Blackness as "Debt": Excavating the Racial Economy of "Merit" Devaluing Black Professional School Faculty

• In Event: Centering Marginalized Voices in Professions Education

Abstract

We propose ‘Blackness as Debt’ as a new organizing concept for interrogating anti-Blackness within professional schools and examining Black faculty’s experiences of (un)belonging at those schools. Our analysis relies on a combined theoretical lens of ‘whiteness as property’ (Harris, 1993), racial capitalism (Leong, 2012), and educational debt (Ladson-Billings, 2006) to develop a definition of Black Debt that unveils the internal racist logics of merit at professional schools. We use Black Debt to examine the anti-Blackness evident in academic systems that assigns positive value to whiteness (and methods of securing whiteness) and negative value, or debt, to liberated Blackness. We argue that this racial capitalistic value assignment shapes the merit system affecting Black faculty (un)belonging at professional schools.

Authors

• Tyler Derreth, Johns Hopkins University
  Presenting Author

• Dwayne Kwaysee Wright, The George Washington University
  Presenting Author