Offsetting Whiteness in Academia: A Note for Faculty on Supporting Black Students

By: Wanda Swan

*Feature article written for the National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity*

In a time of collegiate restructuring due to a pandemic that leaves many unanswered questions, universities are scrambling to balance their  business-as-usual model of operations with a healthy dose of “Are we really re-opening?”  Abridged semester schedules that almost guarantee students to be home before Thanksgiving (if not sooner), reduced student attendance in residence halls, pay cuts, furloughs, and virtual learning; all are necessary props to turn the house lights on for this semester’s production of Real World: College Campus. So much money spent and so much more already lost, and so many Black people that are still dying at the same rate we’ve been before we “19th” this COVID. I admit that that was an abrupt turn, but I think it is fair to point out that the world is on fire and that COVID-19 is only one of several ongoing pandemics that have long been in residence within our society.  For the sake of time, I will streamline this piece to only focus on one other:  Anti-Blackness. 

You see that slight of hand?  That was a magic trick.  I fooled you into thinking that anti-Blackness was some lowly, isolated pandemic on the outskirts of our realm of visibility.  Like that Mom & Pop store that sells the fried pickles you only eat when you are road-tripping in that direction.  Special occasion food.  The gag is that anti-Blackness is more like the Wal-Mart, no, the Super Wal-Mart of pandemics: easily accessible, open 24 hours, produces highly questionable, at least, and outright offensive, at best, products for a price considered reasonable to those who shop there.  Reasonably-priced oppression.  Another correlation between the two lies in just how vast they both are.  Seriously, how many times have you heard someone mumble, “I just came in for one thing…” while the cash register rings up six items totaling $183.59?  It is overwhelming by design as it sucks you in, convincing you that it is a necessary  part of your routine that makes your life easier, and there is literally some new component of it that you missed the last time you frequented.  Anti-Blackness, like Super Wal-Mart, holds all kinds of gizmos and doo-hickeys.  And by gizmos, I mean oppression, and by doo-hickeys, I mean other pandemics that are direct off-shoots of the impact of anti-Blackness that continues to kill Black people. In my attempt to be cheeky, I have actually managed to stumble upon my real purpose for penning this feature, which is to offer the perspective that while compounding pandemics are now actively taking up space in our collegiate communities, anti-Blackness has been and remains a pandemic that, unlike COVID-19, is readily affordable for higher ed institutions to tolerate.

As one who has worked within the anti-violence movement for collegiate, government, and nonprofit audiences for nearly 15 years before becoming a nonprofit manager, I cannot begin to the describe the ways and times I’ve worked to bend, stretch, fold, and contort myself and this message into a palatable format that both validates the experiences of our Black students and placates the “social justice” ego our university missions.  I can no longer carry that burden. The truth is we’ve long done and continue to do a disservice to Black faculty, staff, students, and families, by not actively interrogating the ways that our infrastructure, policies, admissions processes, diversity trainings, and even our identity-specific spaces dance around acknowledging how historical inequities and messages of Black inferiority are threaded throughout our existence and enter our classrooms, labs, and mentee/mentor relationships. Yes, there is a difference between Whiteness and White as a racial identifier. Both are constructs that serve the purpose of classifying this idea of Blackness as sub-human, but one speaks to an origin story of the world we know today and the other speaks to those who were most designed to benefit from it.

Critiquing Whiteness without acknowledging the conscious construction of race in this country as a pre-meditated design of oppression is not only dangerous; it is arrogant and highly insulting to the intelligence of those of us who are left navigating the carnage that the legacy of anti-Blackness leaves behind.  It is a pretty straight-forward story, really.  Anti-Blackness, this global agreement of conscious prejudice against Black people that “both voids Blackness of value, while systemically marginalizing Black people and their issues” (Movement for Black Lives, 2019), and was designed to work as a fulcrum from which the force of whiteness propels white supremacy into action (Nakagawa, 2012).  In short, Whiteness, as a construct, birthed a narrative of a default race and branded ideals of white superiority as the law of the land.  That’s it. That’s the history lesson in a nutshell.  That’s the truth we avoid at all costs even, and especially, in our classrooms.  Why?  Because acknowledging that these messages live within us, that we build our lives around it, raise our children with it, make decisions about what to wear, where to eat, where to live, who to allow in our homes and circles, whose voices are valued in our classrooms, whose research and expertise is properly evidenced-based and peer-reviewed, is to acknowledge that the price of offsetting Whiteness is a much higher one to pay than secretly committing to shop at our local Super Wal-Mart of anti-Blackness.  We just can’t beat the deals.

Unraveling Anti-Blackness entails overthrowing the entire system of academia and rendering it void. No amount of mentoring Black students, community service, diversifying your departmental faculty, or POC D&I leadership will be enough to meet or surpass the astronomical tally of white supremacist culture that leaves our Black students convinced they do not possess the intellectual rigor to navigate the ever-moving goal posts of academic success.  Goal posts that stand firmly planted for their White counterparts.  As long as this system is up and running in normal working fashion, we are failing members of our community, and I’m not talking about nameless, faceless masses.  We are failing Black students who purchase overpriced school apparel, who show up for class, who have registered for your classes, who have already taken note of your anti-Blackness and created coping mechanisms for survival, who are returning to campus after experiencing yet another pandemic that has statistically impacted their demographic in disproportionate numbers. This, after hearing that Breonna Taylor’s killers have not been arrested, that George Floyd will never again have the opportunity to be a father to his daughter, that Rayshard Brooks did not live to attend his daughter’s birthday party, and that so many others, many who look like them, are related to them, are being killed by pandemic of anti-Blackness. 

We must acknowledge the conscious decisions we make within the realm of our control to stay complicit and non-racist when the global consciousness calls for so much more.  We must acknowledge our committed and loving relationship to a construct that systematically thins the herd solely on the basis of race and continuously asks for more ways to do so.  We must acknowledge when we give in to that ask (in the form of cloaking our racism and anti-Blackness under the guise of “academic freedom of speech” and adherence to “the spirit of the time in which [insert problematic text here] was written”) to justify the use of racial slurs and jokes in our classrooms.  In these instances, I would perceive you not as  learned scholars, but no better than the ignorant, racist, under-developed, power-hungry thieves who stole this land and the freedom of those who sit outside of their narrow understanding of humanity.

Why Black folks?

It’s a question I’ve gotten often since kicking around this idea of a Center. Actually, the question I get is “Why just Black folks, though?” My response is usually, “Why not just Black folks?” My question is sometimes met with silence, sometimes met with a grimace, but often with a sigh and a shrug. It all culminates back to the same unspoken perception that others have about us and we have about ourselves: Healing Black folks is tiring work and working specifically for Black folks is not financially sustainable.

I get it. Really, I do. I grew up in a little country town in Holmes County, MS and we still don’t have stoplights. Education, athletics, or the military were the only legal outs for little black kids seeking to stretch their wings beyond the county or state line. My mama had already carved out a path for me to follow that involved college and career to offset the label of “Welfare Baby” stamped on my ass by the government. She wanted more for all of her girls and she was willing to do almost anything to do it. So I went to college, got the degrees, landed a career, and have been enjoying a life of comfort my mom had never experienced. I looked good on paper. It was probably year three into my first professional job when I realized I was playing the role of the Safe Negro in predominately-white spaces, and about a year later when I was able to categorize it as a side effect of the very same plan designed to save and improve my life. I knew then that I would never truly be free to exist outside my comfortable trappings and had determined to dedicate my life to being an educator to those who looked like me. I wanted to make sure that other Black kids who dreamed of better had an opportunity to read the fine print before signing on.

I also dedicated my life to being a resister, one who seeks to disrupt this myth of the Safe Negro and unpack the ways in which it provokes Black folks to further separate ourselves from each other in hopes of being “chosen.” I dedicated my life to unpacking how this choosing allows us to validate and turn a blind eye to the violence that occurs to those who may look like us, but lack the attraction to Respectability Politics. I dedicated myself to unraveling us from the snares of inequity and oppression laid by White Supremacy.

I dedicated myself to Black people.

The other things will work itself out, but this is where I need to be.

-Wanda