Interpreting Otherwise: Fugitive Agency and the Reimagining of Racial Justice at UNC

• In Event: Unforgetting in an Era of Erasure: Resisting Anti-Justice Attacks and Envisioning Futures for Higher Education

Abstract

This paper employs Critical Race Theory’s composite counterstory methodology (Solórzano & Yosso, 2002) and fugitive critical policy analysis (Gillborn, 2016; Givens, 2021; Harney & Moten, 2013; Jayakumar & Vue, 2025) to examine how racial justice commitments are contested, constrained, and reimagined amid escalating attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion. The University of North Carolina (UNC)—a central site in recent U.S. Supreme Court challenges to race-conscious admissions (Students for Fair Admissions v. UNC & Harvard, 2023; Jayakumar, 2024; Jayakumar & Kendi, 2023) and embedded in a Confederate, segregationist legacy—serves as the case study. The analysis situates the present moment within a longer trajectory of white supremacist reconstruction (Dorsey & Chambers, 2014; Harris, 1993; Rodriguez, 2020) and the fugitive imaginings of Black, Indigenous, and other communities of color forging liberatory futures within constraint.
Through the composite figure Rachel Justice—an amalgamation of real UNC actors—the counterstory traces her encounters with the institutional memory and living legacies of Zora Neale Hurston (1942), Pauli Murray (1956/1987), and other historical figures who resisted racial violence while generating new possibilities. Their prayers, intellectual labor, and refusals animate Rachel’s own fugitive agency as she navigates intensifying political and legal pressures to dismantle race-conscious practice. Findings illuminate two divergent institutional trajectories: “protector” logics, marked by interpretive overreach, preemptive compliance, and legalist containment strategies that erased equity infrastructure under the guise of neutrality; and “exiled” logics, embodied in Rachel’s refusals, counter-memory work, and interpretive reimaginings that sustained racial justice commitments in visible, strategic, and covert ways. “Protectors” sought to manage risk by narrowing policy interpretations, suppressing race-conscious language, and redirecting resources toward race-neutral initiatives; “exiles” cultivated coded networks of care, embedded critical histories into everyday practices, and positioned themselves at the margins to preserve freedom to act. By bringing historical memory into the present, the paper shows how fugitive agency interrupts the normalization of racial erasure, exposes the limits of institutional protectionism, and seeds alternative futures—an urgent praxis for higher education actors confronting authoritarian encroachment today.

Authors

• Uma Mazyck Jayakumar, University of California - Riverside

• Rican Vue, University of California - Riverside