What Does it Take? by Caleb E. Dawson

What does it take for Black lives to matter at a historically white university?

Across the history of Black campus movements – from Black Studies to Black Lives Matter – we find a litany of loved ones lost to extraordinary violence, on- and off-campus. Perhaps you remember some of their names. Their premature deaths form a pattern of evidence that Black lives do not yet matter to society. In their wake (Sharpe, 2016), we Black folk routinely reassert and seek to institutionalize that Black lives matter (Bradley, 2016; Dancy et al., 2018; Douglas et al., 2020; Mustaffa, 2017; Williamson-Lott, 2018). And occasionally, our mobilizations manifest in the improved experiences of some in higher education (Berrey, 2015; Ferguson, 2012; Karabel, 2005).^[1] Social movements, and Black social movements as exemplars among them, are a formidable force for social and institutional change (Omi & Winant, 2014; Ray, 2019). There would be no racial reckoning without Black mobilizations for reckoning.

As I research the racial and gender politics of institutional change, I wonder, why does it feel like Black death is a pre-requisite of change in how Black lives matter at/to a university? I have held onto Black folk grieving over the routine disregard for Black suffering unless a Black (cis-man’s) death makes the headlines – Black folk who are simultaneously grieving, theorizing, and strategizing in anticipation of “next time.” Maybe after the next Black death, things will finally be different. “Maybe I will be next,” and they might take more seriously the totality of Black suffering. It may be the fire next time (Baldwin, 2013). There is something about the spectacle of extraordinary violence that captures attention and threatens to unsettle racial stupidity (Fleming, 2018; Taylor, 2016). And yet it appears from this dreadfully long litany that our deaths are never enough to end the tragedy of anti-Blackness (ross, 2020).

Cultivating Black life in universities apparently demands much more than Black death. What university is so sensitive to Black premature death that, without agitation or public relations ploy, they habitually mobilize to improve the social and material conditions of Black people within or without the institution? Or better yet, what university prevents Black suffering?

Neither the universe nor the university bends toward justice without considerable social action. For this reason, Robin D. G. Kelley (2016) lovingly reminds student activists of the Black Lives Matter era that “universities will never be engines of social transformation.” People have always been the engines. To engender such transformation in and through universities takes serious work.

It takes recording, rendering, and representing the violence of Black suffering. It takes surveys, focus groups, and external reviews. It takes storytelling, circulation, and repetition. It takes a series of demands, meetings, hires, fires, votes, reports, and campaigns. And just as we should be bothered by all that the social world requires for Black life and death to be taken seriously, we should take seriously how the cultivation of Black life and mitigation of Black suffering takes serious and exhaustive work. Among many things, it takes work for Black lives to matter institutionally.

According to abolitionist Frederick Douglass, “if there is no struggle, there is no progress,” so I study the struggle on which progress depends. My research uncovers how both historically white (educational) institutions and Black folks’ struggles for institutional change are sites of Black suffering (Dumas, 2014). Too many people, like these institutions, both require and take for granted all the work that it takes of Black people generally – and Black womxn in particular – to make “diversity,” “equity,” “inclusion,” and now “antiracism” work for Black and non-Black people (Harley, 2008; Hirshfield & Joseph, 2012; Mawhinney, 2011).

The demands on Black people to make Black – let alone all – lives matter demands answers to new questions. What is the toll on Black people of all that it takes to make Black lives matter? What does it cost for Black people to be working towards pro-Black solutions to anti-Black institutional problems? How does it feel for this work to be taken for granted, assumed, appropriated?

And then, what if all the work of making Black life and mitigating Black suffering was taking the very lives of Black people – was wearing down those who are building up alternative futurities against overwhelming odds?

Would all of this taking of Black life matter?

Caleb Dawson is a playful community organizer who loves to dance and indulge in food that tastes too good to be vegan. He is a fourth year PhD Candidate in Education who studies the cultural politics of institutional change and the political economy of inclusion in higher education. Son of a Black father and Ethiopian American mother, Caleb has found himself at home with loved ones on the unceded land of the Ohlone people, now called the San Francisco Bay Area of California.

References

Baldwin, J. (2013). The Fire Next Time. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Berrey, E. (2015). The Enigma of Diversity: The Language of Race and the Limits of Racial Justice. University of Chicago Press.

Bradley, S. M. (2016, February 1). Black Activism on Campus. The New York Times. https://nyti.ms/2jRNAvi

Dancy, T. E., Edwards, K. T., & Earl Davis, J. (2018). Historically White Universities and Plantation Politics: Anti-Blackness and Higher Education in the Black Lives Matter Era. Urban Education, 53(2), 176–195. https://doi.org/10.1177/0042085918754328

Douglas, T.-R. M. O., Toldson, I., Shockley, K. G., & Banks, J. A. (2020). Campus Uprisings: How Student Activists and Collegiate Leaders Resist Racism and Create Hope. Teachers College Press.

Dumas, M. J. (2014). ‘Losing an arm’: Schooling as a site of black suffering. Race Ethnicity and Education, 17(1), 1–29. https://doi.org/10.1080/13613324.2013.850412

Ferguson, R. A. (2012). The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference. University of Minnesota Press. https://muse.jhu.edu/book/24877

Fleming, C. M. (2018). How to be less stupid about race: On racism, White supremacy, and the racial divide. Beacon Press.

Harley, D. A. (2008). Maids of Academe: African American Women Faculty at Predominately White Institutions. Journal of African American Studies, 12(1), 19–36. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12111-007-9030-5

Hirshfield, L. E., & Joseph, T. D. (2012). ‘We need a woman, we need a black woman’: Gender, race, and identity taxation in the academy. Gender and Education, 24(2), 213–227. https://doi.org/10.1080/09540253.2011.606208

Karabel, J. (2005). The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Kelley, R. D. G. (2016, March 1). Black Study, Black Struggle [Text]. Boston Review. http://bostonreview.net/forum/robin-d-g-kelley-black-study-black-struggle

Mawhinney, L. (2011). Othermothering: A Personal Narrative Exploring Relationships between Black Female Faculty and Students. Negro Educational Review, 62/63(1–4), 213–232. https://libproxy.berkeley.edu/login?qurl=http%3a%2f%2fsearch.ebscohost.com%2flogin.aspx%3fdirect%3dtrue%26db%3deue%26AN%3d73802158%26site%3deds-live

Mustaffa, J. B. (2017). Mapping violence, naming life: A history of anti-Black oppression in the higher education system. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 30(8), 711–727. https://doi.org/10.1080/09518398.2017.1350299

Omi, M., & Winant, H. (2014). Racial Formation in the United States. Routledge.

Ray, V. (2019). A Theory of Racialized Organizations. American Sociological Review, 84(1), 26–53. https://doi.org/10.1177/0003122418822335

ross, kihana miraya. (2020, June 4). Opinion | Call It What It Is: Anti-Blackness. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/04/opinion/george-floyd-anti-blackness.html

Sharpe, C. E. (2016). In the wake: On Blackness and being. Duke University Press.

Taylor, K.-Y. (2016). From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation. Haymarket Books. http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/berkeley-ebooks/detail.action?docID=4356956

Williamson-Lott, J. A. (2018). Jim Crow Campus: Higher Education and the Struggle for a New Southern Social Order. Teachers College Press.

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[1] Whether any Black folk – and which Black folk (e.g., social class, student vs staff, gender, immigration, ability, etc.) – are beneficiaries of these improvements is part of the story for another time.