Today, for #ScholarStrike, I’m wearing my higher ed hat. I’m working on a book right now, #InsurgentAcademics, that examines the unsung work of Black, brown, and Indigenous scholars in public humanities.

I argue that since the very moment that these entered universities, they have been transforming them. Let’s briefly outline white supremacy in higher ed, shall we?

There are 100+ years of unacknowledged history that the very “solutions” offered by well-meaning white to recuperate the value of the university fail to recognize. And this work has been undertaken in largely hostile institutions — historically and at present.

The university cannot be separated from its intimate relationship to racial capitalism and settler colonialism.

Tremendous work has been done by scholars like Craig Wilder, @ProfLMH , Ruth Simmons, Al Brophy, and others to shed light on the connections between universities and slavery. I'll link to them at the end of this thread.

Early universities in the US were built on racial capitalism, on the fungibility and commodification of Black people. This ranged from enslavement in the U.S. to wealth generated by Black and Indigenous people laboring on colonial plantations in the Caribbean.

Dispossession of Indigenous communities is the precondition for racial capitalism for the US -- and the US university.

As the team behind Land Grab Universities demonstrates beautifully, universities have derived significant financial benefit from stolen land. http://landgrabu.org  ( @meredithlmccoy, @jenguiliano & I have a piece coming out on this in NAIS soon).

University coffers swelled with the spoils of settler colonialism, genocide, and enslavement. At the same time, white scholars in these institutions produced knowledge that ossified the backbone of white supremacy that undergirds the US.

This litany of theft is not a ”legacy.” It’s the university’s present. Universities continue to violate indigenous sovereignty. They are intertwined w/the prison-industrial complex. Black and other minoritized workers & students routinely experience structural and casual racism.

One might argue that universities continue to run on the politics of the plantation, marked by the history and present of its settler-colonial project and complicity with enslavement.

We can see this in curriculum, racial demographics of administration and tenure-line faculty, relative overrepresentation of POC in contingent faculty positions, treatment of college athletes, relationship with police, surveillance state pedagogy of our colleagues.

We see this in the fact that many of us have more Black and brown colleagues among the maintainers of our universities than among faculty, in the struggles of scholars of ethnic studies.

We see this in the fact that the systematic defunding of public higher education began when larger numbers of Black, brown, and Indigenous students started going to college.

We see this the fact that the demands of our Black and brown students are the SAME ones that they were making in the 1970s.

A tweet from the Chronicle this summer read, "Professors need to prepare themselves to discuss concepts like structural racism with their students this fall." I told a friend, "They [white people] seem to not realize that we [scholars of color] are professors too."

Take the lead of these scholars and recognize that we have to start FIRST with how white supremacy shapes the very places in which we work, in which our students learn.

Ending structural racism *must* include undoing white supremacy WITHIN higher education, if it’s even redeemable — and some days I’m not sure. Learn about it. Talk to students about it. Read the work. Cite the scholars. Recommendations below.

. @Prof_Evans - Black Women in the Ivory Tower https://books.google.com/books?id=HUskAQAAMAAJ&source=gbs_book_other_versions

. @alavelleporter - The Blackademic Life https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Blackademic_Life/DDe0DwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=blackademic+life&printsec=frontcover

Fred Moten and Stefano Harney - "The University and the Undercommons" https://www.minorcompositions.info/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/undercommons-web.pdf

Craig Wilder - “Ebony and Ivy” https://www.google.com/books/edition/Ebony_and_Ivy/2einBQAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=ebony+and+ivy&printsec=frontcover

@ProfLMH, James T. Campbell & Alfred Brophy - Slavery and the University https://www.google.com/books/edition/Slavery_and_the_University/5UOCDwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=slavery+and+the+university+harris&printsec=frontcover

Sekile M. Nzinga, Lean Semesters https://jhupbooks.press.jhu.edu/title/lean-semesters