Abstract
This article offers a pedagogical response to the growing demand that institutions of higher education must contend with their racial pasts. Drawing upon concepts from the literature on collective memory, students work with institutional archives that showcase localized examples of racial injustice. Students are then asked to imagine potential options for the collective redress of these institutional racial pasts. This activity provides a chance for students to consider how racial histories are preserved and told, and to suggest solutions for changing that story. Moreover, through engaging in this activity, students are encouraged to see their campus environments within the context of contemporary understandings of institutional racism.
Organizations and institutions across the landscape of higher education in the United States have recently responded to demands to acknowledge their racial histories as part of the #BlackLivesMatter movement (Anderson and Span 2016). This is a significant undertaking, as many American colleges and universities were built upon a foundation that relied on the spoils of institutional racism. The founding of many campuses themselves is built upon enslaved labor (Walters 2017; Wilder 2013) and the settler colonialist project of removing Native Americans from their land (Nash 2019). Moreover, research from colleges and universities was used to propagate ideas aligned with scientific racism (Wilder 2013), and higher education institutions established policies and rhetoric meant to discourage racial mixing on campuses (Ferber 2011). In short, many institutions of higher education are built upon significant histories of racial inequality.
Beginning with a 2001 acknowledgment of Yale University’s connection to enslavement, colleges and universities throughout the United States, including the University of North Carolina, William & Mary, and Georgetown University, among others, have documented the ties that their institutions have had with enslaved labor, the Civil War, and segregation efforts (Brophy 2018; Dugdale, Fueser, and de Castro Alves 2001). These recognitions have varied in their forms, including formal apologies (Clarke and Fine 2010), community-wide conversations about the institutional legacy of enslavement (Walters 2017), and monuments on campus (Walters 2017). In this current moment where many institutions of higher learning are contending with their racial pasts, it is essential that sociologists bring these conversations into the university classroom.
Although sociologists may use archives within their own research, archival experiences, and especially those that use the archives of institutions of higher education, are often left out of sociology curriculums. This pedagogical article offers a corrective through the implementation of an activity that allows for undergraduate sociology students to discover the racial history of their own academic institutions within the context of contemporary understandings of institutional racism. Drawing upon concepts from the literature on collective memory, students work with institutional archives that showcase localized examples of racial injustice. Students are then asked to imagine potential options for collective redress of these institutional racial pasts. In what follows, the article provides a brief introduction to collective memory and detailed information about the activity. Then, to highlight the pedological impact of this activity, reflections of student participants are excepted and discussed, along with suggestions for strengthening and adapting the activity.
Collective Memory
Collective memory encompasses how narratives about the past are formed and replicated for future generations (Wertsch 2009). Importantly, the concept emphasizes that memory is not an objective, individualized experience, but instead a subjective experience that grows out of the larger social context of that memory (Conway 2010). That is, “it is in society that people normally acquire their memories. It is also in society that they recall, recognize, and localize their memories” (Halbwachs 1992:93). Collective memories are contested territories, wherein opposing groups struggle to control an official narrative through shaping society’s recollection of the past. Thus, collective memory can serve as a tool that allows the memories of dominant groups to eventually become the sanctioned and established memory of the collective (Schuman, Schwartz, and D’Arcy 2005). These memories are distinctly racialized. Many of our dominant histories are shaped by a white narrative of the past, which has shaped our understandings and awareness of racial histories (Squires and Upton 2020).
Dominance of the official memory of record is not fixed, however. The current time period may be particularly well-suited to a reckoning of racial history via collective memory projects, as a politics of regret (Olick 2007) has recently ushered in a number of communities, institutions, and nations expressing remorse for historical injustices. In this way, collective memory projects of institutions of higher education can be interpreted as examples of this turn toward historical reckoning and remembrance. Just as dominant groups may use collective memory projects to develop their version of history as official public memory, collective memory projects also provide an opportunity for marginalized groups to establish and disseminate countermemories (Zerubavel 1995).
Indeed, if countermemories are paired with ideal conditions, they may transform into openly recognized versions of the past (Whitlinger 2015). These conditions include what (Raj Andrew Ghoshal 2013:330) has termed “mnemonic opportunity structures,” finding that collective memory projects were more successful if they occurred in places with high commemorative capacity (based on if the local institutions and individuals were conducive to commemorative practices), if they contained moral valance (and thus included individuals easily cast as heroes or villains), and if they had ascribed significance (or were considered remarkable events at the time that they occurred). Successful memory projects also are more sustained when they include conditions for positive intergroup contact (Whitlinger 2019). Given these conditions, classroom-based discussions of institutional histories with racial injustice may be particularly ripe conditions for mnemonic change.
Moreover, collective memory projects may be able to change individual views of contemporary racial issues. For example, understanding and awareness of historical racial violence as facilitated by collective memory projects, along with political ideology, was found to influence support for government redress of historical injustices (Ghoshal 2015). That is, how individuals understand aspects of the past influences not only how they comprehend the past but also how they interpret the present and the expectations that they develop for the future (Rusen 2004).
Aleida Assmann (2008) introduced two types of remembering at work within the realm of cultural memory: active and passive. Active remembering is shaped by the canon of society, described as curated memories that have come to be understood as both durable and valuable. Passive remembering, however, is shaped by the archives of society, which is situated between the canon and the act of forgetting. Importantly, (Assmann 2008:104) contends that these categories are fluid, wherein the canon can “recede into the archive, while elements of the archive may be recovered and reclaimed for the canon.” This pedagogical exercise extends this theoretical ideal by applying it to the archives of the racial histories of institutions of higher education.
Unsettling and Rectifying Racial Histories
The goal of this activity is to encourage undergraduate sociology students to engage with historical documents in ways that capture contemporary sociological debates about institutional racism. In so doing, students are asked to propose avenues for reshaping institutional collective memories regarding racial history, allowing students to practice moving from simply identifying a social problem to proposing concrete solutions for collective redress. This lets students apply definitions of racism to a variety of concrete situations, while emphasizing the sociological tenant that racial injustice in the past still shapes the racial outcomes of the present. Thus, it is essential that students have familiarity with the sociological literature on racism and how this conceptualization differs from a more individualistic perspective prior to the instructor initiating the activity. This includes perspectives such as color-blind racism (Bonilla-Silva 2010), laissez-faire racism (Bobo 2011), racial formation theory (Omi and Winant 2014), racialized social systems (Bonilla-Silva 2001), and systemic racism (Feagin 2006). Moreover, students should be familiar with basic ideas of collective memory and historical redress, such as conversations about reparations, and examples of how reparations have been instituted in the past. This background knowledge will allow for students to propose a range of suggestions to address historical injustices.
Activity Description
The activity should be paired with the reading assignment of Assmann’s (2008) “Cannon and Archive” prior to arriving to class, which the instructor may want to review. Before beginning the activity, instructors will select a number of historical documents regarding their institution’s history with race for their students to explore. For example, this activity was originally implemented in Racial and Ethnic Relations courses at Oxford College of Emory University, the liberal arts campus of a large, private research university. Oxford College is the original campus of Emory University, and now functions as one of two pathways to an undergraduate education at Emory University. Evidence suggests that although Emory University did not directly own enslaved people, the institution did rent enslaved people to provide labor for the campus (Auslander 2010). Building off of this knowledge, the instructor worked closely with the institution’s archival librarians and the university historian, selecting roughly 25 historical documents from the university archives. These items represented the history of race at the institution, including the relationship with enslavement, the admission of international students, and the push toward desegregation. Documents included Board of Trustee minutes which referenced renting enslaved people, institutional yearbooks which contained racist jokes, and flyers from protests organized by the Black Student Alliance, traversing the lifespan of the institution.
Once documents that illustrate the institutional history of race are selected, the documents will be arranged on tables around the periphery of the classroom. Allot the students 25 to 30 minutes to walk through and view the items, which depending on archival regulations may include handling or photographing the items. After this initial walk through, students are organized into small groups of three to five students. Students are instructed to choose one item of interest to discuss in their small groups, mentioning why it stood out to them and what it revealed about the archives of the institutional racial history. As students share, the instructor should walk around and listen in on the small groups. These group discussions are helpful for students to practice linking individual items to institutional pasts, as well as comparing the canon of the institutional history with the archive in front of them. The Big Six historical thinking concepts were designed to help students establish a meaningful understanding of the past through working with historical texts (Seixas 2017; Seixas and Morton 2013). Instructors may use these concepts as guiding questions to their students, with a special focus on two of the concepts that touch on the continuity and change between the past and the present (how has the role of race at our institution changed since the time of these documents?) and the ethical dimension (what is to be done today about the legacy of race at our institution?).
Students will complete the rest of the activity at home. They will be given an activity sheet that details the following instructions, which will be verbally discussed and clarified with the class: Your task is to write an essay in the form of a blog post that explores your experiences with the archival materials. Choose one of the items from the session, and use the blog post to explain the item to someone who is not in class. What is the significance of the item? What does it communicate about our university’s history with race? What was it like to see this item as a student of our university? Does this item reflect the “canon” or the “archive” of our university? How does this tie into any concepts addressed in the readings or in class? Then, propose specific suggestions about how our university should address their history with race. Please provide definitions of your key concepts and arguments using academic sources.
Students will post the blog post on a learning management system, such as Blackboard or Canvas, so that all students will be able to see and interact with the entries from their peers.
When students return to class, the instructor will ask students individually or in groups (depending on time and class size) to share their experience proposing solutions for collective redress. When doing so, instructors may ask, What did you propose regarding how our institution should address this racial history? What would be barriers to achieving this proposal? Who gains from this proposal? How does this proposal address contemporary racial inequality on campus? How would this affect the canon of racial history at our university? Instructors should aim to have students make connections between proposals by asking if other students had similar thoughts or solutions.
Example Student Experiences
A total of 50 students participated in this activity. Their experiences have been drawn upon in this section to provide anecdotal evidence of the impact of this pedogeological activity. Many students reported a realization that there had been omissions in the racial history of their institutions. A second-year Latina student explained, “I feel like we have never really been educated about the complicated relationship that our school has with racism. As this is easy to ignore, I feel like most people don’t know about it.” Similarly, a second-year Latino student exclaimed, “After leaving the activity, I left wondering why the thing I learned were not presented to me before that day. Additionally, why is this information not presented to everyone in the school?” After encountering the racial history of their institutions, students were surprised and angry that they had not encountered this information before this activity. Thus, students noted that this archival information was missing from Emory University’s official canon (Assmann 2008).
Students were then asked to propose strategies that might aid in changing the canon of official memory regarding Emory’s racial history to incorporate the archives (Assmann 2008). This allowed students to move from reflecting on the lack of acknowledgment of racial history to advocating for ways to reshape that collective memory. Students suggested a number of ways to bring attention to their institutional past, including offering courses or events on the racial history of the campus (54 percent), expanding access regarding this racial history to the public (39 percent), addressing this history during campus tours or orientation (36 percent), installing physical markers of memory such as memorials or plaques (25 percent), and reparations or scholarships for descendants of enslaved people that provided labor to the university (15 percent). As one first-year Asian American student hopefully suggested, Given how the campus was built through slavery and oppression, we should call for a better way to honor those that have sacrificed themselves. Ideally, new monuments, speaker series, and campus-wide remembrance events would be a constructive and practical way for students to inform their minds and connect themselves with the past. Ultimately, it’s far too easy for students to believe that Emory, a selective private institution, is a bubble of meritocracy and equality. Without the proper knowledge required to recognize the racial inequalities that are historically rooted in the US, even the most brilliant students may not discern the dark realities that surround our school to this day.
Although students agreed that an institutional response to the racial history was important, relatively few suggested avenues for redress that went beyond a simple acknowledgment of the racial past. That is, as opposed to suggesting actions that would challenge the racial status quo of the institution, such as providing scholarships to the descendants of enslaved people associated with the university, students were more comfortable proposing actions that recognized the past injustices, without changing who benefits from those actions in the present. Ultimately, this works in recreating a racial hierarchy that keeps the spoils of whiteness to the most privileged in society.
This points to a limitation of the activity; students are not necessarily moved solely by the activity to conceptualize racial redress in a structural manner. To overcome this limitation prior to the activity, instructors should ensure students are familiar with multiple types and examples of historical redress, ranging from individual-level to societal-level responses.
If this limitation is still apparent after the activity, the instructor should draw attention to these different strategies and motivations for racial redress. This allows students to see how they, despite being knowledgeable of systemic racism, persisted in suggesting solutions that placed racial injustice in the past. This enables students to move from individual and ahistorical understandings of racism to a conceptualization of racism as institutional.
Conclusion
This activity provides a pathway to discussions about how racial histories are preserved, retold, and addressed at the institutional level. That is, students are encouraged to investigate the archive of racial histories of their institutions, while comparing their findings with the canon of official institutional history (Assmann 2008). Through engaging in this activity, their working definitions of racism are both challenged and reconfigured. Sociology classes can enable students to consider the racial histories of the higher education communities that they belong to, with an eye toward reimagining a racially just and equitable future in those communities. Students may wish to take this activity further by bringing their reflections and proposals for change to fellow students, faculty, administration, alumni, or other community members, which would allow for a further exploration of how to realign the canon and the archives of their institution. This activity can be used for a variety of classes, including Racial and Ethnic Relations, Introduction to Sociology, and Social Problems, as well as adapted to explore the institutional collective memory of other types of social inequality.