Beyond nullification of dissent

Over the past two decades, universities in Canada have increasingly styled themselves as being invested in addressing anti-Black racism, coloniality, and histories of exclusion (McGill University, 2020; Scarborough Charter, 2022; Universities Canada, 2022). We see this institutional styling manifested in a range of administrative postures and performative gestures. To appear interested in addressing long-standing grievances of racism and colonization, universities have ramped-up and mass-promoted implementation of equity-focused initiatives such as equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) offices, executive-level EDI positions, equity-focused stakeholder consultations, race-based data collection initiatives, EDI working groups, subcommittees, and councils, as well as anti-racism charters, statements of solidarity, training, workshops, and so on. Yet these efforts have done little to meaningfully address entrenched forms of anti-Black racism at every level of the university (Hampton, 2016; Thobani, 2021; Walcott, 2021). Rather than review the innumerable ways in which institutions resist change, I provide a few examples of how institutions have nullified Black dissent, so shedding light on how universities respond to Black insurgency. I then put forward four principles derived from my higher education research grounded in the Black Radical Tradition and Black Queer Feminist theory, to offer criteria for unmaking the university. Universities are committed to a performative course of action that does not meaningfully address entrenched forms of racial exclusion. Simply put, these strategies are meant to nullify dissent and maintain the status quo. Universities have become increasingly sophisticated in stifling challenges to power through incorporation, co-optation, and through what Roderick Ferguson (2012) refers to as “minority difference”. Like the state and capital, the academy now takes up insurgence from oppressed communities, adapting hegemonic practices to discipline the challenge this represents to dominant actors. Together, these strategies impede and frustrate radical calls for change in the university. No matter the institution, the approach to nullification is the same. There is an open, public acknowledgement of the stated grievance. This is followed by the formation of a committee of so-called representatives from equity-seeking groups. Following (and just as often not following) the advice of the committee, the university will put forward a solution. The solution responds to the surface issues while doing little to address structural power imbalances. We see this pattern again and again, and we need to ask ourselves how places that purport to be about higher learning, and that are fully capable of assessing effectiveness, are so wedded to approaches that don't work. The reason is that these approaches are not meant to work; they are not meant to produce substantive shifts in the regular business of the university. I am reminded of Césaire's Discourse on Colonialism (2000) where the Antillean scholar and poet argues that colonial projects employ a “forgetting machine” designed to erase any comprehension of their ongoing harms. Strategies of nullification deployed within our universities constitute such a “forgetting machine”. There are long roots to such practices of forgetting. First, in an infamous case, in 1968–69, Sir George Williams University in Montreal, Quebec witnessed the largest and most radical campus protest in Canadian history. The protest involved over 200 students who occupied the university's computer lab to protest faculty who discriminated against Black students. After a 2-week occupation and the complete destruction of the computer lab, the university laid numerous criminal charges, protestors were jailed, and international students were deported. In the face of such protest, university might have reckoned seriously with the problem of racism among its faculty. Instead, there was no discernable shift in how Black students were treated (see David Austin's Fear of a Black Nation 2003). Instead, the university merely drafted regulations, structured an ombud's office, and later merged with Loyola College, changing its name to become Concordia University. “We want to ensure that every member of the University community is accorded the requisite environment to live, learn and work free of bias or discrimination. We know we still have a long way to go to achieve this, and we look forward to working together with faculty, staff and students to address these concerns.” (Vice President of Human Resources and Equity, quoted in the Toronto Star, 2016). In the following year, the university announced it would collect race-based data. The protestors’ central demands have not been met. Predictably, 4 years later, the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 translated into a 2021 taskforce on Anti-Black Racism, which tabled a Report in March 2021, repeating many of the same demands made previously. “Living as...we do in the wake of slavery, in spaces where we never meant to survive, or have been punished for surviving and for daring to claim or make spaces of something like freedom, we yet reimagine and transform spaces for and practices of an ethics of care (as in repair, maintenance, attention), an ethics of seeing, and of being in the wake as consciousness, as a way of remembering and observance that started with the door of no return, continued in the hold of the ship and on the shore” (130). In calling for an “ethics of care” Sharpe eschews fanciful or unrealistic hopes. She does not expect universities to undergo radical transformation, so that they cease to reproduce anti-Blackness. Instead, to survive the afterlife of slavery, Sharpe asks Black people to see, observe and attend to those of us who find ourselves working and learning in universities and other anti-Black spaces. Her ethics of care invites us to move beyond a response to the carceral, punitive plantation logics that undergird the university, inviting us to think and imagine beyond this legacy. Any transformed university demands such an ethics of care, a consciousness alive to what the university has done and is doing, our awareness of its legacy and constitutive function. A university that supports Black faculty, students, staff, and community members will necessarily place an ethics alive to well-being, reflection, and mutual concern at its core. Protest that disrupts the anti-Black status quo is necessary, important, and a potentially transformative act of refusal (Price, 2020). Almost all change that seeks to redresses coloniality comes through struggle; creating a transformed university is no different. Disruptive protests, inside and outside of the university, represent Black people's attempt to resist anti-Black prescriptions and forces, whether they're procedural (harmful policy), mental (internalized racism) or physical (damaging environments/bodily stress). Whether it is Black people resigning from a prestigious university committee, or rallying against racism on campus, or engaging in teach-ins, protest is a means for surviving the academy and making way for change. We cannot hope to unmake the university without protest and disruption. This demands a move away from ceremonial and performative responses to embark on a radical path of change, despite the uncertainty that this creates. The cost of protest is high, given the surveillance and policing of Black people. Nonetheless, agendas, forums, and spaces for protest are productive, necessary, and worth fighting for. “The Black Test simply suggests that any policy that does not meet the requirement of ameliorating the dire conditions of Black people's lives is not a policy worth having” (91). The Black Test has nothing to do with Black exceptionalism, but rather acknowledges that Black people live and die at what Derrick Bell (1992) calls “the bottom of the well” (Bell, 1992). Logically, any amelioration of our condition stands to benefit all of society. A transformed university must commit to policy-making that includes an assessment of Black—and, I would add Indigenous – persons. We must ask if Black and Indigenous people will benefit or be harmed from a given policy. Jettisoning any policy direction that does not meet such a test will transform the university. Universities must support Black social economies as ways of organizing academic spaces, programs, and policies that sustain Black students, staff, and faculty. Black people have long survived the corporate for-profit university because we support each other in accessing resources that sustain our presence. Black faculty, students, and staff (myself included) rely on each by pooling our resources. We quietly point Black students to financial supports, both formal and informal. We share cultural knowledge and guidance for navigating the university. We make connections and introductions for paid employment. We offer timely encouragement. We trade and purchase a wide range of goods, including time, peer tutoring, food, short-term loans, transit fare, child-minding, etc. All these affirming and supportive activities amount to what Caroline Shenaz Hossein (2019) refers to as the “Black social economy”. This demands that unmake the top-down university, bringing forward a collective structure resembling a rhizome (Massumi, 1992) that allows Black social economies to flourish. One of the reasons I research Black experiences in universities is my belief that they have something to offer with respect to thinking about paths to transformation. I think of Black experiences not as exceptionalities but as meaningful routes to change, for all those who seek a university as a space of caring and learning, rather than as a space of colonialism, exploitation, and profit. In this contribution, I have examined how universities commit to performative gestures of change through EDI. I have argued that these actions should be viewed as participating in long histories that nullify Black dissent within the academy. By exploring four principles derived from my higher education research grounded in the Black Radical Tradition and Black Feminist Queer Theory, I have put forward ideas for moving beyond the status quo. I argued that today, we live in the afterlife of slavery, a world in which Black people are seen as outside of humanity (Wynter, 2003). We cannot hope to improve or reform a university rooted in this fact. Instead, Black transformation of the university should be pursued alongside decolonial/Indigenous resurgence projects rooted in land back. Combined with the four principles I lay out here, we may yet embark on unmaking the university through a deep engagement with Black experiences

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