Forgetting Fulbright: opposing racist public memory at the University of Arkansas

ABSTRACT

In summer 2020 at the University of Arkansas, a Black-led protest movement known as #BlackatUARK challenged the presence of a statue to William J. Fulbright due to his racist voting record. Despite the Arkansas state legislature quickly passing a law that made the removal of the memorial illegal, contributors to #BlackatUARK demonstrated how to forget Fulbright by recontextualizing his memory as continuous with a broader history of anti-Blackness on campus. We argue that efforts to forget Fulbright are skillful techniques of anti-racist communication that can be understood as (1) deep ecological worldmaking, (2) wake work, and (3) dissonant history generation.

KEYWORDS:

• Public memory
• campus protest
• deep ecologies
• digital rhetoric
• #BlackatUARK

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The Arkansas State Capitol and Historical Monument Protection Act, Act 1003, Ark. Code Ann. §22-3 -2101 (2021), 7.

2 John Kyle Day, The Southern Manifesto: Massive Resistance and the Fight to Preserve Segregation (Oxford: University Press of Mississippi, 2014).

3 We intentionally capitalize “White,” “Black,” and other markers of racial identity to mark these terms as weighted and replete with meaning, both in the context of our writing and in a larger cultural environment that tends to neutralize racial difference.

4 We use the broad category “Black UARK affiliate” to describe users of the hashtag who claimed to have been a past or present student, faculty, or staff member at the university. Of course, we could not definitively verify everyone’s identity within the hashtag.

5 Kate Duby and Sarah Komar, “Sigma Chi Members Expelled from Fraternity for Mocking Death of George Floyd,” The Arkansas Traveler, 4 June 2020, https://www.uatrav.com/news/article_c6c387f8-a65d-11ea-b41d-df135831c386.html.

6 Bradford Vivian, Public Forgetting: The Rhetoric and Politics of Beginning Again (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010).

7 Monique Riddick-Conelius and Adrian Krishnasamy, “#BlackOnCampus: Exploring the Marginalization of Black Identity through Twitter Messages,” International Journal of Linguistics and Communication 8, no. 2 (2020).

8 Yvonne Liebermann, “Born Digital: The Black Lives Matter Movement and Memory after the Digital Turn,” Memory Studies 14, no. 4 (2021): 713.

9 One can find the full text of all tweets cited throughout this article in a forthcoming publication in Rhetoric Society Quarterly. T. Jake Dionne, Joe Edward Hatfield, and Gabrielle Willingham, “#BlackatUARK: Digital Counterpublic Memories of Anti-Black Racism on Campus,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly (forthcoming 2023).

10 William A. Smith, “Black Faculty Coping with Racial Battle Fatigue: The Campus Racial Climate in a Post-Civil Rights Era,” in A Long Way to Go: Conversations about Race by African American Faculty and Graduate Students, ed. Darrell Cleveland (New York: Peter Lang, 2004), 180.

11 Louis M. Maraj, Black or Right: Anti/Racist Campus Rhetorics (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2020), 18–9.

12 Maraj, Black or Right, 7, emphasis in original.

13 Tasha N. Dubriwny and Kristan Poirot, “Gender and Public Memory,” Southern Communication Journal, 82, no. 4 (2017): 199.

14 Kathryn Gilker, “New Law Makes Moving Fulbright Statue from UA Campus Unlikely,” CBS 5 News 10 June 2021, https://www.5newsonline.com/article/news/local/new-law-makes-moving-fulbright-statue-from-university-of-arkansas-campus-unlikely/527-c6ecbb95-fd48-4af8-bf4a-95c45cb790b4.

15 Dana L. Cloud, “The Rhetoric of Civility as Soft Repression,” in Civility, Free Speech, and Academic Freedom in Higher Education: Faculty on the Margins, eds. Reshmi Dutt-Ballerstadt and Kakali Bhattacherya (New York: Routledge, 2021), 72–88.

16 Cloud, “The Rhetoric of Civility,” 72.

17 Staci M. Zavaratto and Domonic Bearfield, “Weaponization of Wokeness: The Theater of Management and Implication for Public Administration,” Public Administration Review 82, no. 3 (2022): 586.

18 Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 13–4.

19 Jane Greer and Laurie Grobman, eds., Pedagogies of Public Memory: Teaching Writing and Rhetoric at Museums, Memorials, and Archives (New York: Routledge, 2016).

20 Katie Powell, “African American Student Experiences at the University of Arkansas,” Clio 15 December 2020, https://www.theclio.com/tour/1749.

21 Jenny Rice and Jeff Rice, “Pop-Up Archives,” in Rhetoric and the Digital Humanities, eds. Jim Ridolfo and William Hart-Davidson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 247.

22 “Providing Context: Fulbright’s History Now Online, to be Added Near Statue,” University of Arkansas 3 Dec. 2021, https://news.uark.edu/articles/58473/providing-context-fulbright-s-history-now-online-to-be-added-near-statue.

23 “J. William Fulbright,” University of Arkansas, Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences. https://fulbright.uark.edu/thecollege/j-william-fulbright.php.

24 Patricia G. Davis, Laying Claim: African American Cultural Memory and Southern Identity (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2016), 138–9.