Universities,slavery,and the unthought of anti-Blackness

Abstract

Over the past 10 years there has been an increase in institutional recognition of how US universities and their founders directly participated in and benefitted from Black chattel slavery. However, these developments have largely escaped the attention of scholars who take higher education as their object of study. This article offers a conceptual reading of how apology efforts around slavery have unfolded at a single university. Drawing on the intersections of Black Studies and decolonial scholarship, I consider how revised institutional narratives develop through efforts to address and incorporate these violent histories.

Keywords

Anti-Blackness coloniality higher education modernity slavery

The lie, noun and idiom (as in lie of the land), at the center of everything is in the silence, then and now, about power, about the structuring presence of anti-blackness, and the ways and what it positions one to see and hear, positions those would claim the freedom to walk, drive, and “stand their ground,” as participant in unseeing and unspeaking this foundational anti-blackness even as it emerges as most apparent in spaces and places, in where and how we live, how we are consigned to living deaths, how we die, and the forms that our struggles to live and change must take.

(Christina Sharpe, 2014b, “The Lie at the Center of Everything”)

The academy never stood apart from American slavery—in fact, it stood beside church and state as the third pillar of a civilization built on bondage.

(Craig Steven Wilder, 2013, Ebony & Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities)

Over the past 10 years there has been growing recognition of the role that US universities and their founders played in Indigenous colonization and Black enslavement (Auslander, 2010; Brophy, 2008; Brown University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice, 2006; Clarke and Fine, 2010; Green, 2015; John Evans Study Committee, 2014).¹ Craig Steven Wilder (2013) offers the most comprehensive and illuminating historical account of this institutional involvement. By tracing how the profits of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and colonial plantation economy ended up in university accounts, mapping the elite social networks these institutions supported (and were in turn supported by), and outlining the role of enslaved persons in actually building and serving schools, Wilder demonstrates that “American colleges were not innocent or passive beneficiaries of conquest and colonial slavery” (p. 11). Apart from benefitting materially, scholarship produced in many higher education institutions also provided ideological support for racial, colonial, and imperial subjugation (Harding, 2011; Hong, 2008; Said, 1978; Spivak, 1988; Tuhiwai Smith, 1999; Wynter, 2003).

With growing recognition of colleges’ and universities’ roles in slavery and colonization, a number of institutions have publicly addressed their histories of violence. In addition to official apologies, institutional efforts have included the commissioning of archival research, physical memorialization, and exploration of these issues through courses and conferences. University apologies can also be understood as part of a larger international apology culture in which nation-states in particular have sought to address and reconcile their histories of racial and colonial violence. This trend has sparked a body of critical work that examines the affective and political dimensions of these apologies (e.g. Al-Kassim, 2008; Coulthard, 2014; Henderson and Wakeham, 2013; Povinelli, 2002; Simpson, 2011; Somani, 2011; Trouillot, 2000; Walcott, 2011). However, university apologies have yet to be similarly subjected to sustained study.

It is therefore the purpose of this article to contribute to a deeper understanding of university apologies and the kinds of transformations they either facilitate or foreclose by offering a reading of how one institution, the University of Virginia (UVa), has publicly addressed its institutional history of slavery. Ultimately, I ask about the limits of institutional apologies and revised histories that neither identify nor disrupt the structuring anti-Blackness that continues to organize US higher education.

Blackness and modernity

In his discussion of the history of slavery at the College of William and Mary, Brophy (2008) suggests, “the College’s teachings led us towards Enlightenment at points and darkness at others” (p. 1139). Against this notion, some decolonial and Black Studies scholars suggest that this “Enlightenment” and “darkness” are in fact two sides of the same modern/colonial world system in which autonomy, freedom, safety, and prosperity for some (or at least, the promises of these) were guaranteed only at the expense of others’ bodies and lands (Grosfoguel, 2012; Silva, 2014). This contrasts with the liberal humanist account of conquest and enslavement, which suggests that these were either “lapses” of judgment within modern reason and morality, or else evidence of their incompletion, and were eventually overcome with inevitable progression toward universal human rights and freedoms. The analytic of modernity/coloniality counters this narrative by emphasizing that the modern West was and continues to be constituted not autonomously, nor against already-existing Others, but rather through its colonial/racial construction of those Others. It also emphasizes the foundational and ongoing role of colonization and slavery in the expansion of global capitalism and the nation-state.

Although its particular formations have shifted significantly over time, this modern/colonial dynamic has outlasted the formal political decolonization of much of the world, notwithstanding ongoing settler colonialism, and the abolition of chattel slavery, because it is not only a political or economic relation, but rather affects all realms of life, social relations, and ontoepistemological categories (Maldonado-Torres, 2007). Cognizant of the risk of flattening the variegated experiences and structural positions of those differently racialized within modernity, I draw on Black Studies to emphasize the specificities of ongoing anti-Black logics and the institution of Black chattel slavery.

Black Studies interrogates the position of Black persons during slavery as well as during what Hartman (2007) has called the “afterlife of slavery” wherein “black lives are still imperilled and devalued by a racist calculus and a political arithmetic that were entrenched centuries ago,” affecting “skewed life chances, limited access to healthcare and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment” (p. 6). At the same time as many Black Studies scholars emphasize that the position of Black enslaved persons in modernity is without analogy, they also emphasize that modernity itself would not have been possible without Black slavery (Sexton, 2015). As Wilderson (2010) put it succinctly, “No slave, no world” (p. 11). Hence, the project of Black Studies has a much broader relevance than to Black people alone (James, [1969] 1993; Silva, 2014).

The anti-Blackness of Man

The role of slavery and its afterlife in the ordering of modern social life operates at many levels, but perhaps most notably in the notion of humanity itself. In her work, Sylvia Wynter offers an important distinction between “Man” and other “genres of the human.” As modern Man (Euro-descended, middle-class, college educated) claims to be the apex of humanity, he deems all other humans—not only racialized peoples, but also the unemployed, the incarcerated, the homeless—to be sub- or non-human (Wynter, 1994, 2003). This hierarchy of humanity has been used to justify the overrepresentation of Man’s interests and the subordination of others to his will. Wynter traces how the foundations of European modernity entailed a transformation, starting in the 15th century, from a worldview that transcendentalized the Church and the desire for salvation, to a worldview that transcendentalized the State and secularized knowledge (Wynter, 2003). However, the transformations that took place were not internally produced within Europe, but rather were enabled through Indigenous colonization and Black enslavement. These provided both the material and conceptual conditions for the emergence of the West, including the architectures of the nation-state, capital, and the modern university.

In order to invent himself, Man had to forcibly incorporate his Others into a European (conception of the) world and deny their distinct modes of thinking and being the status of “alternative modes of being human” (Wynter, 2003: 282). According to Wynter,

it was to be the figure of the Negro (i.e., the category comprised by all peoples of Black African hereditary descent) that [the West] was to place at the nadir of its Chain of Being; that is, on a rung of the ladder lower than that of all humans. (p. 301)

Categorization of Black people as non-human and evolutionarily inferior justified their relegation to what Fanon (2008) famously described as “the zone of nonbeing” (p. xii). In the era of chattel slavery, this translated into a logic according to which Black flesh was inscribed and treated as fungible—that is, interchangeable, accumulable, and objectified as property (Hartman, 1997; King, 2014; Spillers, 1987).

In addition to studies of slavery, many Black Studies scholars address post-emancipation Black subjugation, carefully cataloguing the ongoing “material, rhetorical, state, discursive, intimate, violences to which black bodies and psyches are subjected” (Sharpe, 2014b: 206). Particularly in the context of this study, it is imperative to note that Black people’s hard-won increased presence in higher education institutions does not forestall this subjugation. Many universities continue to employ Black people in poorly compensated and often-precarious staff positions (Pettit, 2008) and contribute to the gentrification of neighborhoods surrounding their campuses, often with significant Black populations (Baldwin, 2015; Bose, 2014). Black faculty, students, and staff regularly experience anti-Black racism from their peers and professors (e.g. Griffin et al., 2014; Gusa, 2010; Harper et al., 2011; Johnson-Ahorlu, 2012; Patitu and Hinton, 2003; Patton and Catching, 2009; Solórzano et al., 2000) and are interrogated and abused by campus and local police (e.g. McMillan Cottom, 2014; Vest, 2013).

Anti-Blackness also inheres in the production of knowledge itself. In spite of the many powerful disruptions enacted through Black Studies and associated fields, Sharpe (2014a) argues that an anti-Black “death-dealing episteme continue[s] to be produced in ‘think tanks’ and in the university, by teachers, lecturers, researchers, and scholars, and then reproduced by the students who have been educated in the classrooms and institutions where [Black people] labor” (p. 61). This enduring “death-dealing episteme” is not merely contained within explicitly white supremacist knowledge, like the now thoroughly discredited field of phrenology or even today’s more blatantly pathologizing strains of mainstream social science. Instead, according to Wynter (1994), “both the issue of ‘race’ and its classificatory logic” are built into the basic logic of the modern order of knowledge (p. 47). Spillers (1987) called this order an “American grammar,” arguing, “the ruling episteme that releases the dynamics of naming and valuation, remains grounded in the originating metaphors of captivity and mutilation” (p. 68). Yet, not only does this grammar extend beyond the United States, it also extends beyond an enduring order of knowing to encompass an enduring order of being as well. Silva (2013) captures both in her notion of “the ontoepistemological grammar that governs post-Enlightenment accounts of existence” (p. 50) and that structures Man’s claims to autonomy, self-determination, and mastery of universal reason. These claims are then used to justify the imposition of Man’s will on the world and on (and in contrast to) those whom he deems his irrational and outer-determined racial Others.

To consider that this modern/colonial grammar has endured for over five centuries does not minimize its internal variation, the importance of its ongoing contestation, nor the possibility of its further rearticulation. However, it does raise questions about the available possibilities for justice within it.

Black life

According to Moten (2003),

There are those who act as if the only way to speak or fathom or measure the unspeakable, unfathomable, immeasurable venality of the slavers is by way of the absolute degradation of the enslaved. But such calculation is faulty from the start insofar as we are irreducible to what is done to us… (p. 56)

Indeed, although the modern global order situates Blackness as “always already a referent of commodity, an object, and the other, as fact beyond evidence” (Silva, 2014: 81), this in no way delimits what Black life was, is, and can be. Wilderson clarifies the difference thusly: “I’m not saying that in this space of negation, which is blackness, there is no life. We have tremendous life. But this life is not analogous to those touchstones of cohesion that hold civil society together” (Hartman and Wilderson, 2003: 187).

Many have noted that in excess of both the position of non-being ascribed to Black persons by modernity’s grammar and of Man’s narrowly imagined possibilities for existence, Blackness has always offered ways of knowing and being otherwise (Moten, 2003, 2008, 2013; Scott and Wynter, 2010; Sexton, 2011; Silva, 2013, 2014). According to Silva (2014), because Man’s claims to sovereign subjecthood are dependent upon Black affectability and objecthood, the stability of this relation is constantly undermined by “the radical potential Blackness hosts” (p. 84). This radical potential contains “another text … a grammar that exceeds existing articulations of the human as a thing of self-determination” (Silva, 2013: 57). If Man’s conceptual coherence and material continuation are premised on Blackness as a threatening but necessary lack and negation, then Black life cannot be adequately recognized or represented by or through his grammar without repeating this violence.

Reading the case of slavery at UVa

Officially founded in 1819, today UVa is one of the most highly regarded public universities in the United States. Given the ways in which students and alumni jealously guard its institutional traditions (Office of the Dean of Students, 2015), UVa offers a compelling example of the abiding strength of “organizational sagas” in higher education. According to Clark (1972), an organizational saga is “a collective understanding of unique accomplishment based on historical exploits of a formal organization” (p. 178). These sagas generate loyalty and belief in the distinguished nature of an institution when they are premised on “a credible story of uncommon effort, achievement, and form” (p. 183). Proud narratives about UVa’s idealistic provenance and idyllic early days are indeed central to its institutional identity (Longstreth, 2014), as is the outsized figure of UVa founder, statesman, and enslaver Thomas Jefferson.

Jefferson remains a ubiquitous presence at the university. He is consistently evoked at formal events like convocation and graduation, memorialized in statues and scholarships, and frequently recalled in the colloquial designation of the institution as “Mr. Jefferson’s University.” In particular, the university celebrates his ambitious vision and detailed plans to create an “Academical Village” to educate future “statesmen, legislators, and judges, on whom public prosperity and individual happiness are so much to depend” (Jefferson, 1818). Given that Jefferson (1818) understood education as a civilizing cure for “barbarism and wretchedness,” it is telling that he is celebrated for his democratic visions of schooling (Carpenter, 2013).

The glowing images of the university and its founder held by many students and alumni contrast with the perspective of those who express concern about UVa’s low wages and poor benefits for its disproportionately racialized service staff, its effect on property prices in the area, and its largely uncritical celebration of Jefferson (University and Community Action for Racial Equity (UCARE), 2012a). The institution known to many as Mr. Jefferson’s University is known by some in the surrounding community as the “Plantation” (UCARE, 2012a). UVa students have also offered critiques. Following the March 2015 beating of Black UVa student Martese Johnson by law enforcement officers in an area adjacent to the university, the Black Student Alliance issued a document, “Towards a Better University,” which outlines several suggestions for how the university administration can “commit to addressing the issues and concerns of its Black students, Black faculty, and Black workers” (p. 5). The document also notes that these issues and concerns are longstanding:

Black students, faculty/staff, and workers have for decades, more or less, been pushing for the same actions to promote truth regarding the University’s bitter legacy, to improve the experiences of all Black people on campus, to enhance the educational experiences of Black students, and most importantly, to make this University an environment in which future generations of Black students, faculty, and workers can feel safe and welcomed. (p. 5)

Together, these dynamics make UVa a rich site for examining institutional apologies.

Slavery at UVa

When construction of UVa began in 1817, enslaved persons “formed a significant portion” of those laboring to build the new school (President’s Commission on Slavery and the University, 2014). Some free Black workers also participated in the construction. Enslaved persons, including some children, hauled supplies and erected university buildings (Bruce, 1920a; Wilder, 2013). As a cost-saving effort, these individuals were not owned by the university but rather, according to Wolfe (2013b), “hired from local owners, who were paid a set amount per slave,” with costs totaling over US$1000 each year (Wilder, 2013). Enslaved people continued to be held and forced to labor on university grounds after it opened 8 years later. Although there are conflicting accounts of exactly how many people the university itself owned at any one time, most accounts put the number as more than none and less than five (Oast, 2009; Schulman, 2003; Wolfe, 2013a). While students were prohibited from bringing persons enslaved by their families to school, those enslaved by hotels and inns where students lived labored on the university’s grounds (Wolfe, 2013b). Free Black people who worked at the university also lived in communities around the school that were eventually gentrified and later acquired by the university (Hood and Basnak, 2015).

University professors and administrators owned the majority of enslaved persons on campus, some of whom were purchased from Jefferson himself (Faulkner, 2013; Longstreth, 2014). According to Oast (2009), “slaves became a permanent fixture at the university” (p. 220) and also labored on a nearby farm acquired by the school. Deceased enslaved persons were also used in medical dissections (Bruce, 1920b). Housing for enslaved persons at the university was makeshift, as Jefferson did not include this in his vision of an Academical Village (Longstreth, 2014). Minutes from the Board of Visitors’ (BOV) meetings document its involvement in the management of enslaved persons on university grounds, and university faculty adjudicated disputes between students and enslaved persons (Oast, 2009). In 1829, the university instituted a slave patrol (Wolfe, 2013a). By the time of the Civil War, the state of Virginia held the highest population of enslaved Black people in any state (nearly half a million), and more than 100 of these individuals were held on UVa’s campus. At the end of the Civil War, the faculty overwhelmingly agreed that freedpersons were not deserving of any assistance, and the BOV similarly did not put forth any provisions (Wolfe, 2013a).

Institutional apology

UVa’s first significant step in addressing its history of slavery came with the February 2007 instalment of a small, slate memorial near the Rotunda building, the crowning structure of Jefferson’s Academical Village. The plaque states, “In honor of the several hundred women and men, both free and enslaved, whose labor between 1817 and 1826 helped to realize Thomas Jefferson’s design for the University of Virginia” (Faulkner, 2013: 5). A few months later, in April 2007, a BOV resolution expressed “particular regret for the employment of enslaved persons in these years” before the Civil War (for the full text, see Wood, 2007). These events followed shortly after the Virginia Assembly (H.J.R. 728, 2007) passed a resolution on the 400th anniversary of the state’s founding. The state’s resolution expressed regret for “maltreatment and exploitation of Native Americans” through settlement, its participation in the “immoral institution of human slavery” prior to the Civil War, and racist state legislation that continued throughout the 20th century. However, UVa’s resolution focused exclusively on slavery, making no reference to its history of segregation or to the Monacan people who once inhabited the land on which the university was eventually built. The absence of the Monacan people from the university’s institutional history is worthy of study in its own right. As much as slavery was a condition of possibility for the university’s existence, so too was the displacement of the Indigenous people on whose traditional and ancestral territories it now sits (see Hantman, n.d.; Hantman et al., 2000; Samarrai, 2003).

In 2012, after uncovering what are believed to be the graves of enslaved and free Black people during construction efforts, the university decided the area would be “preserved and memorialized” (Wolfe, 2013b). In 2013, a report commissioned by a UVa alumni group noted that institutional efforts to grapple with slavery had thus far “lacked an [sic] cohesive frame- work and in some cases, institutional backing” (Faulkner, 2013: 3). That same year, the university announced the formation of a commission to advise the President on further addressing the issue of slavery. According to its charge, the commission will provide recommendations and consider “opportunities for recognition and commemoration,” such as developing potential collaborations with Monticello (Jefferson’s nearby home and plantation), proposing educational projects for the university community and visitors, and considering further possible means of memorialization (President’s Commission on Slavery and the University, 2013). In the autumn of 2014, the university hosted a symposium, “Universities Confronting the Legacy of Slavery,” and in 2015 it named a student dormitory after William and Isabella Gibbons, who both labored as enslaved persons on university grounds prior to the Civil War and later became prominent post-bellum Black community leaders (Bromley, 2015). The university library is currently preparing an exhibition on slavery at the university that is set to open in 2018 (Schwartzburg, 2015).

UCARE’s response

The University and Community Action for Racial Equity (UCARE) formed soon after the UVa BOV made their apology in 2007. Founder and UVa professor Frank Dukes found the apology itself to be inadequate, suggesting, “It’s important to learn about history and to commemorate, to not forget, but we also have to act” (as cited by Wolfe, 2013b). UCARE (2012a) describes it as their vision “To understand and remedy the University’s legacy of slavery, segregation and discrimination within and outside of the University,” and their mission to learn from community members, communicate and foster understanding about UVa’s legacy of slavery, and “be a catalyst to generate commitment and actions that promote racial justice, equity, and reconciliation.” UCARE is made up of community members and UVa students, staff, and faculty. It has conducted research, held public forums, compiled a list of initiatives at UVa’s peer institutions that address histories of slavery (UCARE, 2012b) and supported student research. This research led to the formation of a student group, Memorial for Enslaved Laborers, which has demanded a memorial distinct from the gravesite discovered in 2012. In addition, UCARE helped organize a course for students and community members entitled “UVA: Race and Repair.”

UCARE (2012a) also produced a report, “Call for Reflection and Action,” which documents responses from members of the university and local community to UVa’s apology. While few of those questioned had heard of the apology, those who had articulated a number of concerns, including reluctance to report frequent occurrences of racial discrimination at the university out of concern that complaints will either be ignored or be responded to with retaliation. Also documented are concerns that university researchers exploit the local community as research subjects, that the university contributes to racial disparities in housing, education, and employment in the area, and that the university has not made its apology meaningful through the demonstration of a “real understanding of the underlying problems and a commitment to act to right the wrongs that are a product of that history” (p. 5). The document also puts forth visions and goals for “reflection, deliberation, and action” derived from dialogues with various groups and individuals. These include sponsoring further research on slavery and the history of university–community relations, promoting more visible public acknowledgements and student awareness of UVa’s history of slavery and segregation and a commitment to address contemporary racialized university employment practices.

Can the enslaved person speak?

According to a piece in the official university magazine, the various groups engaged in “efforts to understand, document and commemorate the slaves who lived and labored at the University of Virginia” are motivated by a “common set of questions: Who were these enslaved men and women who helped build and run the University? What did they do, how were they treated and how should the University treat their legacy?” (Wolfe, 2013b). For instance, this is largely the focus of a “student-led,” institutionally sponsored brochure, “Slavery at the University of Virginia: Visitor’s Guide” (University of Virginia, 2013).

The brochure features a section “Violence Against Slaves on U.Va. Grounds,” and several other accounts of slavery at the university also document instances of exceptional violence (Oast, 2009; Schulman, 2003; Wolfe, 2013b). However, as the brochure itself astutely notes, even these archived incidents were recorded largely because they were instances of “person-on-property violence with damages being paid to the owner of the slave but no thought given to the human victim.” That the brochure includes this qualification is notable, and yet its framing of only discrete acts of bodily harm as “violence against slaves” can obscure what Hartman (1997) described as “the terror of the mundane and quotidian” that made possible the very (non-)position (and, in the case of male enslavers’ rape of enslaved women, the very reproduction) of enslaved peoples (p. 4). The brochure does not account for the fact that, in addition to any discrete act of violence and the sanctioned violability of the enslaved by their enslaver, the person-as-property relation was itself the foundational violence of slavery. As long as this structuring violence remains muted, as Sexton (2011) cautions, “our analyses miss the paradigm for the instance, the example, the incident, the anecdote” (p. 34).

The visitor’s brochure also highlights the story of Henry Martin, who labored on university grounds first as an enslaved person and then as a freedman, a path not uncommon for formerly enslaved persons who had few post-bellum options for employment. According to the brochure, “Martin made a strong impression on generations of students and was remembered as a man of ‘intelligence, firmness, and diligence’” (University of Virginia, 2013). In 2012, a plaque was placed in Martin’s honor on the university grounds (Wolfe, 2013b). Yet, as former UVa Professor Corey D.B. Walker notes,

We have to remember, these people were enslaved. No matter how much we want to romanticize it, they did not control their destiny … The problem of making the assertion that [Martin] was wonderful and a beloved figure belies the very violence of the institution of chattel slavery. (as quoted by Graves, 2012)

Another story in the same brochure (2013) features William and Isabella Gibbons who “were able to maintain family connections and become literate despite the constraints of slavery.” It is further noted that after the Civil War Isabella “became the first person of color to teach at the Jefferson School, a freedman’s school in Charlottesville.” The Gibbonses were also featured in a dissertation about slavery at Virginia institutions, which claimed, “those with open ears and a desire to learn could pick up more than the average slave might on a plantation or farm” (Oast, 2009: 238). The author goes on to suggest, “college slaves might pick up the table scraps from the educational feast around them, if they were hungry enough” (p. 254). While few would deny that the Gibbonses’ story is worthy of note, in emphasizing the benefits of education recognized and “scrapped” by those working on university grounds, and celebrating their later professional successes, these accounts may implicitly assert the school’s underlying goodness and affirm the universal and even redemptive value of its knowledge.

In this way, UVa’s efforts to address its past have in some cases resulted in enslaved persons being retroactively “included” into the university’s organizational saga, even to the point of deeming them minor university heroes. This observation is not intended to malign these individuals, but is rather meant to prompt further consideration: Can the complex lives of enslaved persons really be “known” through these institutional accounts? Why were these particular individuals and not others featured in official university materials? And why are the accounts of their lives and their place at the university constructed in this way? Writing about recent historical novels, Sharpe (2014b) suggests that some contemporary portrayals of slavery are “engaged in constructing a useable past out of which a post racial present and future might be understood to have been always already coming into existence—even under the most brutal of systems” (p. 194). Through its curation of enslaved persons’ stories, the university may be similarly crafting a “useable past” out of which to reassert its own benevolence and potentially refuse “in the present to account for the persistence, necessity, and instrumentalization of black suffering” (Sharpe, 2014b: 197).

Apart from both the undoubtedly limited range of stories that are accessible through official archives (Hartman, 2007) and “the tensions of what it is possible to tell” (Walcott, 2000: 142), emphasizing the stories of individual enslaved persons who are deemed to be exceptional can preclude reflection on Black enslavement as a structuring condition of possibility not only for the modern university’s accumulation of wealth, power, and prestige but also for the modern world itself. At the same time, narratives that emphasize the humanity of enslaved Black persons, as well as free Black persons, only in ways that can be read as deserving of empathy or admiration from Man’s gaze, may repeat the initial negation. As Hartman suggests,

It’s as though in order to come to any recognition of common humanity, the other must be assimilated, meaning in this case, utterly displaced and effaced: “Only if I can see myself in that position can I understand the crisis of that position.” (in Hartman and Wilderson, 2003: 189)

Institutional accounts of slavery are circumscribed by the possibilities for representation and recognition within Man’s grammar, and by the preservationist imperative to contain possible fractures in the university’s organizational saga. The result may be the reproduction of underlying frames of anti-Blackness in the present, as well as the fiction that enslaved persons’ lived experiences are readily accessible, when in fact, as Professor Walker notes, “We don’t know Henry Martin” (Heuchert, 2012).

The selective interest in individual stories is also telling for its almost total focus on enslaved persons. It is particularly notable that there is little reference to Thomas Jefferson as an enslaver, given that he is otherwise the object of almost obsessive focus at the university. This is not to suggest that the stories of enslavers ought to be featured in order to “balance” the stories of those whom they enslaved, but rather to interrogate why the latter are of such interest and the former are not. One way to disrupt a narrative of benevolence is indeed to re-examine hagiographic histories. There is value in such correctives not primarily in order to produce a judgment about Jefferson’s particular disposition as an enslaver (e.g. as in Wiencek, 2012) —as if there were such a thing as a “good” slaveowner—but to consider how the very philosophy that guided Jefferson’s vision for the university, and indeed the US nation-state, may also be organized by frames of coloniality, white supremacy, and anti-Blackness (Robin, 2012; Wilder, 2013).

Such consideration might, for example, allow for a more critical reading of the segment of the 2007 BOV resolution that emphasized,

the notion of involuntary servitude is repugnant and incompatible with the ideals upon which the University was founded, the ideals upon which the commonwealth was organized in 1776, and the ideals embodied in our national Declaration of Independence [drafted by Jefferson] in the same year. (Wood, 2007)

If the figure of the irrational, affectable, and unfree Black person provides a foundational conceptual contrast to, and material condition of possibility for, Man’s claims to universal reason, sovereignty, and liberty (Silva, 2007; Wynter, 2003), then anti-Blackness and the university’s founding ideals are not incompatible but rather constitutively complementary. An examination of the university’s founding documents, and its entire archive of self-constituting statements, might therefore tell us much about the place of slavery as an unspoken condition of institutional possibility. The board’s evocation of national ideals also extends the possible scope of examination to include the ways in which public universities are tied to national ideological investments.

Enslaved persons as UVa’s unpaid laborers

The UVa visitor’s brochure on slavery (2013) frames the university’s use of enslaved persons after its construction as a means “to fulfill institutional duties” based on “the University’s need.” A university Vice President for Academic Affairs suggested that Jefferson did not initially want to have slaves on campus but, “he did not anticipate that there was no way to operate the University without slavery. There was no other labor force available” (as cited by Wolfe, 2013b). By describing slavery as a “need,” these statements reconstitute the unthought logic that subordinates Black life to White objectification and instrumentalization (Hartman and Wilderson, 2003). At the same time, although enslaved persons did of course labor at UVa (both productively and reproductively) to the benefit of their masters (both the school and the associated enslavers), institutional accounts that pose enslavement as merely an extreme form of unpaid labor provide an incomplete picture.

In its 2007 resolution, the BOV expressed “its profound respect for the contributions of these women and men [both enslaved and free], by whose ingenuity and labor much of what is now admired at the University as a national and world treasure came to be” (Wood, 2007). Beyond the fact that granting recognition via labor valorizes human worth based on productivity within capitalist frameworks, and beyond asking what it means to express gratitude for ingenuity and labor that were stolen, it is pertinent to ask what is obscured by framing slavery as primarily a matter of stolen labor.

According to King (2014), “Black labor is just one kind of use within an open, violent and infinite repertoire of practices of making Black flesh fungible,” a fungibility that underwrites not only the modern/colonial political economy but also its libidinal economy as well (Wilderson, 2010). Rather than the exploitation of labor, slavery was fundamentally premised on the objectification and expropriation of flesh; rather than mere economic violence, it entailed “total violence for the extraction of total value” (Silva, 2014: 83). Nonetheless, given the choice to frame enslaved persons as unpaid laborers, it is notable that there is little discussion about possible reparations to descendents of those enslaved at UVa. Furthermore, while improving the wages and working conditions of UVa’s largely low-wage Black laborers today would be inadequate for addressing the full extent of institutional anti-Blackness, even this does not appear to be on the university’s agenda (Living Wage Campaign at the University of Virginia, 2012).

Interrupting and/or reasserting institutional narratives?

Universities today are highly concerned to protect their “brand” in the eyes of legislators, potential students, alumni, and corporate partners (Osei-Kofi et al., 2013; Wæraas and Solbakk, 2009). Undoubtedly, this plays a role in institutional decisions about how, or whether, to address histories of slavery. Brophy (2008) notes that, at the University of Alabama, “fear of permanent loss of political power, however unlikely in practice, underlay a refusal to apologize” for institutional slavery (p. 1107). At another school, a professor argued that an apology would “distract legislatures and those who ask them for more pressing business” (Brophy, 2008: 1107).

However, apologies may also be understood as public demonstrations of institutional remorse and rectitude that are necessary to preserve not only an internal sense of pride but also a positive external identity (Clarke and Fine, 2010). In the case of UVa, institutional materials note that “peer institutions” have taken steps to address their histories of slavery, suggesting that at least part of the motivation to act was an imperative to prove itself equal to these elite private schools, like Brown and Yale (Faulkner, 2013; President’s Commission on Slavery and the University, 2013). UCARE (2012b) also leveraged the work of peer institutions to advocate for further action.

Scholars of nation-state apologies have argued that such apologies are often a means to reaffirm legitimacy, or what Povinelli (2002) describes as “the self-evident good of liberal institutions and procedures” (p. 16). Ahmed (2004) also points out that when a nation takes on the mantle of shame, it suggests it has failed to “live up to its ideals,” which ultimately serves as a redemption narrative, that is, as “evidence of the restoration of an identity of which we can be proud.” Indeed, at UVa an alumni commissioned catalogue of institutional initiatives about slavery justifies further research on the topic by invoking Jefferson, who said,

This institution will be based on the illimitable freedom of the human mind. For here we are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it. (as cited by Faulkner, 2013: 17)

This invocation of freedom and truth can be read as a claim to institutional exceptionalism even in the context of acknowledging its participation in slavery. In the 2007 BOV resolution, it is also noted that the board “recommits itself to the principles of equal opportunity and to the principle that human freedom and learning are and must be inextricably linked” (Wood, 2007). In emphasizing its recommitment to education and equality, the BOV mobilizes its apology to assert moral legitimacy going forward. Critical scholars of nation-state apologies note that past wrongs are often recognized as a means to achieve closure without enacting substantive social, political, or economic transformation (Coulthard, 2014; Simpson, 2011; Sunder Rajan, 2000; Trouillot, 2000). In much the same way, by suggesting slavery was a temporary lapse in good judgment, the UVa BOV is able to make a claim for absolution and potentially forestall future demands for restitution or for addressing institutionalized anti-Blackness.

If university apologies are oneway administrators attempt to position their institutions as “post-racial,” they can also be a means to start conversations and make demands, as UCARE has demonstrated. Leveraging the ambivalent potential of the apology and disrupting the potentially appeasing promises of liberal progress, like Hartman (2007) UCARE seems to ask, “To what end does one conjure the ghosts of slavery, if not to incite the hopes of transforming the present?” (p. 170). Efforts to draw connections from a history of slavery to the current experience of Black workers and students are important refutations of a narrative that might otherwise mobilize a moment of shame to suture a violent history into a tale of seamless progress. Whether these demands, or those of student groups like the Black Student Alliance (2015), will lead to significant institutional transformation remains an open question; whether this will enable a fundamental disruption of institutional anti-Blackness is even more uncertain.

Conclusion

In this article, I have argued that as formal recognition, apologia, and memorialization of institutional histories of racial violence proliferate, these must be understood with a critical eye to the frames of reference and representation that are employed. If in fact universities were not only built by enslaved persons and funded through a plantation economy, if they not only offered courses and produced research in support of racial hierarchies, but were also and continue to be premised on to the reproduction of Man and his purportedly universal (and thereby, racialized) order of knowledge and modern/colonial grammar of existence, then any institutional account of racial subjugation may continue to be organized by that anti-Black grammar.

Were universities to confront the full implications of the possibility that “slavery was the precondition for the rise of higher education in the Americas” (Wilder, 2013: 114), and for the rise of “global modernity itself” (Sexton, 2015: 166), they would likely be risking more than only their public images or alumni support. The question that remains open, not only for universities but for all of US society and the world, is whether the work of facing our varied and incommensurate relationships to slavery can ever be adequate to the task that is demanded of it. Is it possible to make visible and audible “the lie at the center of everything” (Sharpe, 2014b)? Is it possible to grapple with “the violence that underwrites the modern world’s capacity to think, act, and exist spatially and temporally” from within that world (Wilderson, 2010: 2)? And if efforts to do so are necessary but still inadequate, then what else may be done?

If the “everything” made possible by the lie is not everything that is possible but merely everything that is possible within a given mode of being human, then what remains is everything that is excluded—that is, everything else. Perhaps this is what Walcott (2000) meant when he suggested that slavery “becomes a site for signaling the various possibilities for living human life differently” (p. 146)—that is, for other genres of the human. Those now designated as Man’s “non-/sub-human” others have always enacted other conceptions of existence and modes of survival. As Wynter suggests,

We have lived the millennium of Man in the last five hundred years; and as the West is inventing Man, the slave-plantation is a central part of the entire mechanism by means of which that logic is working its way out. But that logic is total now, because to be not-Man is to be not-quite-human. Yet that plot, that slave plot on which the slave grew food for his/her subsistence, carried over a millennially other conception of the human to that of Man’s … So that plot exists as a threat. It speaks to other possibilities. (in Scott and Wynter, 2000: 165, emphasis in the original)

These possibilities may be illegible to Man and his institutions, but perhaps it is preferable that they remain so, lest the “threat” they pose be neutralized.

However, it may not be necessary to know the secrets of the “slave plot” in order to denaturalize Man’s grammar, to disrupt its reproduction and potentially sketch its edges, if not peer beyond them. More work must be done to examine what approaches might call into question not only the past, present, and future of higher education but also more fundamentally, “the grounding premises from which the metaphysical discourses of all population groups, all human systems—including that of the West—are generated” (Wynter, as cited by Walcott, 2000: 141). And if there is a risk that universities, and our attachments to them, cannot survive an honest confrontation with the full depth of their historical and ongoing role in the reproduction of racial and colonial violence, then the tasks that lie ahead are only that much more pressing.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers and editors of Cultural Dynamics for their invaluable feedback on earlier drafts of this article, as well as Dallas Hunt for his editorial suggestions and support. An initial draft of this article was presented at the 14th Annual Critical Race Theory and Anti-Colonial Studies Conference in October 2014.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Author biography

Sharon Stein is a PhD candidate in the Department of Educational Studies at the University of British Columbia. Her research examines the relationships between liberalism, coloniality, and capitalism in the past, present, and future of higher education. She has published articles in Decolonization: Indigeneity Education & Society, and Higher Education.

References

Ahmed

(2004) Declarations of whiteness: the non-performativity of anti-racism. borderlands 3(2). Available at: http://www.borderlands.net.au/vol3no2_2004/ahmed_declarations.htm

Al-Kassim

(2008) Archiving resistance: women’s testimony at the threshold of the state. Cultural Dynamics 20(2): 167–192.

Auslander

(2010) The other side of paradise: glimpsing slavery in the university’s utopian landscapes. Southern Spaces. Available at: http://www.southernspaces.org/2010/other-side-paradise-glimpsing-slavery-universitys-utopian-landscapes (accessed 10 September 2014).

Baldwin

(2015) The “800-pound gargoyle”: the long history of higher education and urban development on Chicago’s South Side. American Quarterly 67(1): 81–103.

Black Student Alliance (2015) Towards a better university. Available at: http://bloximages.newyork1.vip.townnews.com/dailyprogress.com/content/tncms/assets/v3/editorial/d/52/d5218da8-e700-11e4-a3c9-d3da3a32206c/55345d99d422e.pdf.pdf

Bose

(2014) Universities and the redevelopment politics of the neoliberal city. Urban Studies. Epub ahead of print 22 September. DOI: 10.1177/0042098014550950.

Bromley

(2015) New U.Va. residence hall, Gibbons House, named for former slave couple. UVA Today, 26 March. Available at: http://news.virginia.edu/content/new-uva-residence-hall-gibbons-house-named-former-slave-couple (accessed 15 August 2015).

Brophy

(2008) Considering William and Mary’s history with slavery: the case of President Thomas Roderick Dew. William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal 16(4): 1091–1139.

Brown University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice (2006) Slavery and justice: Report of the Brown University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice. Providence, RI: Brown University.

10.

Bruce

(1920a) History of the University of Virginia, 1819–1919: The Lengthened Shadow of One Man (Vol. I). New York: Macmillan.

11.

Bruce

(1920b) History of the University of Virginia, 1819–1919: The Lengthened Shadow of One Man (Vol. II). New York: Macmillan.

12.

Carpenter

(2013) Thomas Jefferson and the ideology of democratic schooling. Democracy and Education 21(2): 1–11.

13.

Clark

(1972) The organizational saga in higher education. Administrative Science Quarterly 17(2): 178–184.

14.

Clarke

Fine

(2010) “A” for apology: slavery and the collegiate discourses of remembrance-the cases of Brown University and the University of Alabama. History & Memory 22(1): 81–112.

15.

Coulthard

(2014) Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

16.

Fanon

(2008) Black Skin, White Masks. New York: Grove Press.

17.

Faulkner

(2013) Slavery at the University of Virginia: A Catalogue of Current and past Initiatives. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Idea Fund.

18.

Graves

(2012) In the age of slavery. The University of Virginia Magazine. Available at: http://uvamagazine.org/articles/in_the_age_of_slavery/

19.

Green

(2015) How to acknowledge a shameful past: universities across America are apologizing for their checkered histories. The Atlantic, 27 February. Available at: http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/02/how-to-acknowledge-a-shameful-past/386372/

20.

Griffin

Ward

Phillips

(2014) Still flies in buttermilk: black male faculty, critical race theory, and composite counterstorytelling. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 27(10): 1354–1375.

21.

Grosfoguel

(2012) Decolonizing Western uni-versalisms: decolonial pluri-versalism from Aimé Césaire to the Zapatistas. Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World 1(3): 88–104.

22.

Gusa

(2010) White institutional presence: the impact of whiteness on campus climate. Harvard Educational Review 80(4): 464–489.

23.

Hantman

(n.d.) Colonial legacies and the public meaning of Monacan Archaeology in Virginia. Available at: http://www.heritage.umd.edu/chrsweb/NPS/training/Hantman.htm (accessed 1 September 2014).

24.

Hantman

Wood

Shields

(2000) Writing collaborative history: how the Monacan Nation and archaeologists worked together to enrich our understanding of Virginia’s native peoples. Archaeology 53(5): 56–59.

25.

Harding

(ed.) (2011) The Postcolonial Science and Technology Studies Reader. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

26.

Harper

Davis

Jones

. (2011) Race and racism in the experiences of Black male resident assistants at predominantly White universities. Journal of College Student Development 52(2): 180–200.

27.

Hartman

(1997) Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press.

28.

Hartman

(2007) Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux.

29.

Hartman

Wilderson

III (2003) The position of the unthought. Qui Parle 13(2): 183–201.

30.

Henderson

Wakeham

(eds) (2013) Reconciling Canada: Critical Perspectives on the Culture of Redress. Toronto, ON, Canada: University of Toronto Press.

31.

Heuchert

(2012) On “Henry Martin Day,” university honors all who built it. UVA Today, 26 January. Available at: http://news.virginia.edu/content/henry-martin-day-university-honors-all-who-built-it (accessed 1 September 2014).

32.

H.J.R. 728 (2007) General Assembly Va. Available at: leg1.state.va.us/cgi-bin/legp504.exe?071+ful+HJ728ER (accessed 10 September 2014).

33.

Hong

(2008) “The future of our worlds”: black feminism and the politics of knowledge in the university under globalization. Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism 8(2): 95–115.

34.

Hood

Basnak

(2015) Diverse truths: unveiling the hidden layers of the Shadow Catcher commemoration. In: Tauke

Smith

Davis

(eds) Diversity and Design: Understanding Hidden Consequences. New York: Routledge, pp. 37–53.

35.

James

CLR

([1969] 1993) Black Studies and the contemporary student. In: Grimshaw

(ed.) C.L.R. James Reader. Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers, pp. 390–404.

36.

Jefferson

(1818) The Rockfish gap report: report of the commissioners for the University of Virginia. Available at: http://www.founding.com/founders_library/pageID.2361/default.asp

37.

John Evans Study Committee (2014) University of Denver. Available at: http://portfolio.du.edu/evcomm (accessed 1 September 2014).

38.

Johnson-Ahorlu

(2012) The academic opportunity gap: how racism and stereotypes disrupt the education of African American undergraduates. Race Ethnicity and Education 15(5): 633–652.

39.

King

(2014) Labor’s aphasia: toward anti-blackness as constitutive of settler colonialism. In: Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society. Available at: https://decolonization.wordpress.com/2014/06/10/labors-aphasia-toward-antiblackness-as-constitutive-to-settler-colonialism/ (accessed 10 September 2014).

40.

Living Wage Campaign at the University of Virginia (2012) Keeping our promises: toward a Living Wage at the University of Virginia in 2012. Available at: http://www.livingwageatuva.org/keeping-our-promises/

41.

Longstreth

(2014) The parts and their whole: conceptualizing a planning strategy for restoration at Thomas Jefferson’s Academical Village. Journal of Planning History 13(1): 3–23.

42.

McMillan Cottom

(2014) Walking without papers at ASU, the “New American University.” In: TressieMc. Available at: http://tressiemc.com/2014/06/29/walking-without-papers-at-asu-the-new-american-university/ (accessed 1 September 2014).

43.

Maldonado-Torres

(2007) On the coloniality of being. Cultural Studies 21(2–3): 240–270.

44.

Moten

(2003) Notes on passage (The new international of sovereign feelings). Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender, and the Black International 3(1): 51–74.

45.

Moten

(2008) The case of blackness. Criticism 50(2): 177–218.

46.

Moten

(2013) Blackness and nothingness (mysticism in the flesh). South Atlantic Quarterly 112(4): 737–780.

47.

Oast

(2009) Forgotten masters: Institutional slavery in Virginia, 1680–1860. PhD Thesis, The College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, VA.

48.

Office of the Dean of Students (2015) Students and traditions. Available at: http://www.virginia.edu/deanofstudents/studenttraditions.html

49.

Osei-Kofi

Torres

Lui

(2013) Practices of whiteness: racialization in college admissions viewbooks. Race Ethnicity and Education 16(3): 386–405.

50.

Patitu

Hinton

(2003) The experiences of African American women faculty and administrators in higher education: has anything changed? New Directions for Student Services 2003(104): 79–93.

51.

Patton

Catching

(2009) “Teaching while Black”: narratives of African American student affairs faculty. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 22(6): 713–728.

52.

Pettit

(2008) Academe maid possible: The lived experiences of six women employed as custodial workers at a research extensive university located in the southwest. PhD Thesis, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX. Available at: https://hdl-handle-net.web.bisu.edu.cn/1969.1/148438

53.

Povinelli

(2002) The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

54.

President’s Commission on Slavery and the University (2013) University of Virginia. Available at: http://slavery.scholarslab.org/ (accessed 1 September 2014).

55.

President’s Commission on Slavery and the University (2014) Historical context. University of Virginia. Available at: http://slavery.scholarslab.org/2014/06/01/historical-context.html

56.

Robin

(2012) Thomas Jefferson: American Fascist? (ed. Robin

). Available at: http://coreyrobin.com/2012/12/01/thomas-jefferson-american-fascist/ (accessed 1 September 2014).

57.

Said

(1978) Orientalism. New York: Knopf.

58.

Samarrai

(2003) U.Va., Monacan Indian nation leaders to discuss collaborative history during public discussion 23 October. University of Virginia News. Available at: http://www.virginia.edu/topnews/releases2003/monocan-oct-17-2003.html (accessed 1 September 2014).

59.

Schulman

(2003) Slaves at the University of Virginia. Available at: http://www.locohistory.org/Albemarle/Slaves_at_the_University_of_Virginia.pdf (accessed 1 September 2014).

60.

Schwartzburg

(2015) First floor exhibitions explore slavery and abolition. In: Notes from the Under Grounds: The Blog of the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library. Available at: http://smallnotes.library.virginia.edu/2015/06/16/slavery-and-abolition/ (accessed 15 August 2015).

61.

Scott

Wynter

(2000) The re-enchantment of humanism: an interview with Sylvia Wynter. Small Axe 8: 119–207.

62.

Sexton

(2011) The social life of social death: on Afro-pessimism and black optimism. InTensions 5: 1–47.

63.

Sexton

(2015) Unbearable blackness. Cultural Critique 90(1): 159–178.

64.

Sharpe

(2014a) Black Studies: in the wake. The Black Scholar 44(2): 59–69.

65.

Sharpe

(2014b) The lie at the center of everything. Black Studies Paper 1(1): 189–214.

66.

Silva

DFD

(2007) Toward a Global Idea of Race. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

67.

Silva

DFD

(2013) To be announced: radical praxis or knowing (at) the limits of justice. Social Text 31(1_114): 43–62.

68.

Silva

DFD

(2014) Toward a black feminist poethics: the quest(ion) of blackness toward the end of the world. The Black Scholar 44(2): 81–97.

69.

Simpson

(2011) Dancing on Our Turtle’s Back: Stories of Nishnaabeg Re-Creation, Resurgence and a New Emergence. Winnipeg, MB, Canada: Arbeiter Ring.

70.

Solórzano

Ceja

Yosso

(2000) Critical race theory, racial microaggressions, and campus racial climate: the experiences of African American college students. The Journal of Negro Education 69(1–2): 60–73.

71.

Somani

(2011) The apology and its aftermath: national atonement or the management of minorities? Postcolonial Text 6(1): 1–18.

72.

Spillers

(1987) Mama’s baby, papa’s maybe: an American grammar book. Diactrics 17(2): 64–81.

73.

Spivak

(1988) Can the subaltern speak? In: Nelson

Grossberg

(eds) Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, pp. 24–28.

74.

Sunder Rajan

(2000) Righting wrongs, rewriting history? Interventions 2(2): 159–170.

75.

Trouillot

(2000) Abortive rituals: historical apologies in the global era. Interventions 2(2): 171–186.

76.

Tuhiwai Smith

(1999) Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. Dunedin, New Zealand: Zed Books.

77.

University and Community Action for Racial Equity (UCARE) (2012a) Call for reflection and action. Available at: https://pages.shanti.virginia.edu/ucare/files/2011/11/Call-to-Action_Final_May-2012.pdf (accessed 1 September 2014).

78.

University and Community Action for Racial Equity (UCARE) (2012b) Initiatives at peer institutions to address this history of slavery at a local level. Available at: https://pages.shanti.virginia.edu/ucare/files/2012/06/Initiatives-at-Peer-Institutions.pdf (accessed 1 September 2014).

79.

University of Virginia (2013) Slavery at the University of Virginia: Visitor’s guide. Available at: http://vpdiversity.virginia.edu/sites/vpdiversity.virginia.edu/files/documents/SlaveryatUVaBrochure_FINAL.pdf

80.

Vest

(2013) What doesn’t kill you: existential luck, postracial racism, and the subtle and not so subtle ways the academy keeps women of color out. Seattle Journal for Social Justice 12(2): 471–518.

81.

Wæraas

Solbakk

(2009) Defining the essence of a university: lessons from higher education branding. Higher Education 57(4): 449–462.

82.

Walcott

(2000) Pedagogy and trauma: the middle passage, slavery, and the problem of creolization. In: Simon

Rosenberg

Eppert

(eds) Between Hope and Despair: Pedagogy and the Remembrance of Historical Trauma. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc, pp. 135–151.

83.

Walcott

(2011) Into the ranks of man: vicious modernism and the politics of reconciliation. In: Mathur

Dewar

DeGagne

(eds) Cultivating Canada: Reconciliation through the Lens of Cultural Diversity. Ottowa, ON, Canada: Aboriginal Healing Foundation, pp. 341–349.

84.

Wiencek

(2012) Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves. New York: Macmillan.

85.

Wilder

(2013) Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing.

86.

Wilderson

III (2010) Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of US Antagonisms. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

87.

Wolfe

(2013a) Slavery at the University of Virginia. In: Encyclopedia Virginia. Available at: http://www.EncyclopediaVirginia.org/Slavery_at_the_University_of_Virginia (accessed 1 September 2014).

88.

Wolfe

(2013b) Unearthing slavery at the University of Virginia. The University of Virginia Magazine. Available at: http://uvamagazine.org/articles/unearthing_slavery_at_the_university_of_virginia (accessed 10 September 2014).

89.

Wood

(2007) University of Virginia’s Board of Visitors passes resolution expressing regret for use of slaves. UVA Today, 24 April. Available at: https://news.virginia.edu/content/university-virginias-board-visitors-passes-resolution-expressing-regret-use-slaves (accessed 10 September 2014).

90.

Wynter

(1994) “No humans involved”: an open letter to my colleagues. Forum N.H.I: Knowledge for the 21^st Century 1(1): 42–73.

91.

Wynter

(2003) Unsettling the coloniality of being/power/truth/freedom: towards the human, after man, its overrepresentation—an argument. CR: The New Centennial Review 3(3): 257–337.