Racialized Organizations in Slavery’s Afterlife: Deconstructing Black Intellectual Un/Freedom on the Academic Plantation

• In Event: Constructing New Possibilities for Racialized Organizations Theory in Educational Research

Abstract

In a precursor to the wake of dual pandemics in 2020—Black death heightened by COVID-19 and police brutality—a growing number of Black-led research publications paralleled plantations with universities (Dancy et al., 2018; Wilder, 2013; Williams, Squire, & Tuitt, 2021). As an OrgCrit researcher who draws upon Afro-pessimism, I join this Black intellectual genealogy of theorizing the academic plantation as a site for empirical inquiry. In my larger study on Black doctoral socialization at U.S. historically white institutions (HWIs) (AUTHOR, 2021), participants characterized the organizational structures of anti-Blackness at their universities as academic plantations—highlighting features of exploitation, censorship, imposed imposter thoughts, and tokenism. This symposium paper seeks to deepen our empirical understanding of the academic plantation by integrating Hartman’s (1997) concept of indebted servitude (ontological anchor) with Ray’s (2019) racialized organizations (theoretical anchor) to deconstruct how socialization mechanisms as people-processing tactics (Van Maanen & Schein, 1979) cons(train) Black intellectual un/freedom at U.S. HWIs. I use “un/freedom” to evoke the unfinished business of emancipation in slavery’s afterlife (Hartman, 2008), while raising Dumas’ (2016) clarification of Afro-pessimism as a point of entry to understand “the Black is socially and culturally positioned as slave, dispossessed of human agency, desire, and freedom…[while] slavery marks the ontological position of Black people” (p. 13).
My research question asks: How do U.S. HWIs launder the racial domination of Black intellectual un/freedom on what doctoral students characterize as an academic plantation? Employing an analytic framework of discursive, archival, and narrative methods, I place the following texts in a meso-level conversation with each other collected from 34 Black doctoral students in education-focused programs at 12 research-intensive HWIs across five U.S. Regions: individual data (pre-interview questionnaire, semi-structured 90-minute interview transcripts, participant-generated socialization artifacts) and institutional data (university websites, historical university artifacts, campus racial demographics, organizational charts, doctoral curriculum overviews, doctoral admissions and funding letters).
Preliminary findings reveal the vulnerabilities that Black doctoral students at HWIs in this study were subjected to whereby their ownership over intellectual property is obscured, protections against intellectual theft are not enforced, access to Black thought in core curricula are foreclosed and outsourced to non-education disciplines, and extraction of unpaid Black intellectual labor is normalized. These findings both problematize the racialization of intellectual un/freedom in doctoral education, while simultaneously pinpointing possibilities to sever its ties with plantation practices that replicate themselves in academia.
This study’s significance illustrates the power of bridging Black intellectual thought with OrgCrit frameworks in higher education research, and offers recommendations to dismantle racialized organizational practices that conceal anti-Blackness. The implications call for a racialized reconstruction of higher education, which is particularly important for institutions that want to recruit and retain Black educational researchers who study issues of racial in/justice and/or center Black people in their work. This call to action is critical, especially against the backdrop of current political attacks and legislative bans on Black intellectual thought in education, as well as dangerous attempts to erase the history of slavery in the United States and its afterlife.

Author

• Mariama Nagbe, University of Southern California