Gendering Anti-Blackness: A BlackCrit-Feminist Analysis of HBCU Statements Following George Floyd Uprisings

• In Event: The Role of HBCUs in Constructing Knowledge: Race, Relevance, and Research

Abstract

Drawing upon Black critical theory, Black feminist theory, and a multi- institutional content analysis of 20 HBCU public statements on the state murder of George Floyd, this article studies the politics of HBCU presidential narrations of “racial justice” around antiblackness and gender. Specifically, we are guided by the research question: How, if at all, do HBCU presidents construct antiblackness or antiblack racism in the wake of global uprising? How, and in what ways, do statements implicate “Black gender”; and how do statements compare by presidential gender? More broadly, this article complicates narrow and dichotomous framings of HBCUs through a BlackCrit, or Black-specific, investigation of institution politics, ultimately posing the question, “What is this ‘Black’ in “HBCU”, and what purposes should Black education serve?”. Findings reveal how HBCU president statements: (1) avoid using terminology such as “murder,” “antiblack” or “defund the police” in their statements, (2) uphold “peaceful protests” for “respectability,” (3) infrequently, if at all, speak of violence affecting Black women, and (4) read similarly across gender with women presidents more likely to refer to the death of George Floyd as “murder” as well as advocate for “collective action” or “community-centered activism.” This article calls upon HBCU commitment to radical study and praxis inherent in shared dimensions of critical frameworks.
Black feminist critiques have long called our attention to domination ideology with scholarship explicitly arguing that Black women’s deaths are silenced against a backdrop of hypervisibility of Black men’s deaths to maintain a global status quo of structural violence (Douglass, 2018; Hull et al., 1982; McKittrick, 2006). In this article, we are concerned with a closer reading of the silencing mechanism around Black women. More specifically, we study the phenomenon of gendered antiblackness across historically Black colleges and universities to build on scholarship articulating the racialized and patriarchal politics of gender and class in these institutions (Blackshear & Hollis, 2021; Tillis, 2018). Such analyses also implicate the narrative mechanism inherent in university “knowledge economy,” which refers to the specific university political and economic technologies that preserve structural inequities (Baldwin, 2021). In this study, we attempt to heed the call of Black feminist scholars not to fall into the trap of gender analysis for the sake of representation within antiblack structures but to expose the “violent anchors” (Douglass, 2018, p. 108) of representation in service of an analysis of the ways gender, as a human condition, is denied to Black people (Douglass, 2018; Spillers, 2003). We hold this argument even as we use descriptors like “men” and “women.”
The afterlife of slavery shapes the stories of Black people in the U.S. and across the African diaspora. The afterlife of slavery refers to the “racial calculus” that remains following the “non-event of emancipation”; the “skewed life chances, limited access to healthcare and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment” (Hartman, 2007, p. 6) that persist. Regarding structured death and terror, Black people lose their lives to police at telling rates – for instance, Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old Black boy gunned down by a police officer while playing in a park (Rice, 2020); Charleena Lyles, a 30-year-old pregnant, Black women shot and killed in her home in front of her three children by two police officers during a self-requested welfare check (Miletich, 2019); or Tony McDade, a 38-year-old Black transgender man murdered by the cops in front of an apartment complex (Deliso, 2020). These three, along with countless names, constantly remind Black peoples about both the precarity of Black life and the nearness of death. While some names are widely known,

branded, and symbols of public demonstrations, others are much less known, but their shared pain and suffering teaches us about power and power relations. We also refuse overreliance on police killings of Black people as these obscures the quotidian and gratuitous violence Black people experience every day, everywhere, and around the world.

Author

• T. Elon Dancy, University of Pittsburgh