A (Queer?) Return to the Gibbs-Green Shooting: Higher Education and the Anti-Black Drive

• In Event: Black Students, Alumni, and Higher Education Across Racial Unrest and Inequality

Abstract

This paper ruminates on the fatal shooting at Jackson State University to examine antiblackness and the role of the higher education in societal change. The psychoanalytic notion of the drive is thus taken up to supplement current theories of the nature and scale of antiblackness in higher education research. ‘Overkill’ as the material effects of the drive on the body becomes the necessary analytic that helps articulate the Gibbs-Green shooting not only as a queer phenomenon, but illustrative of the relationship between desire and antiblackness. By underscoring antiblackness as sutured to both gratuitous violence and calls for emancipatory education, this paper concludes by meditating on acts that gesture towards cultural and psychic change that might rival this violence.

Author

• Zachary R. Brown, University of Rochester