Combatting White Supremacy On Campus

"Over the past two decades, we have witnessed an abundance of student protests at colleges and universities in the United States. Many of these protests cluster around the issues of white supremacy and anti-Black racism as they function in higher education settings—issues that have historically and contemporarily plagued United States colleges and universities. In this project, I analyze the arguments produced by college student protestors during race-based controversies at the University of Missouri, the University of Maryland, and the University of Georgia between 2015 and 2020. In each of these cases, college student activists have addressed racist cultures, actions, and policies upheld by their white peers, faculty, and university leadership. The student protest discourses developed during these controversies illuminate a theory of racialized counter-memory, which I define and elaborate throughout each chapter. Racialized counter-memory, as a rhetorical concept, brings together scholarship concerned with race, memory, and place/space, and it is best understood as public memory that centers race and racialized experiences in a way that counters dominant or institutional memory and promotes an anti-racist perspective. This study shows how racialized counter-memories—and the students that create, negotiate and circulate them—can combat the challenges of hegemonic white supremacy on college campuses by making white supremacy known, by marking racism’s existence on campus, and by envisioning anti-racist solutions. I also illustrate the ways in which students’ use of racialized counter-memory re-constituted the places and spaces of campus towards anti-racist ends, such as redistributing campus resources, constructing memory sites, and altering town-and-gown relations. Overall, this dissertation analyzes specifically how and in what way college students demonstrated the power of racialized counter-memory, in theory and in practice. I posit that rhetorical scholars should further develop and study racialized countermemory, enacted in anti-racist protests and social change, as a rhetorical lens that can address and combat the assumed white standpoint and white supremacist systems imbedded in U.S. institutions and landscapes, including higher education institutions and their campuses." - abstract