Education is a systematic filter to maintain white intellectual supremacy and suppression of Black intellectual potential

Labor, Ownership, and Education Settler colonialism requires an explicit connection between land and citizenship. The original arbiter of full participation in the colonial political economy was not White manhood. Several White men in the colony lived as indentured servants, share croppers, or otherwise dispossessed. Their agency within the colonial arrangement was barely above the Black enslaved (Williams, 1944). The lynchpin to citizenship was land, or property ownership. This connection between land ownership and citizenship created a fundamental link between ownership and humanity. This link continues to bear much consequence for Black education today.

Education funding at the K-12 level is largely determined by property taxes. Children who live in neighborhoods with higher property values benefit from the resources available at well-funded schools. Children who live in poorer neighborhoods endure underresourcing, high teacher turnover, overcrowded classrooms, and a milieu of additional challenges to their educational access. Unsurprisingly, neighborhood school funding is highly racialized and historical. Steering potential Black homeowners to areas with lower property values, government collusion in the obstruction of Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) home loans dispensed to Black veterans, and “White flight” have all worked to consolidate large segments of the Black population to impoverished neighborhoods and subsequently underresourced schools. All of these realities work to concretize notions of mattering and humanity. These realities are even more intriguing when one considers Anderson’s (1988) assertion that universal public education, particularly in regard to iterations forged in the U.S. South, is a Black idea. When analyzed through the lens of organizational or political theory, the challenges of public education can appear unfortunate, possibly evidence of the ills of capitalism, if one were a Marxist.2 However, through the lens of anti-Blackness, these regulatory failures can be understood as White supremacy’s response to Black agency with reassertions and reminders that “The Black” is “slave.”

Public education, the institution designed to prepare students for higher education, is predicated on anti-Blackness. If one is not an owner or the progeny of an owner, one is not entitled to an adequate education. Public education funding is a direct model of plantation politics. The maintenance of a public education system dependent on property taxes institutionalizes a social arrangement of dispossession. It also serves as an anti-Black filter for higher education. Refusal on the part of higher education to substantively respond to the failures of public education reflects its complicity in anti-Blackness.

Institutionalization of Black Suffering

Relegating Black people to labor that models colonial arrangements or reasserts linkages between ownership and humanity perpetuates a system of antiBlackness, but in some ways, these arrangements can be understood as resultant. One of the defining principles of anti-Blackness is the negation of Black humanity by way of violence. Dumas (2016) argues, Black people exist in a structurally antagonistic relationship with [white frames of] humanity . . . antiblackness marks an irreconcilability between the Black and any sense of social or cultural regard . . . [antiblackness necessitates] utter contempt for, and acceptance of violence against the Black. (p. 13)

White humanity is dependent on its ability to harm Black life. To avoid violence against Black people would place White humanity in question because, in an anti-Black polity, White humanity is predicated on Black inhumanity. Black enslavement was maintained by physical, sexual, and psychological brutality. Similarly, the reign of Jim Crow was established through the terrorization of Black communities.

Within higher education, there are similar configurations of anti-Black violence. While physical insecurity is less evident, psychological and economic vulnerabilities persist. Microaggressions, tokenism, impostorship, and racial battle fatigue attest to the psychological torment regularly visited upon Black humanity in higher education (Dancy, 2014; Dancy & Hotchkins, 2017; Dancy & Jean-Marie, 2014; Smith, 2014). Contemporary Black student protest against the culture of White antagonism on college campuses has been largely in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter Movement (Johnston, 2015). The continued defunding of HBCUs reflects a sordid commitment to the elimination of Black enterprise. It also undergirds the relationship of trauma between Blackness and the educational system, a relationship HBCUs play a protective role in fighting against. In many ways, HBCUs are the contemporary manifestation of Underground Railroad safe houses.3 While not beyond a critique of settler colonial strivings, they have also protected and supported Black students along their journey to educational and economic freedom amid a dangerous environment. Defunding HBCUs exposes the state’s commitment to Black vulnerability.

In these settler colonial relationships, Black resistance and despair is understood as not only a nuisance but also a public display of Black suffering for the consumption of a White audience (Alexander, 1995). As discussed earlier, while Whiteness may understand “the Black” as having sentient capacity (ability to perceive or feel), there is not relational capacity (ability to interact; Wilderson, 2010). Thus, Black suffering merely decorates the landscape of White humanity. It cannot be responded to with understanding and empathy. Instead it is Black full intellectual participation in higher education that is illegible, accumulated (collected), exchangeable, and openly vulnerable (Anzaldúa, 1981; Wilderson, 2010). Black academics are not subalterns but the property (slaves) of their colleagues (Wilderson, 2010).

Policy responses to anti-Black violence reveal higher education’s commitment to the maintenance of Black trauma. The standard institutional approach is to establish protocol for racial bias incidents (Hughes, 2013). If the campus is progressive, the particular incident (such as a noose displayed in a quad, Black-face party, or fraternity song celebrating the lynching of Black men) will be swiftly addressed and repudiated. Punishment will be summarily delivered to the individuals clearly responsible, and the campus will publicly disavow the incident. For several reasons, this process supports anti-Blackness. As Hughes (2013) argues, higher education’s insistence on characterizing anti-Black violence as incidental or anomalous functionally erases the history of trauma experienced by Black bodies on White campuses (Wilder, 2013). It frames White perpetrators as foolish and ignorant, possibly even racists, but not as terrorists enacting violence against Black life. In addition, the modus operandi prioritizes the public image of the White institution not the assault on Black humanity