v. Westminster School District and won an early desegregation case that applied to their school district and eventually across California.