Antiracism as Zombification: Engaging With White Faculty on the Plantation

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session 12
  In Roundtable Session: Discomforts Toward Reconciliations in Higher Education: Critical Perspectives

Abstract

This paper discusses the zombification, exploitation, and social death of BIPOC faculty in and through “informal” anti-racist collectives in teacher education. Over the course of summer of 2020, many of these types of faculty groups were formed across a range of college and university campuses. Mostly they were formed, often by the university administration rather than the faculty, as a response to broader demands for some type of accountability for ongoing racism in teacher education programs (Author, 2019). One stated goal of these types of groups, ironically, was to go beyond the insincerity of previous iterations of anti-racist or anti-oppressive statements on

Author

• Ramon Vasquez, University of Minnesota - Twin Cities