Plantation Politics and Neoliberal Racism in Higher Education: A Framework for Reconstructing Antiracist Institutions

• In Event: 67.029 - Institutional Change for Racial Equity in Higher Education: Recommendations for Necessary Action

Abstract

Overcoming the deeply embedded anti-Black racism and colonial heritage of North America is an ongoing project. As a broadly atheoretical field, scholars have yet to explicate fully the ways that racism and colonialism are foundational to the construction of institutions of higher education. Plantation politics provides the opportunity to reveal parallel organizational and cultural norms between contemporary higher education institutions and slave plantations. To better explore the applicability of this theory, the authors share an example of the parallel between slave plantations and contemporary universities called “The Oxymoronic Social Existence of Whites (or Neoliberalism as the New Slave Code)” and its implications for campus practice toward racial liberation. The authors argue that the institutional logics of colonialism and imperialism—which were essential to the establishment of this country and led to the creation of plantations and the enslavement of Black bodies—exists within higher education institutions today.
The call for change within higher education organizations can take many forms from revolution to reformation, with people on all sides of the argument providing justification for their solutions. In thinking about more tangible engagements with this theory, we have laid out a few ways that thinking persists though not contemporaneously in our institutions today. In the meantime, dissecting the neoliberal competitive markets that faculty, staff, and students have to engage in is desperately needed to inch closer toward emancipation for people of color in higher education.

Authors

• Dian D Squire, Iowa State University

• Bianca C. Williams, CUNY Graduate Center

• Franklin A. Tuitt, University of Denver