![Sample our Communication Studies journals, sign in here to start your access, 2013 & 2014 volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5927/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Information-Science2.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
The 2017-2018 Task Force on Slavery and Justice at Furman University documented historical harms and initiated reparative action. In this article, I advance a theory of institutional optimism and pessimism that flows through the work of racial repair. Narrating my experience as co-chair of this process, I call others to learn from the protean agency and hope of minorities, rather than embrace cliché forms of institutional pessimism–forms used by allied majorities to avoid prolonged stakeholder activism that leads to healing.
Notes
1 Henry A. Giroux, “Cultural studies, public pedagogy, and the responsibility of intellectuals,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 1, no. 1 (2004): 59–79; Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, “Agency: Promiscuous and Protean,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 2, no. 1 (2005: 1–19.
2 The outcome of the Task Force’s yearlong existence was a report entitled Seeking Abraham, on the historical harms committed by the university toward African American people, followed by a list of recommended steps of repair. The report was compiled by Deborah Allen, Laura Baker, T. Lloyd Benson, Teresa Nesbitt Cosby, Brandon Inabinet (chair), Michael Jennings, Jonathan Kubakundimana, Shekinah Lightner, Jeffrey Makala, Chelsea J. McKelvey, Quincy Mix, Stephen O’Neill, Forrest M. Stuart, Andrew Teye, Courtney Thomas, Courtney Tollison, and Claire Whitlinger and is available at https://scholarexchange.furman.edu/records-taskforce-slavery/1.
3 I use the term “extractive economics” (from the Brazilian Portuguese “extractivismo”) in order to stress proximate critical practice; nearly everywhere, Indigenous and local people and natural resources are being harmed in order to benefit plantation economics. I am also wanting to connect in this work the economy of the plantation with the economies of higher education. For more on this connection, see Bianca C. Williams, Dian Squire, and Frank Tuitt, Plantation Politics and Campus Rebellions: Power, Diversity, and the Emancipatory Struggle in Higher Education (New York: SUNY Press, 2021).
4 See, for example, Louis Althusser, “Ideology and ideological state apparatuses,” trans. Ben Brewster, Critical Theory since 1965, ed. Hazard Adams and Leroy Searle (Tallahassee: University Press of Florida and Florida State University Press), 239–250; and Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. and ed. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977).
5 The mode of institutional optimism I depict, marked by the words “agency” and “hope” in Campbell’s and Giroux’s writing, does not liberate the institution from extractive economics. Emancipatory potential will be co-opted to further legitimate the institution’s self-interested narrative in exploitative markets. This legitimation perpetuates harm, including at universities, which tend to heap resources on the already-privileged, center Western traditions, and exclude those individuals most in need of uplift, for the sake of institutional prestige.
6 Neil J. Smelser, Bernard Giesen, Jeffrey C. Alexander, Ron Eyerman, and Piotr Sztompka, Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press), 2004. I especially thank Sharon Morgan of Coming to the Table for her advice, “Resources,” https://comingtothetable.org/resources/. Their theory of trauma-informed healing comes from the work of the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding, “Strategies for Trauma Awareness & Resiliency,” https://emu.edu/cjp/star/toolkit.
7 The Center for Justice and Peacebuilding breaks these apart in the context of “building resilience” in their “Snail Model,” https://emu.edu/cjp/star/docs/snail-model.pdf.
8 Like Clemson and other schools in the Carolinas, Furman leaders and historians had focused on the peaceful desegregation enacted by Joseph Vaughn (who graduated in 1968), the widespread respect with which he was viewed by the campus community, and white campus leaders who had made this transition possible. The historians disturbed this narrative with archival evidence of acute racism on the part of the Board of Trustees and complicit administrators. Moreover, in a speech at the 2016 faculty retreat, O’Neill further revealed an internal memo showing that university leaders failed to pursue scholarships for African American students in the decades following 1965, fearing that Black student activists might upset the safety and reputation of the college. The institution’s continued inability to attract minorities beyond athletics in the twenty-first century was not an accident, O’Neill argued, but a clear continuation of twentieth-century policy choices.
9 Leslie M. Harris, James T. Campbell, and Alfred L. Brophy, eds. Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2019).
10 Craig Steven Wilder, Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery and the Troubled Histories of America’s Universities (Providence, RI: Brown University, 2006); Brown University, Report of the Brown University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice, https://slaveryandjustice.brown.edu/report/2006-report.
11 Nathaniel Cary, “Dylann Roof visited Greenville Confederate Museum,” Greenville News (June 22, 2015), https://www.greenvilleonline.com/story/news/local/2015/06/22/dylann-roof-visited-greenville-museum/29124283/.
12 Southern Poverty Law Center, “Unite the Right,” https://www.splcenter.org/unite-the-right.
13 The major historians whose works elevated the movement and who have been major players in the movement are David Blight, Ed Ayers, and James Loewen (who sadly died in 2021). Within the movement, scholar-activists like Jody Allen (at William & Mary) and Rhondda Thomas (at Clemson) have been pivotal figures. For those who want to join in this work, their publications and use as contacts are highly encouraged.
14 Brandon Inabinet, “When pastors go public: Richard Furman’s public letter on slavery,” Southern Communication Journal 76, no. 3 (2011): 169–190.
15 I was clear in this meeting that I would not mind being excluded from the Task Force, especially if it helped create much-needed diversity. I told the provost that I specifically did not think it would be wise to make me chair, both because of my status as a white male alumnus and because I was only recently-tenured and lacked gravitas. Yet, when we assembled for the first time, and the provost laid out the responsibilities of the job, nobody wanted to chair, knowing the service burden and risks involved. When then put on the spot for proposing the model of an institutional report and one-year timeline, I agreed to chair, only asking that an African American colleague join me so that we at least clearly communicated inclusion of minority voice and decision-making at the top. She chaired for half the year, then asked to step down in order to focus on her scholarly work and teaching load.
16 Descendant communities had provided the strong impetus at Virginia schools for a reparational conversation about slavery’s legacies in 2014, and at Georgetown University (which became involved in 2015 and led to the establishment of “Universities Studying Slavery”, a consortium of over 90 higher learning institutions). Furman’s entry, along with other Carolina universities (Clemson, USC, UNC, etc.), across 2016 and 2017 marked a turning point in a social movement in response to the Mother Emmanuel AME shooting and Unite the Right rally.
17 Rhetoric Society of America. “Rhetorics for All,” https://rhetoricsociety.org/aws/RSA/pt/sp/rhetorics_for_all.
18 In particular, in a state of nearly 30 percent African American/Black residents, the campus lacked a single acknowledgement of the Black experience or historical Black existence. No buildings, no memorials, no plaques, no paintings of Black individuals existed, only recent photography of Black students on contemporary displays.
19 Ariel Gilreath, “Furman expands minority scholarship as part of report’s recommendations,” Greenville Journal (October 30, 2018), https://greenvillejournal.com/news/furman-expands-minority-scholarship-as-part-of-reports-29-recommendations/; “Furman University unveils statue of its first Black student,” Associated Press (April 17, 2021), https://apnews.com/article/race-and-ethnicity-greenville-2423410e4e1569c17eb7540153513546.
20 Karma R. Chávez, “Beyond inclusion: Rethinking rhetoric’s historical narrative,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 101, no. 1 (2015): 162–172. The quotation appears on page 166.
21 Seeking Abraham, 10.
22 Student opinions have been gleaned from informal conversations in classes, intergroup dialogue sessions, as well as peer interviews, which will be used as data in forthcoming scholarship by a sociologist on faculty, Claire Whitlinger.
23 The Instagram posts appear from June 24, 2020 to November 9, 2020, @BlackatFurmanUni, https://www.instagram.com/blackatfurmanuni/?hl=en, and are preserved within Furman University Archives and Special Collections. After accumulating a significant number of posts, the account’s anonymous editor focused on the need for “a response,” without specifying what that would be. A Black Alumni petition allied with the page led to better Bias Incident reporting and transparency, as well as non-renewal of contracts for music instructors. Meanwhile, Black student leaders on campus pressed the university to move forward with urgency on recommendations made in the Seeking Abraham report. This included a campus climate study that would result in a coherent minority recruitment and retention strategy, a General Education Requirement (GER) on structural inequities within the United States, and campus programming and events to educate on anti-racism and allyship.
24 Hannah Arendt, “Action,” The Human Condition, Ch. 5 (University of Chicago Press, 1998), 199–247.
25 Special forum contributor Michael Lechuga similarly argues that activist praxis must be part of our calling as scholars who study rhetoric and communication. See Michael Lechuga, “An anticolonial future: Reassembling the way we do rhetoric,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 17, no. 4 (2020): 378–385.
26 Lisa B. Y. Calvente, Bernadette Marie Calafell, and Karma R. Chávez, “Here is something you can’t understand: The suffocating whiteness of communication studies,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 17, no. 2 (2020): 202–209.
27 A parallel case study from the field is Daniel C. Brouwer’s theory of oscillation in ACT UP, with the difference that protean Black critical agency described here in the forms of institutional optimism and institutional pessimism presume institutional belonging before issue advocacy, whereas individuals had come together as an activist organization to protest (and throw rocks) and offer hearing testimony in that historic case. Although I wouldn’t want to belabor the distinction, the kind of work within already existing networks and institutions seems highly appropriate for the field’s consideration, too. Daniel C. Brouwer, “ACTing-UP in Congressional Hearings,” in Counterpublics and the State, ed. Daniel C. Brouwer and Robert Asen (New York: SUNY Press, 2001), 87–109.