Land and Place in Black Student Organizing

• In Event: Honoring Black and Indigenous People’s Place and Land Relations: Educational Engagement in and Beyond Schools

Abstract

Objectives

There is a longstanding history of Black student resistance at post-secondary institutions, a history that blurs the lines between campus and community (Williams & Tuitt, 2021; Ferguson, 2017; Turner, 2020). While some discussions of student organizing focus on campus activism, and others focus on organizing within community spaces, this project draws attention to how all forms of student activism take place on shared Indigenous lands. I detail Black student organizers’ relationships to the lands where they live, organize, and/or study, and how these relationships shape their organizing politics.

Although violent structures onset by colonialism and enslavement rupture Black land relations, Black communities continue to hold relationships to land and place that are not overdetermined by these root violences. This paper shares how Black students’ understandings and connections to land are embedded in their organizing. I discuss a co-created set of principles for “land-centered Black student organizing.”

Theoretical Framework

This paper is framed by the field of Black Geographies, which contests racist renderings of Black people as ungeographic and surfaces Black land-based knowledges (McKittrick, 2006; Nxumalo and Cedillo, 2019; King, 2019). Despite spatial constraints placed upon Black communities, alternative geographies are always already happening; and although it cannot be understated how settler colonialism and racial hierarchies construct geographies of antiblackness, that is not a complete story of Black life.

Methods and Data Sources

I conducted semi-structured interviews with 30 Black student organizers from post-secondary institutions in Canada and the United States, three focus groups with 13 returning student organizers, photo elicitation, and concept mapping. The data for this paper consists of three transcribed focus groups and one concept map.

Results

The concept map created by focus group participants demonstrates that land-centered Black student organizing extends from a radical tradition to undo deep-seated structures, logics, and relations instituted by slavery and settler colonialism. Land-centered Black student organizing involves understanding and teaching land histories, prioritizing and co-organizing with surrounding communities, building connections between Black organizers and Indigenous organizers, and recognizing Black liberation requires decolonization. Participants engaged in land-centered organizing in several ways, e.g., designing prison divestment campaigns, calling for the removal of campus police, developing student-community coalitions, and co-organizing with Indigenous communities in Land Back movements.

Scholarly and Scientific Significance

By bringing land and place to the fore, I de-center the university as a primary focus of Black student activism. I offer “land-centered” to resist this implicit understanding and to emphasize the abolitionist and decolonial desires of Black students. Black students have long organized in ways that demonstrate they are not invested in fixing the university or seeking repair through institutional solutions (Harney and Moten, 2013; Purnell, 2016; Kelley, 2016). For such Black organizers, their ambivalence towards the university as a site of social transformation does not discount harm-reduction or intermediary solutions to support Black students. However, they work towards a longer, liberatory project that transcends post-secondary institutions. Conceptualizing their organizing as land-centered honors the expansiveness of Black student organizing and uplifts how place- and land-relations shape their liberatory politics.

Author

• Sefanit Habtom, University of Washington