A history of white violence tells us attacks on black academics are not ending (I know because it happened to me)

ABSTRACT

This article examines attacks on black academics as an analytical apparatus for connecting histories of U.S. racial violence to the current state of white backlash against black advancement. Through an anatomy of these attacks – of which the author herself was targeted – this essay explores two processes: First, what these attacks do to blackness and, second, what this violence does for whiteness. In the former, this work explains that attacks on black academics are first and foremost anti-black attacks, not dissimilar to attacks on visible African- Americans in other arenas. The intention is to terrorize black progress on the whole. In the latter process, the generative nature of these attacks reproduces collective white identities across region, age, and newly digitized spaces. In the current political moment this digitized mob violence ritualistically reaffirms white hegemony. This essay concludes with an explanation for why the author believes these attacks will continue with regularity.

KEYWORDS:

• Social media
• scholarly attacks
• black faculty
• public scholarship
• Black Lives Matter
• racial violence

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. For more on the perils of racism and tenure, see Matthew (2016).

2. For examples and theories on internal racist attacks, see: Hordge-Freeman, Mayorga, and Bonilla-Silva (2011) and Zuberi and Bonilla-Silva (2008).

3. For analytical detail on the epistemic implications of university complicity with public attackers, see Shavisi (2015).

4. For details on my attack, including my university’s official response, please see articles printed in these and other media outlets.

5. During slavery and Jim Crow, black women occupied private white family spaces as domestics and nannies where they were routinely raped and abused. Fictionalizing my private life as a broken sexual contract with white men redeposits white male sexual domain over black women. Referring to legal adults as “children” connotes much of the historic anxiety about black women’s intimate access to white families in possible service of resistance and rebellion, while reaffirming stereotypes of white innocence.

6. Special thanks to my colleagues in the Tertulia Junior Faculty Seminar at BU who workshopped this essay with me. In a room of almost all white faculty, we could not identify a key typifying feature of attacks on white scholars, and, ultimately, concluded that our inability to name such a trait was an important part of understanding the racial specificity of anti-black scholarly attacks.

7. See, for example, racist public backlash against Olympic gold medallist Gabby Douglass, NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick, ballerina Misty Copeland, comedian Leslie Jones, or Former President and First Lady Barack and Michelle Obama.

8. Former First Lady Michelle Obama, for example, notably received harsh criticism for stating the historically verified fact that the White House was built with slave labour.