Beyond the "Ceremony of Acknowledgment": Toward a Political Economy of Reparations in Higher Education

• In Event: Theorizing Higher Education as an Essential Site for the Design of Knowledge Production

Abstract

After the social unrest of 2020, more colleges and universities have been pushed to acknowledge the history of their entanglements with various forms of white supremacy, slavery in particular. We have witnessed buildings renamed, monuments, scholarships and commissions studying the intimate relationship between the ivory tower and a history of Black bondage and Indigeneous removal. However, what Olata Lakota scholar Megan Red Shirt Shaw names the “ceremony of acknowledgment,” allows schools to acknowledge their historical wrongdoings while simultaneously celebrating how far they have come. By contrast this paper asserts that higher education’s racial reckoning reaches well into the present. I will briefly explore racial capitalist public policies throughout the 20th century, from the Morrill Act Grant Act to the Federal Housing Act of 1959, which sets the table for an exploration of today’s rapacious knowledge economy that continues to extract wealth from the largely Black, Brown, and Indigeneous communities that surround urban campuses. Public discourse reveals a higher education sector that continues to mask its self-interests behind an ethos of the “public good.” But it is precisely the conversion of local neighborhoods into what Davarian Baldwin calls “UniverCities” that makes visible both the materialist self-interests of higher education and the seeds for a reparations critique of its past harms and enduring legacies (2021). Drawing from disparate but growing campus/community campaigns for racial justice, this paper ends with a skeletal mapping of a political economy of reparations for today’s knowledge economy

Author

• Davarian Baldwin, Trinity College
  Presenting Author