Lynching and the University

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Notes

1 Nor do I wish to engage in pornotroping as a white man mobilizing a Black woman’s pain to my own scholarly ends. Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth Century America (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1997), 4.

2 See Sharon Keelyer, “ASU Places Police Officer Ferrin on Leave,” ASU Now, 2 July 2014, https://asunow.asu.edu/content/asu-places-police-officer-ferrin-leave?fbclid=IwAR2f16SpY81KSkN9V7oRsUjkyy1CGKo9Ak6TePunRNpXlyys5_v6BEO3Dh4.

3 On the relationship between white supremacy, citizenship, and disciplinary histories, see Karma R. Chávez, “Beyond Inclusion: Rethinking Rhetoric’s Historical Narrative,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 101 (2015): 162–72; Bryan J. McCann, Ashley Noel Mack, and Rico Self, “Communication’s Quest for Whiteness: The Racial Politics of Disciplinary Legitimacy,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 17 (2020): 243–52; Eric King Watts, “Critical Cosmopolitanism, Antagonism, and Social Suffering,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 101 (2015): 271–79.

4 Armond R. Towns, “Whither the ‘Human’? An Open Letter to the ‘Race and Rhetoric’ Forum,” unpublished paper, 2018, https://docs.google.com/document/d/12LFu8xlLpdoOV92JG-8jCNJZQQyn5PMR6XczxTww00w/edit; Jared Sexton, Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008); Frank B. Wilderson, III, Red, White, Black: Cinema and the Structure of US Antagonisms (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010).

5 See Sara Ahmed, On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012); Bernadette Marie Calafell, “Cisnormativity, Whiteness, and the Fear of Contagion in Academia,” QED: A Journal of GLBTQ Worldmaking 7 (2020): 68–74; Lisa B.Y. Calvente, Bernadette M. Calafell, and Karma R. Chávez, “Here Is Something You Can’t Understand: The Suffocating Whiteness of Communication Studies,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 17 (2020): 202–9; Paula Chakravartty, Rachel Kuo, Victoria Grubbs, and Charlton McIlwain, “#CommunicationSoWhite,” Journal of Communication 68 (2018): 254–66; Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs et al., eds., Presumed Incompetent: The Intersections of Race and Class for Women in Academia (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2012); Darrel Wanzer-Serrano, “Rhetoric’s Rac(e/ist) Problems,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 105 (2019): 465–76.

6 See Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (Wivenhoe, UK: Minor Compositions, 2013); Eli Meyerhoff, Beyond Education: Radical Studying for Another World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019).

7 See Christopher Newfield, The Great Mistake: How We Wrecked Public Universities and How We Can Fix Them (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016).

8 Kristiana L. Baéz and Ore, “The Moral Imperative of Race for Rhetorical Studies: On Civility and Walking-in-White in Academe,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 15 (2008): 331.

9 Hortense J. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics 17 (1987): 64–81. Also see Alexander G. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014).

10 Myisha Priest, “‘The Nightmare Is Not Cured’: Emmett Till and American Healing,” American Quarterly 62 (2010): 14.

11 James Baldwin, “Many Thousands Gone,” The Partisan Review, November–December 1951, 666.

12 I draw the language “vulnerability to premature death” in relation to antiblackness from Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s widely cited definition of racism. She writes, “Racism, specifically, is the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.” Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 28.

13 For one example of antiblackness in academic settings, see Colleen Flaherty, “‘Botched,’” Inside Higher Ed, 22 June, 2020, https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/06/22/two-black-scholars-say-uva-denied-them-tenure-after-belittling-their-work?utm_source=Inside%20Higher%20Ed&utm_campaign=c6b2cc9f1e-DNU_2019_COPY_02&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-c6b2cc9f1e-197637061&mc_cid=c6b2cc9f1e&mc_eid=354d8a19b4&fbclid=IwAR0F2be9MKoMzXwjkdSO5IhEtGz5TUgel_-GVlMd4JRocAP87eWgNWpZeKo.