©Teresa Marie Ramos
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Teresa Marie Ramos MANAGING RACIAL RISK IN THE U.S. UNIVERSITY OF THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY: RACIAL THEME PARTIES, ADMINISTRATIVE MANAGEMENT, AND STRATEGIC RESISTANCE BY TERESA M. RAMOS DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Anthropology in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2012 Urbana, Illinois Doctoral Committee: Professor Nancy Abelmann, Co-Chair Professor Alejandro Lugo Professor Laurence Parker Associate Professor Lisa Cacho, Co-Chair Associate Professor Junaid Rana ABSTRACT My dissertation investigated how incidents of racism were managed at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the affect on students and administrators. I examined four ethnographic episodes on campus: 1) the racial theme party, Tacos and Tequila, 2) the retirement of Chief Illiniwek, 3) the “Next Dance,” an annual mock-Chief Illiniwek performance held on University Property by a registered student organization and 4) the vandalism of public art work by Hock E Aye VI Edgar Heap Of Birds (Cheyenne-Arapaho). I found that university administrators managed racism as racial-risk—that is the legal and financial liability that emerges from university governance dictated by the logics of corporate neoliberalism that influence U.S. law and culture. These observable racial-risk management strategies serve to control populations of student dissenters on campus by institutionalizing dissent in order to commodify it for profit. ii For my sister Stephanie Ramos iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Every teacher I had and everyone who took the time to engage me in conversation made this possible—especially those of you who disagreed with me. My intellectual committee made this a reality. Thank you Nancy Abelmann, Lisa Cacho, Larry Parker, Alejandro Lugo, and Junaid Rana. You all helped me begin to decolonize my mind and provided me with knowledge to learn something otherwise. Nancy, thank you for your friendship and advise these past nine years. Lisa Cacho, thank you for showing me how to use and strengthen the tools I needed to think and communicate better. Minds are not buckets, and a shovel is not a teacher’s tool. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION…………………………………………………………………1 CHAPTER 2: METHODS: ETHNOGRAPHY OF THE UNIVERSITY INITIATIVE………………………………………………………………………….………….37 CHAPTER 3: RACIAL GATE-KEEPING: POLICING BELONGING IN HIGHER ED……..64 CHAPTER 4: SHIFTING RACIAL RISK, SHIFTING RACIAL BURDENS…………….…………………………………………………………………………93 CHAPTER 5: DISPLACING RACISM: BLAME IT ON THE ALCOHOL………………….109 CHAPTER 6: HIDING RACISM: THE INTENTIONAL TRAPPINGS OF THE BLACK/WHITE PARADIGM…………………………………………………………………135 CHAPTER 7: SELLING DIVERSITY: THE MANAGERS AND THE SALESWOMEN…...162 CHAPTER 8: CONCLUSION …………………………………………………………………188 NOTES ………………………………………………………………………………………….200 REFERENCES………………………………………………………………………………… 203 v CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION Women responding to racism means women responding to anger; the anger of exclusion, of unquestioned privilege, of racial distortions, of silence, ill-use, stereotyping, defensiveness, misnaming, betrayal, and co-optation...Every woman has a well-stocked arsenal of anger potentially useful against those oppressions, personal and institutional, which brought that anger into being. Focused with precision it can become a powerful source of energy and change. —Audre Lorde (1981) The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism This dissertation is an ethnography of institutional racism at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (U of I). Institutional racism is discrimination that perpetrates systems of disparate impact (i.e. oppression and privilege) through social and political policies and practices. My research frames racial theme parties and similar incidents as much more than bias between individuals. Since the onset of social networking sites and technology, racial theme parties and acts of racial intolerance have grown in visibility on college campuses across the country. Although as you will find in reading this dissertation, these events are not new phenomena—in fact they’re not phenomena at all. Their visibility gives us a different view from which to understand and examine racism on U.S. college campuses. These incidents afford us a chance to review not only how far we have come, in the U.S., in institutionalizing racial equity on college campuses across the country but also the work we have left to do. Racism is a powerful and historically entrenched form of discrimination that accumulates interest. Analyzing how racism operates at the U of I allows us to assess how power operates through the institution. I show how racism operates in higher ed policy and management that contributes to and followes from racism in our cultural, governmental, and social institutions. My dissertation research examines racism at the U of I in order to understand how neoliberal economic practices dominate the operational logics of the University. I do so through 1 an examination of how acts of racial intolerance, including racial theme parties, disrupt campus climate, generate protests, and require management. More specifically, I examine how in these moments of crisis, the words or actions of a university administrator require thoughtful analysis. Administrators are particularly cautious about how their actions might risk loss of funding or respect for the University. As they proceed in their decision-making they take in data from multiple sources, drawing maximally on their risk-management skills (by this I mean an assessment of material and other dangers that emerge in these moments of rupture in campus climate—when underlying racial hostilities are exposed). To put it plainly, in a system of university governance that is influenced by and modeled after corporate governance, risk equals loss, specifically financial loss. I have found that despite attempts to respond to racism in ways that are anti-racist1 administrators’ calculations of risk instead often advance racial ideologies (i.e., ahistorical and colorblind analyses of the significance of race) congruent with forms of neoliberal-multiculturalism (Melamed 2006) and white supremacy (Delgado and Stefanic 2001). My research situates both student and administrative responses to racial-theme parties within the context of neoliberal-multiculturalism (Melamed 2006) as it is practiced within public institutions of higher education.2 My research focuses on four such acts of racial intolerance at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (U of I). Specifically, I contextualize four macro-ethnographic episodes for the local, (macro because they were events that were commonly known and received campus and local media attention). These four projects are 1) the racial theme party, Tacos and Tequila, 2) the retirement of Chief Illiniwek, 3) the “Next Dance,” an annual mock-Chief Illiniwek performance held on University Property by a registered student organization, and 4) the vandalism of public art work by Hock E Aye VI Edgar Heap Of Birds (Cheyenne-Arapaho). 2 In each of these four cases, I outline how University Administrators utilized a distinct racial risk management plan or strategy. Modeling the managerial politics formed in response to the protests of the 1960s (Yúdice 2003), campus and University Administrators find ways to manage racial risk—again that is their assessment of the material or other dangers that emerge in moments of racial violence. One of the ways this happens is by deflecting the situation away from discourses/conversations of race and racism. For example, instead of acknowledging the presence of anti-Native racism in a series of acts of vandalism against “Beyond the Chief” alcohol is proposed as the possible primary force behind the actions. These observable racial- risk management strategies serve to control populations of student—dissenters on campus. One of the ways this is done is by institutionalizing dissent—that is appropriating the calls by student protestors for racial justice in order to serve the University’s own purpose. On one level this is primarily done through programming out of diversity offices that in some ways serve to consolidate and further homogenize diverse cultural and political spaces that emerged from decades of protest—most notably the 1992 protests in which students demanded more resources and deeper institutionalization of cultural centers and resources for students of color. On another level, institutionalizing anti-racism or racial justice means the appropriation of diversity and multiculturalism to serve the interests of the Predominantly White University, in preparing students to be managers in the neoliberal economy of the twenty-first century. Racial risk-management strategies are ways in which a university administrator can shift, spin, or frame a racist incident as racially insignificant, or significant in other ways that are coincidental rather than fundamental. The strategies I discuss in this dissertation include: Keeping Racism Hidden, Displacing Racism, Shifting Racial Risk, Denying Racism, Acknowledging the Intractability of Racism, and to a lesser extent, Insulting Racism, and 3 Shaming Racists. Which racial risk-management strategy is used and when is it used really depends on the situation. Racial Risk Management strategies vary depending on the type of racism involved in an incident and the reaction to racism—usually there is more than one type of racism at work in any given incident. Different actions and