‘Built on my B(l)ack’: racial capitalism and anti-Blackness in predominantly white institutions of higher education

ABSTRACT

This article presents a qualitative analysis of Black student organizers’ experiences of racism at the University of Missouri, where they led a resurgence of campus struggles in 2015. Semi-structured interviews with former student organizers were conducted and, together with archival materials, subject to thematic analysis. Black students faced frequent racist aggression, wherein their presence in campus social and intellectual life was cause for white alarm and aggression. Analyzing experiences and impacts of everyday violence in relation to broader systems of anti-Blackness and racial capitalism, the article identifies educational, psychological, social, spatial, material, and political consequences of campus racism. Several broader impacts of anti-Black racism are delineated, including psychological harm, economic dispossession, and institutional maintenance. The findings illuminate the effects of varied but cohesive instances of anti-Black racism in higher education, making visible repetitive moments of everyday violence that universities both enable and erase.

KEYWORDS:

• Higher education
• racism
• black students
• anti-Blackness
• racial capitalism
• predominantly white institutions

Acknowledgments

This research was made possible by the generous support of the American Educational Research Association’s Minority Dissertation Fellowship and the CUNY Graduate Center’s American Studies Dissertation Fellowship and IRADAC Dissertation Fellowship. Thanks to CS1950 organizers and MU faculty and staff for sharing their experiences with me, and for the time, effort, and emotion they invested and risks they took to demand a less violent institution.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. This research was approved by a university institutional review board (#2018–0663), and all interviewees provided written consent to participate in the study.

2. Pseudonyms are used for interview participants; however, participants featured here have previously shared their experiences in news articles, public forums, documentary films, and published writing.

3. The hyper-segregated white suburbs of nearby St. Louis and Kansas City supply the largest demographic block of students at the university. These suburbs also surround the town of Ferguson, where months of protests followed police officer Darren Wilson’s brutal public murder of teenager Michael Brown in 2014.

4. Greektown refers to the part of campus where primarily class-privileged white students live and socialize in fraternity and sorority mansions subsidized by the university (Jozkowski and Wiersma‐Mosley 2017). Several participants discussed white fraternity racism and misogyny; one organizer, Erica, recounted a white male student calling a ‘n_____ b____’ while forcing her and another Black female student out of a fraternity party.

5. See American Psychiatric Association (2013) for more on major depressive disorder and posttraumatic stress disorder. See Carter (2007) for an in-depth exploration of the psychological effects of racism with a focus on traumatic stress.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the American Educational Research Association.