‘How do we name the air that we breathe?’ – The haunting presence of white supremacy and settler colonialism at UC Berkeley

ABSTRACT

Social-justice-oriented student activists at UC Berkeley are concerned with structural inequalities and their connection to past unacknowledged atrocities associated with the campus. Through different activist endeavours, students seek to raise awareness of UC Berkeley’s settler colonial past and legacy of white supremacy. They unearth, reactivate, and relocate past atrocities in the present. The students call forth and are called upon by the past to dismantle structures of inequality on campus and beyond and encourage each other to be attentive to these structures. Building on five months of in-person fieldwork among student activists and online fieldwork from 2020 to 2022, I explore how rumours and narratives of the past, in resonance with broader translocal calls for justice, becomes a way for activist students to deal with the unaddressed settler colonial past of the university. Inspired by a theoretical framework of hauntology, I show how (past) injustices haunt the campus and demand a reckoning with the past and present. I argue that activist students understand current inequalities as directly connected to past atrocities and that this understanding of history positions the students as implicated. Being implicated entails discomfort but also opens possibilities for action.

KEYWORDS:

• Hauntology
• higher education
• student activists
• settler colonialism
• renaming
• repatriation
• rumours
• implicated subjects

Introduction

How do we name the air that we breathe and seek to understand it? For the time being, we will think about it as proximity to, and complicity in, white supremacy, it is not about intending to be part of the system, it is the structures around us. To do nothing is to be complicit. To think about whiteness requires attention and struggle.

Anna,¹ an undergraduate majoring in Ethnic Studies and one of the two facilitators of a student-run course² on deconstructing race, gender, and capitalism at UC Berkeley presents on the topic of structural racism. Dylan, her co-facilitator, adds an ‘mmhm’ and snaps his fingers in support. Today’s class is run on Zoom, where I am watching, along with 15 undergraduate students. Importantly, students in the class identify differently in terms of racial and ethnic categories, but Anna, who refers to herself as white, argues here that although everyone is situated differently, whiteness serves as a foundational structure that bestows privileges, advantages, and power in a society shaped by structural racism. In the class, Anna draws inspiration from post-structuralism and critical race theory, influenced by scholars such as Crenshaw (1991) and Omi and Winant (1986), and argues that whiteness is centred as one of the most, if not the most important, privilege one can have access to, or be in proximity to. In this way, in Anna’s words, it is not about intending to be part of the structure but rather about the fact that whiteness is already all-encompassing and present in architecture, norms, and relations, not unlike what Sara Ahmed has previously argued (Ahmed 2007). Whiteness, then, is not just about being perceived as white but understood as a pervasive structure that permeates students’ lives, the campus they walk, and ‘the air that they breathe’. Breathing sustains life, but the allusion to air in Anna’s presentation points to the polluting, invisible, and unavoidable qualities inherent in it. Air is shared; it transcends bodily barriers, moves, and creates relations across time and space. It is the creation of such relations that this article seeks to explore.

Building on ethnographic fieldwork, I unpack how social-justice-oriented student activists at UC Berkeley call attention to current inequalities related to whiteness and white supremacy by unearthing, reactivating,and relocating past atrocities in the present. I show how the students call forth and are called upon by the university’s past to dismantle racist structures on campus and beyond and how they encourage each other to be attentive to these structures because, as Anna says, ‘to do nothing is to be complicit’.

To show how students attempt to resist complicity, I analyse two significant concerns for activist students at UC Berkeley: the renaming of buildings at the university to disassociate them from names associated with white supremacy and the lack of repatriation of ancestral Indigenous remains currently kept in the Anthropology Museum on campus. Both cases were evoked repeatedly during my fieldwork and haunted students and their surroundings in different ways because of their continued presence.

I argue that students evoke the settler colonial past of the university as a way to locate the campus directly in connection with past atrocities that have not yet been fully acknowledged; therefore, according to the students, they continue to have detrimental effects. I show that activist students (metaphorically) dig up parts of the past that used to be hidden from view or at least only rudimentarily addressed by the university administration. By emphasising the direct connection between past atrocities and present injustices, these students align with broader national and global calls to address historical injustices. Finally, I argue that activist students feel ‘implicated’ (Rothberg 2019) as students on a campus haunted by the past. This implicatedness, although difficult to bear, opens up possibilities for action, mainly in the form of awareness raising but also in aiming at a structural critique at the university. In this way, students seek to name the ‘air that we breathe’ and thereby make whiteness as a structure more tangible.

Methodology and categorisations

I build my analysis on ethnographic fieldwork conducted at UC Berkeley, physically from October 2021 to April 2022 and sporadically online from 2020 to 2022. Through participant observation, interviews, and document analysis, I sought to map out and understand student activism focusing on social justice issues on campus. I understand social justice as a work towards a more equitable distribution of resources, including the notion of individual and collective rights (Avineri et al. 2018). This work is both a process and a goal, as argued by Lee Anne Bell (2007). Specifically, I attended four student-led courses, some for the duration of one or several semesters and others for a few classes, I attended student meetings, events, presentations, reading groups, and debates on social justice. I conducted semi-structured interviews with 72 individuals, mostly undergraduate- and graduate students, although I also included several faculty and administrative staff members to understand the context in which the students operated. Most of the students were organised within their departments and worked formally and informally with the administration to address campus conditions. They were, among other things, invested in facilitating courses for each other, in pushing for curricula change or in raising awareness about discriminationatory practices they had encountered. I actively sought out individuals who were outspoken on the topic of social justice, and thus, it is these specific perspectives I present in this article.

I use the term ‘activist’ in this article broadly to encompass individuals engaged in ‘dispersed resistance’ (Lilja and Vinthagen 2018, 212), that is, individual or small-scale everyday acts that might be subtle or loud to bring about change in an institution, or even society. It is important to note that the students did not necessarily refer to themselves as activists, and they did not necessarily know of each other’s work; rather, it is my analytical term to emphasise that they worked towards changing the university, aiming at greater social justice.

The activist students I engaged with were not organised in homogenous or consensus-seeking entities, but rather individuals with varying motivations and backgrounds. Besides representing an age group of 18–35 years and an interest in social justice and in examining one’s own privilege, the activist students differed in terms of racialisation, ethnicity, nationality, gender, sexuality, and class. They were all aware that a degree from UC Berkeley is considered prestigious, and they felt privileged to be there; however, some had to obtain student loans to attend, some had received scholarships and worked part-time, whereas others had parents who were able to payfull tuition fees and exorbitant housing costs in the Bay Area. As a white Northern European anthropologist, I paid close attention to the norms and customs within each student group to remain respectful and gain knowledge about the students’ motivations and backgrounds. This also meant that interviews often involved sharing considerations of privileges and positionality. To avoid essentialist categorisations, while staying attentive to how categories, privileges, and power are interconnected, I paid attention to the markers students themselves found to be important for their lived experiences. In writing this article, I have thus chosen to describe the students that I quote directly by the social categories they themselves described as important in our conversations.

Translocal hauntings

It has become quite popular in scholarly work to reference a haunting of the past, an unsettling or perhaps uncanny feeling of shaking (former) well-established truths, by pointing out forgotten, ignored, invisible, or silenced narratives and histories (Bozalek et al. 2021). Stories of haunting are often interpreted as a welcome call for political action, albeit a disquieting one (Lincoln and Lincoln 2015). In this article, I also apply the terminology of haunting. Not least because it captures the specific attention students afford to certain versions of the past and because it is particularly adept in an analysis of the mediation between the absence and presence of something not quite there, yet insistently stirring up emotions and reactions. As such, I use the terminology of haunting to show that students are simultaneously troubled by the past and evoke it for activist aims; that is, they are called upon by the past while also calling it forth.

Current scholarly interest in haunting often takes a point of departure from Jacque Derrida’s wordplay on ontology in his theory of ‘hauntology’ (Derrida 2006 [1993]). Hauntology refers to a concern with ghosts, apparitions and representations that call for justice and responsibility from those who are haunted by them. This notion of justice has been taken to mean a continuing ethical practice of responsibility to address traces of past violences that keep appearing in the present (Bozalek et al. 2021, 9).

Haunting derives from the French ‘hanter’, meaning ‘to frequent, resort, or be familiar with; hence the idea of a ghost returning to a place familiar to it’ (Auchter 2023, 117). In the original meaning of the term haunting, is thus an allusion to place, a repetitive return to a place of familiarity. Haunting, then, encapsulates both a temporal blurring, a seeping of the past into the present, and a movement across space to a locality-bound specificity, a spatiotemporal haunting as it were.

UC Berkeley is not isolated from but is influenced by contemporary global debates on social justice and controversial commemorations. The hauntings are therefore shaped by local and trans-local histories and temporalities. Here, I understand translocal to mean movements of ideas or influences across places and times. Translocal hauntings then involve recognising that a haunting shape and is shaped by a locality in resonance with other localities through offline and online networks, where people inspire, influence, and react to each other’s actions (see Khasnabish 2020).

In choosing to work with the terminology of haunting in current student activism for social justice, I am acutely aware of the risk of reinscribing colonial relations (Cameron 2008). The ‘spectral turn’ in examining colonialism in North America is far from original (Cameron 2008, 385). The trope of the disappearing or assimilating Indigenous people described as noble yet also ‘demons, apparitions … or ghosts’ (Bergland 2000, 1) has been popular in American literature for at least three hundred years (Cariou 2006). According to geographer Emilie Cameron, this enduring trope and the more recent explosion of scholarship on hauntings, risk replaying settler complicity while neglecting to mobilise for change in the present (2008, 389). In other words, by employing the terminology of hauntings, there is a risk of overlooking injustices in the present against people who are very much alive today. However, by privileging the perspective of the activist students, my analysis shows how the past is activated and relocated in the present to promote change. It is exactly this relocation that makes visible how past injustices continue today and activate the hauntings’ political potential.

To further counter the risks of the terminology of haunting, I follow the call made by anthropologist Martha Lincoln and historian Bruce Lincoln to clarify the type of spectres scholars claim to be working with (Lincoln and Lincoln 2015). They conduct a succinct analysis of the scholarly conflation between ghosts as metaphysical entities and ghosts as persisting in text, memory, and uneasy silences in the consciousness of those they haunt (Lincoln and Lincoln 2015, 196). To untangle this conflation, they suggest a distinction between ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ haunting (Lincoln and Lincoln 2015, 200). Primary haunting afflicts individuals who are often acquainted with the ghost to set right a ritual failure or a crime committed, and at least initially appear as a terrifying figure prompting an existential threat to the haunted (Lincoln and Lincoln 2015, 201). Secondary haunting, in contrast, is mediated through texts or sediments of horrific historical events and engages a larger audience whose relationship with the deceased is not personal. Importantly, secondary haunting aims at broad forms of repair, the mobilisation of outrage, the remembrance of atrocities, and some form of acceptance of responsibility (Lincoln and Lincoln 2015). Fear of secondary haunting is not an existential threat to the haunted but rather a horror at the violence inflicted in the past.

At UC Berkeley, the haunting presence of the past relayed to me is exclusively of the secondary kind. Although ancestral remains are physically present on campus, they haunt by being mediated through textual and image representations without threatening the existence of those who are affected. Additionally, students encounter various other hauntings, including those of ideas, logics, buildings, and injustices that persistently challenge existing narratives and understandings. This haunting, as I will show in the following through examples of student activism targeting building names and ancestral remains, calls upon the students and is called forth by them to relocate and activate continued injustices in the present.

Controversial commemorations

The University of California, located across the bay from San Francisco, is (in)famous for student uprisings in the 1960s and 70s (Rosenfeld 2013). Today, the activist students I encountered are concerned with various activities aimed at social justice, including the call to rename buildings on campus. Although the call to rename buildings was initiated by students in 2014, it was not until 2019 that the university established a denaming committee,³ which has so far de- and renamed five buildings. The buildings have been renamed because of their namesakes’ involvement in the enslavement of Black people on plantations, white supremacy, or colonialism.

In explaining to me the importance placed on building names, students stressed the harm they felt from continued and unaddressed racism implicit in the building names. One of the first buildings to be renamed was The Social Science Building, formerly named after David Prescott Barrows, the president of the UC system from 1919 to 1923. Barrows was also a keen promoter of US imperialism and argued for the inferiority of non-white races. For years, the Black Student Union (BSU) fought to rename the building. One of the original organisers, a Black undergraduate sociology student at the time, told me:

Barrows, […] is basically talking about us as Black people, brown people, [as] savages and all of this horrible stuff … we wanted it to be known that this man – this hall that all of us go through all the time – is horrible … it was like … a slap in the face. … it was like a really big slap in the face to have to go to this building and refer to it like ‘Oh, I have classes in Barrows’.

For this student, the act of walking into the building or referring to the building by name felt like physical harm inflicted by the name. Barrow’s ideals are experienced as transcending time, making (past) racist logic present in the physicality of the building. In its name, ideals live on and stain the campus.

Sociologist Avery Gordon argues that the presence of ghosts marks the moment ‘when what’s been in your blind spot comes into view’ (Gordon 2008: xvi [1997]). In BSU’s research on Barrows, they learned in detail about the building’s namesake, and to raise awareness, they produced art and spoke out about its problematic legacy. The activist work brought the ghostly qualities of the name into view as a vessel of racist ideals. Similar actions occured across the United States (and globally) during this period as the future of statues and commemorations was contested in debates about how to deal with injustices of the past (Cribbs and Rim 2019; Fryer et al. 2021; Hobbs 2021; Weiner 2020). Students at the University of Cape Town, for example, beginning in 2015, demanded that a statue of British colonialist Cecil Rhodes be removed from campus in an effort to address continued structural racism in the post-apartheid country (Chikane 2018; Knudsen and Andersen 2019). Similarly, in New Orleans, three monuments commemorating the Confederacy were hotly debated and eventually removed in 2017 when activists raised awareness of the problematic celebratory monuments and ‘refused to quarantine the statues in the past’ (Mitchell 2020, 580). By pulling the past into the present, the statues came into sight as a continuation, celebration, and materialisation of white supremacy. ‘I barely even saw the statue; Jefferson Davis was there-but-not-there as we drove by’, the white mayor of New Orleans reflected, thinking back to the noticed yet unnoticed presence of the statues in his childhood (Landrieu 2018, 36). For the mayor, the statues came into view when activists across the country called for a historical reckoning of the past, not least by addressing how the past is remembered.

Building names and commemorations, thus, become symbols of a continuation or even celebration of past atrocities into the present. Understanding the past and present as connected through key events is not unique to the students at Berkeley, nor is it a novel concept. Michelle Alexander’s book ‘The New Jim Crow’ links the history of slavery and Jim Crow laws, through poverty and police surveillance, to mass incarceration today (2010). Similarly, The New York Times project ‘1619’ seeks to rewrite history on a number of themes by centring the year 1619, the arrival of the first enslaved Africans to the colony of Virginia, as pivotal (Hannah-Jones et al. 2021). And already in 1965, the writer and civil rights activist James Baldwin criticised the notion of history as something that merely lives in the past, but instead argued that it is present in the everyday through the actions of individuals who embody and enact their inherited social relations:

White man, hear me! History, as nearly no one seems to know, is not merely something to be read. And it does not refer, merely, or even principally, to the past. On the contrary, the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do. (James Baldwin 1998 [1965], 722–723, italics in original)

Baldwin’s emphasis on the past in the present calls for a vision of continued legacies and gives explanatory power to the past over the present. At UC Berkeley, the attention paid to certain (local) events and their direct relevance to the present signifies a specific perspective on history, resonating with other contemporary forms of activism and scholarly work. Thus, students evoke and summon the uncanny presence of buildings’ names on campus, refusing to leave the past unexamined. Instead, the students insisted on unearthing knowledge on building namesakes and raising awareness to address the legacy of white supremacist thought on campus. In this way, they brought the ghosts of former racist logics to life to examine, critique, and thereby act upon. Ghosts, as the remainder of something else demand a critical reading, to unpack what this something else is (Peeren 2021, 103). In the case of renaming campus buildings, the remainder of something is, among other things, white supremacy. However, many students felt that renaming was not enough to address the lingering and continuing inequalities.

Renamings and remains

Renamings were one way of addressing the past and challenging the historical legacy of white supremacy on campus; yet, as it turned out, the renamings were both immensely important to activist students and not so important after all. One law student whose parents, both of them law professors, had emigrated from Ghana to the US before her birth, explained to me, sighing: ‘I think people are mostly just like “Yeah, finally”, but honestly, I think there is so much – just bigger things on people’s minds’. This sentiment captures both the relief felt when the issue of renaming was finally addressed and the realisation that renaming alone was insufficient to tackle broader concerns, often equated with tangible changes such as funding, scholarships, and support for marginalised students.

Another prominent concern was the lack of repatriation of stolen Indigenous ancestors and cultural objects currently held in the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology. The human remains were excavated or stolen by archaeologists, anthropologists, or in some cases, military personnel or donated by other museums and individuals over the years (Jacobs and Porter 2021). The museum houses the remains of a variety of different nationalities, ethnicities, and races, although mainly those of Indigenous people from the Americas (Jacobs and Porter 2021). In the version students relayed to me, though, the remains were exclusively those of Indigenous people collected across the US, if not in California specifically.

Ironically, the museum is housed in a renamed building, previously known as Kroeber Hall, now referred to as the Anthropology and Arts Practice Building. The building was renamed, among other things, because of Alfred Louis Kroeber’s (1876–1960) role in categorising Indigenous tribes, thereby aiding the government in determining federal status. Today, this categorisation hierarchy carries tremendous political consequences, as non-recognised tribes find themselves without legal protection in many areas, including the right to demand the repatriation of ancestral remains (Orona and Esquivido 2020, 57). A state audit from 2020 reported that only 19% of the collection was repatriated per the legal framework (NAGPRA) in place since 1990,⁴ making UC Berkeley one of the slowest federal institutions to repatriate (Howle 2020, 20).⁵

The connection between the renamings and the ancestors held on campus came up repeatedly. In the student-run course described in the introduction, the facilitators Dylan and Anna explained that the anthropology museum currently holds over 60,000 human remains and that they remain non-compliant with the legal requirements to repatriate remains to Indigenous communities: ‘The university is breaking the law by holding onto the remains. Surprise surprise’ Anna added sarcastically,

If you look this up, there is a land acknowledgment on the [museum] website, but then they don’t do anything about it, it is a classic example of saying ‘yeah we know we are colonial motherfuckers’ but we are not actually doing anything material about it

Dylan, who grew up in California as a child of Mexican immigrants, jumps in, linking the matters of settler colonialism and denamings: ‘Now they are changing the names of a few buildings, but what does that even mean? It doesn’t change anything’.

Anna and Dylan explicitly connect the issue of renaming to the ancestors kept at UC Berkeley and create a hierarchy of which actions matter. When Anna adds that the Land Acknowledgement for her becomes yet another symbolic gesture without any ‘material’ results, she is also emphasising that although words matter, they are not enough to secure social justice. Importantly, this is not an argument against renamings or Land Acknowledgements but rather a wish for more holistic approaches in addressing inequalities, and in particular, with a focus on the university’s continued disavowal of the settler colonial past and connections to ideologies of white supremacy. Furthermore, as I will show in the next section, students did not only focus on the direct harm experienced by descendants, but through the continuous evocation of ancestral remains, they implicated themselves and the campus in the violent legacy.

The settler colonial university – rumours, knowledge and land grab

Among the students, rumours flourished about the exact quantity and location of the ancestral remains. Some would have it that there is an actual burial site on campus, while others would tell me that the remains lie in storage underneath the tennis courts and parking lot on the south side of the campus. In a plenary discussion, a student let the rest of us in on what he believed to be the location of the main collection; underneath the Hearst Gym:

 … they literally still have over 60,000 human remains, a collection of people underneath the Hearst pool! Where people have the time of their lives! That is the microcosm of what we have here at the school, people swimming on the top of human remains! Whatever you do, don’t go swimming in Hearst Pool’

The student’s warning implied that swimming on top of the ancestors would be disrespectful and highlighted the interconnectedness of all campus activities, scholarly or recreational, with the remains. This connection also points out differences in students’ lives, knowledge about, or perhaps a lack of interest in, the (past) violences of UC Berkeley. While some are imagined as having ‘the time of their life’ in the pool, others are cautioned against doing exactly that with the knowledge they now have. It thereby becomes the specific knowledge, although often diffuse, of the number and location of ancestors’ remains - as a (defleshed) embodiment of racism and violent discrimination- that haunts students.

Stories regarding the quantity of remains also varied. Alhough the number 60,000⁶ was frequently mentioned, others told me it was ‘several thousand’ or ‘some hundred’. In 2020, the student newspaper reported that the museum held the remains of 8000 individuals of Native American descent (Ramirez 2020). The National Parks Services reports the number to be 9,000 (National Parks Services n.d.), thereby making UC Berkeley the owner of the largest collection of unrepatriated Native American remains in the US (Ngu and Suozzo 2023). Still, other students would tell me the university holds the remains of just one individual. A Black anthropology graduate student told me:

Like some of the buildings are getting […] re-named and it is going to be a process probably over the next 20 years you know, and that doesn’t even take into account that this university was built on native land! And specifically for a long time … the university – I don’t know if they still have that, but they had the remains of an Indigenous American, like in – at UC Berkeley!.

Alhough not made explicit, this narrative probably refers to the story of a Yahi man who resided at the anthropology museum from 1911 to 1916. His family perished during the systematic massacres of Indigenous Californian people by white settler colonialists (Madley 2016). Anthropologist Alfred Kroeber named him ‘Ishi’, referred to him as the last living member of his band, and installed him in the museum as a research assistant, a living museum exhibition, a janitor and a friend, although different accounts emphasise different aspects. Some portray Ishi as a captive, coerced into providing information for anthropological research, whereas others depict him as willingly sharing his knowledge and enjoying the attention he received from being exhibited in the museum and newspapers at the time (cf. Field 2005; Kroeber 2008; Orona and Esquivido 2020; Scheper-Hughes 2001; Vizenor 2001). In 1916, Ishi died of tuberculosis and was autopsied against his wishes while Kroeber was away from Berkeley. Upon Kroeber’s return, he discovered Ishi’s brain on his desk and shipped it to the Smithsonian Museums. After the persistent efforts of the Maidu, Redding, and Pitt Rivers tribes in California, Ishi’s brain was finally repatriated in 2000 (Orona and Esquivido 2020, 51). The story of Ishi was told to me countless times, albeit in different versions. In some, he lived in Berkeley, although the museum at the time was located in San Francisco; in other versions, he lived underground, alongside ancestral remains,⁷ and in some versions, he was a nameless individual treated unfairly and as a museum object on display.⁸

In these rumours, whether it concerns the location or the number of remains and whether students emphasise Ishi as part of the story or not, it becomes evident that students are deeply affected by and take the presence of ancestral remains seriously. In emphasising the differences in versions of the past and treating them as rumours, I do not wish to dismiss or undermine the call for repatriation or the critique of the university. Instead, I highlight that the flourishing rumours show a dedication to unearthing atrocities of the past, told and retold to make sense of the world in which people live (Gluckman 1963), and I seek to take them seriously, not literally (Holmes 2022). As such, I understand the rumours to hold affective and productive qualities.

The rumours then become a haunting presence which is not to be ignored of the ‘not-quite gone, the sensed but not seen’ (Lincoln and Lincoln 2015, 194). When the ancestors, their assumed location, and uncertainty about exact numbers are brought up in conversation repeatedly, students reconfigure their campus in the absence/presence of the namesakes’ legacy and ancestors by drawing attention to the continued colonial relation to land and people. The haunted campus of UC Berkeley becomes one steeped in the colonial encounter that has not yet been fully documented, acknowledged, or dealt with. The rumours also express a fumbling after whatever facts or narratives are available. In retelling the information, the students seemed to have, the rumours also gained a relational and social component, uniting activists in an understanding of the campus as undeniably implicated in continued colonial relations.

Rumours about an actual burial ground on campus also proliferated. Some argued it was directly underneath the bust of Abraham Lincoln, next to the campus landmark, the Campanile Tower. In the aforementioned student-run class, an eagerness towards unearthing and sharing knowledge about the past of the university further emphasised the connection between Indigenous land and the present campus:

We need to establish that this university is built on native land! Through a land grab […] [Abraham] Lincoln was a settler colonialist, murdering Indigenous people across the continent. This is stolen land, all of it!

Dylan, Anna’s co-facilitator, shows a PowerPoint with a map of what is today known as the United States of America. Overlaying the state borders, other borders are drawn to demarcate when and how Indigenous land was seized by or ceded to the US government. Anna takes over: ‘UC Berkeley is operated as a real estate company’. She shakes her head, ‘They sold plots of [unceded] land and got interest payments. The land was that of Miwok, Yokuts, Gabrielino, Maidu, Pomo, and more peoples’. Dylan adds, ‘Find out whose land you are on, and keep it in mind. This university is built upon violence’.

What Anna and Dylan are referring to here is UC Berkeley’s beginning as a ‘land grant’ university, (often called land grab by activist students). Land grant universities were established across the United States following the 1862 ‘Morrill Act’ which allowed for the appropriation of land from Indigenous people -without monetary compensation (Sorber 2018). The Morrill Act allocated more than 46 hectares of land to each (Union) state during the American Civil War, land that until then had belonged to the original population (la paperson 2017, 25). The states were encouraged to sell or lease the land to finance the establishment of state universities tying landownership to land grant universities. While there is an increasing interest in examining the way universities, land appropriation and colonisation are inextricably linked in the US, there is also a dominant narrative portraying ‘The Morrill Act’ as beneficial to the wider public, as access to education increased (Fanshel 2021). A rumour, such as the one placing an Indigenous burial ground under the bust of Abraham Lincoln, ties together the ancestral remains on campus and the land-grab establishment of the university. These rumours actively connects facts and knowledge about Land Grant institutions with more speculative ideas.

Similar concerns about land rights and the settler colonial beginnings of the university were brought up in many other settings. In a teach-in on the topic of the housing crisis in the Bay Area, one white undergraduate English-major connected the current lack of affordable housing directly to the settler colonial past: ‘What are we doing in this room? If we are not Native Americans, then we are settler colonialists’. With only 0,463% of the total student population consisting of Native Americans (UC Berkeley Office of Planning and Analysis 2023), most of the students at the teach-in, as well as on campus, could then be identified as settler colonialists following this logic. The speaker thereby implicated all non-Native students, including himself, in the act of continued settler colonialism, by the very fact of them being on campus. He further urged the attendees of the teach-in to educate themselves on the history of land-grant universities and UC Berkeley. Much like Dylan’s instructions to his fellow students to look up whose land they are on and keep it in mind, clearly indicating that acknowledgement of the violent history is important in itself. Implicating all non-native students in the continued colonial relations is not unlike the introductory vignette where Anna reminded fellow students in her class that whiteness is ‘the structures around us’ and that ‘to do nothing is to be complicit’. To be complicit in this sense is given by the very fact that students are present on campus, they are part of the structure. However, there is also the option to act, and thereby resisting complicity. In the last section, I explore how implication can lead to possibilities of action.

Haunted campus, implicated students

The ghostly presence manifested through names, statues, or rumours is not coincidental. Walter Benjamin, although not speaking directly of ghosts or haunting, but of remembrance, the past, and the dead, argues that encounters between the living and dead emerge at moments of crisis and profoundly influence the politics and morality of historic memory (Benjamin 2003 [1940], 391). Arguably, most moments in history can be framed as that of one crisis or another. However, this specific time in the United States is characterised by distrust in government and increasing polarisation, creating a fertile ground for heated discussions on how to remember and address history. For activist students, the overarching crisis revolves around state violence against marginalised individuals, particularly police killings of Black people, but also the backlash from gender-critical movements that have successfully banned books and targeted LGBTQIA + communities in many states (see Friedman et al. 2021).

Just as it is not coincidental that settler colonial hauntings are happening now, it is not coincidental who experiences this haunting. It is indeed a certain subset of students, who are attuned to listening for social injustices that are both haunted by the past and evoke the past to mobilise action. Memory scholar, Michael Rothberg, argues that new social-justice-oriented movements often focus on acknowledging personal privileges (Rothberg 2019). He points to changing attitudes among activists, from identifying as victims to understanding themselves as ‘implicated subjects’. Here, implicated subjects are defined as those occupying a space aligned with power without being a direct agent of harm, or in other words, inheriting or benefitting from past and present regimes of domination, but not controlling them (Rothberg 2019).

As ‘implicated subjects’, student activists at UC Berkeley occupy multiple subject positions simultaneously. From their perspective, they are overburdened by working toward social change at the university, and some of the students experience discrimination in society because of their ethnicity, race, religion, gender expression, or sexual orientation. However, regardless of whether they experienced discrimination, most believed that being students on a campus directly tied to settler colonialism, made them implicated. This ‘complex implication’ (Noji and Rothberg 2023, 83) reflects the mutable positions of victims, perpetrators, or implicated subjects, depending on specific situations and dynamics. By merging a sense of implicatedness with attention to past injustices, a powerful incentive to action arises, as implicatedness offers a possibility for action (Noji and Rothberg 2023). At UC Berkeley, this is precisely what seems to be happening. When students understand themselves as implicated in ongoing historical injustices due to their association with a university that has yet to adequately address its colonial past, they are driven to take action, primarily in the form of seeking knowledge, raising awareness and asking for accountability from the university. This is evident in the importance placed on the responsibility to be aware of and to address (continued) historical injustices on campus, as is visible in the campaign to rename buildings and certainly in the spreading of rumours across campus. It is also visible in the attention that students give to local injustices in the greater Bay Area. Students repeatedly highlight the importance of acting where one is situated, for example, by supporting local organisations through donations or volunteer work. This reflects the importance students place on rectifying local historical injustices by acting where they are implicated.

Importantly, the critiques voiced by activist students towards the university, are primarily directed at the structural level. Their focus is on holding powerful institutions accountable for instigating change. By understanding themselves as implicated subjects, students do not seek to shift the primary responsibility onto themselves but rather create possibilities for collective and individual action. Recognising their implicatedness highlights how individuals are entangled in events that may initially appear beyond the agency of individual subjects without detracting from the critique of structural inequality.

The implicatedness described by the students is not unlike the call for locating racism closer to home, made by Baldwin (1963). In his extensive writings on racism, the theme of innocence is explored as the inclination of white Americans to locate racism outside themselves (Baldwin 1963):

 … people who imagine that history flatters them … are impaled on their history like a butterfly on a pin and become incapable of seeing or changing themselves, or the world. This is the place in which it seems to me, most white Americans find themselves. Impaled. They are dimly, or vividly, aware that the history they have fed themselves is mainly a lie, but they do not know how to release themselves from it, and they suffer enormously from the resulting personal incoherence. This incoherence is heard nowhere more plainly than in those stammering … Do not blame me, I was not there. I did not do it. My history has nothing to do with Europe or the slave trade. (Baldwin 1998 [1965], 723)

By disassociating oneself from atrocities, it becomes possible to dislocate responsibility and blame from oneself: ‘I was not there’. For Baldwin, this locating of blame elsewhere also traps white Americans ‘like a butterfly on a pin’, without the possibility to change themselves or the world because they are unable to realise that the history they are proud of is made up of lies. If white ignorance and innocence are a dislocation of racism, the work done by student activists at UC Berkeley can be understood as a relocation of racism and white supremacy in the midst of campus and within themselves. Unlike the impaled butterfly, the student activists at UC Berkeley, whether white or not, consciously locate white supremacy in themselves by proximity to whiteness as a structure, and actively try to change themselves and the world. They are then doing exactly what Baldwin hoped for, as ‘it is the innocence which constitutes the crime’ (Baldwin 1998 [1963]:292). The haunting presence of the past that is so present for the students is then a release from history through a relocation and re-actualisation of history.

Conclusion – haunted to act, acting to haunt

For student activists, UC Berkeley’s settler colonial origins and white supremacist legacy permeate and haunt the campus, pointing to the (trans)locality of continued unaddressed inequalities that shape the university of today. The analytical terminology of haunting makes it possible to understand a myriad of legacies, and objects, including namesakes of buildings, statues, and human remains, as being called forth by and calling upon, activist students for political action in the name of social justice. Drawing connections from when the land was seized to build UC Berkeley from Indigenous people to today is thus both a way to portray the university as forever embedded in the colonial encounter and a way to learn to live with the ghosts themselves. The lingering presence of white supremacist ideals emanates from building names into buildings and the campus proper and spurs students’ search for knowledge and awareness raising. The university’s possession of ancestral remains establishes a connection between the university’s settler colonial foundation and the ongoing practice of retaining remains against the wishes of the descendants. Simultaneously, the rumours of the quantity and location of ancestral remains point to a continued fumbling interest in and awareness of continued colonial relations and a specific sociality, in which the history of land grabs is activated and relocated in the present.

The hauntings at UC Berkeley are at once specific to the locality of Berkeley and a symptom of this decade’s larger global attention to reactivate historical connections and tie them to continued structural inequalities. The haunting of the settler colonial past situates students as implicated subjects by the very fact that they are students at UC Berkeley; they walk the campus, and they swim in the pools or enter the buildings. Alhough also directing a structural critique at the university, a sense of implicatedness opens possibilities for action. It is discomforting to be on a haunted campus and to dig up past atrocities, but it is also a way to answer the call from the past, and evoke the past as an argument in current social justice fights.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the students at UC Berkeley who allowed me to follow their work and shared important insights with me. Without them, this research would not be possible. I am also grateful to the Center for Higher Education at UC Berkeley for hosting me during my time in Berkeley. I want to extend my thanks to the two anonymous reviewers from Globalisation, Society and Education, and to my colleagues Eva Iris Otto and Annika Isfeldt who provided invaluable comments on earlier drafts of this article.

Disclosure statement

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

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

The research is supported by the Danish Independent Research Fund as part of the larger project: ‘Fighting for e/quality: Comparative ethnographies of new student movements’, [grant number 9037-00160B]. A research stay at the Center for Studies in Higher Education was also supported by: Augustinus Fonden, Brorsons rejselegat, Fulbright Denmark, Torben og Alice Frimodts fond, and William Demant Fonden, Danmarks Frie Forskningsfond.

Notes

1 All names are pseudonyms. Interlocutors have been asked to give informed consent following the ethical code of conduct suggested by the American Anthropological Association.

2 A student-run course at UC Berkeley is referred to as a ‘DeCal’. It is a course offered to undergraduate students, taught and developed by other students under the guidance of a faculty member. Each year, more than 100 decals are offered in topics as diverse as ‘Baking’, ‘Harry Potter’, ‘Wine Tasting’, ‘Video Game Development’ and ‘Introduction to Molecular Biology’. A Decal is comparable to other elective courses and is graded pass/fail.

3 The committee goes under the name ‘Building Name Review Committee'; it consists of representatives of students, staff, and faculty, and is tasked with reviewing the available material in a proposed case and recommending a decision to the chancellor. UC Berkeley has opted to refer to renamings as a ‘denaming’ because they have decided to grant temporary names until a yet unspecified procedure will help decide on a proper ‘renaming’ (Office of the Chancellor 2023). In this article, however, I refer to the process of ‘denaming’ as a ‘renaming’ because a renaming is what activists have called for, and to keep in the tradition of other scholars who have written on similar practices elsewhere (cf. Brown 2019; Mamvura 2022). (For a discussion on buildings as structures of whiteness also see Fanshell 2023.)

4 The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) was passed in 1990. The act requires institutions that receive federal funding to repatriate remains and objects to federally recognised tribes (Nash and Colwell 2020). Discussions about repatriation of stolen remains and artefacts are ongoing globally and remains a contested area (Hicks 2020).

5 The museum gallery is, at the time of writing, closed because staff members are prioritising complying with NAGPRA spurred by substantial and enduring critique from Indigenous and native groups. Many remains and artefacts are insufficiently labelled and their provenience cannot be documented, complicating the process of repatriation (Platt 2021, 173). A new state audit from 2022, estimated that it would likely take UC Berkeley another 10 years to repatriate the remaining objects and remains (Tilden 2022, 21).

6 It was sometimes unclear whether the number included both human remains and funerary objects. If both are included, the number, in fact, is approximately 500,000 (Tilden 2022, 21).

7 Ishi did live very close to a room of exhibited human remains, and was depressed by its presence (Scheper-Hughes 2001, 14).

8 This rumour is also directly tied to factual data. Ishi was widely known in San Francisco at the time and served as a living exhibit at the Museum, was portrayed in the media as a “wild man” and was objectified and exoticised (Field 2005).