Discouragement, delay, and doublespeak at southern universities: considerations and context for scholars of cultural studies

ABSTRACT

Delay and doublespeak have long been effective ways to communicate discouragement to those seeking change within white supremacist systems. Indeed, white Southerners in power have deployed these strategies of resistance at every turn during the decades since the Civil War. This has certainly been true in education. My essay explores examples of these rhetorical strategies still at work to undermine racial progress at predominantly white institutions (PWIs) in the U.S. South.

KEYWORDS:

• Race
• higher education
• rhetoric
• memory
• antiracism

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 Sara Ahmed, Complaint! (Durham: Duke University Press, 2021), 154.

2 Jodi Skipper, Behind the Big House: Reconciling Slavery, Race, and Heritage in the U.S. South (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2022), 49.

3 Skipper, Behind the Big House, xvii.

4 A terrible irony is that much of the actual manual construction was accomplished by enslaved people of color. Robin Boylorn, after reading a draft of this essay, observed that through this horrible process, people of color were forced to construct buildings and shape campus landscapes that would serve as monuments to their oppressors. Efforts are underway on various campuses to document this practice. See, for example, the University of Mississippi Slavery Research Group. https://slaveryresearchgroup.olemiss.edu/.

5 Jay Winter, “Remembering War: The Great War between Memory and History in the Twentieth Century,” in The Collective Memory Reader, eds. Jeffrey Olick, Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi, and David Levy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 427.

6 Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Racism without Racists: Colorblind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America (Lanham: Rowan & Littlefield, 2014).

7 For more on how “frames of reference are hardly visible to members of the group and are not normally questioned,” see Jan Blommaert and Jef Verschueren, Debating Diversity: Analysing the Discourse of Tolerance (London: Routledge, 1998), 35.

8 Stephen Monroe, Heritage and Hate: Old South Rhetoric at Southern Universities (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2021), 74.

9 Jodi Skipper, Behind the Big House, 137.

10 Skipper, Behind the Big House, 136.

11 Marcia G. Synnott, “Desegregation,” in The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, Volume 17: Education, ed. Clarence L. Mohr (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 54–60.

12 Chaning Green, “UM Unveils Six Contextualization Plaques Around Campus,” The Tupelo Daily Journal, March 4, 2018.

13 “James K. Vardaman” at American Experience (Public Broadcasting Corporation), https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/flood-vardaman/.

14 Chancellor’s Advisory Committee on History and Context, Final Report (June 16, 2017), 16. https://context.wp2.olemiss.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/89/2017/07/ChancellorAdvisoryCommitteeFinalReport.pdf.

15 Alan Blinder, “Racist Episodes Continue to Stir Ole Miss Campus,” The New York Times, February 20, 2014.

16 John Neff, Jarod Roll, and Anne Twitty, “A Brief Historical Contextualization of the Confederate Monument at the University of Mississippi,” May 16, 2016, https://egrove.olemiss.edu/um_pub/21/.

17 Ellie Campbell, “A Week in the Life of Ole Miss: February 2019 and the Fight to Take Down the Confederate Statue,” Activist History Review, December 16, 2019, https://activisthistory.com/2019/12/16/a-week-in-the-life-of-ole-miss-february-2019-and-the-fight-to-take-down-the-confederate-statue/.

18 Sarah Fowler, “Confederate statue on Ole Miss Campus Relocated,” Clarion Ledger, July 14, 2020, https://www.clarionledger.com/story/news/2020/07/14/confederate-monument-ole-miss-statue-being-relocated-cemetery/5433553002/.

19 Mikaela M. Adams et al., “Statement by US Historians on Recently Released Confederate Monument Plans,” June 22, 2020, https://history.olemiss.edu/statement-on-confederate-monument-relocation-plans/.

20 Emily Wagster Pettus, “Relocated rebel statue causes athlete concerns at Ole Miss,” Associated Press News, August 20, 2020, https://apnews.com/article/us-news-oxford-mississippi-college-football-football-d2043ef61f85b129e8bb0f277ef396f5.

21 Kevin Thompson, “Bear Bryant Abroad: Rhetorically Analyzing Public Memories of Paul “Bear” Bryant outside of Alabama” at American Awakening: Interdisciplinary Interrogations in the 21st Century (presentation, University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa, September 30, 2022).

22 Jesse A. Goldberg, Twitter thread, September 23, 2022, http://twitter.com/KempoJesse.