Resisting the Role Call: Black Students in a White Supremacist Apparatus

• In Event: 1284 - Section on Racial and Ethnic Minorities Refereed Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 20. Race/Ethnicity and Higher Education

Abstract

Critical scholarship of race and higher education must regard how racial domination in and through postsecondary institutions is in excess of the inequities in access, affordability, and achievement. The author contends that black students are steered and steering toward white supremacist institutions, and extends scholarly analysis in the functions of historically white colleges and universities (HWCUs) in service of white supremacy. Drawing from sociocultural theories, this paper suggests the outward and inward functions of HWCUs in terms of cultural (re)production and interpellation of upwardly mobile students of color as subordinates of whiteness, respectively. Particular concern is afforded to black students as they are made to suffer and inculcated to serve whiteness in their pursuit of social mobility and racial uplift. The author conceptualizes black students' situation in HWCUs as prisoners of an anti-black war in a white supremacist apparatus, and imagines the unpromised possibility of struggling to mitigate suffering from within the same cultural institution that subjects students to racial domination.

Author

• Caleb Emmanuel Dawson, University of California-Berkeley