An Autopsy of the 21st Century American University: Racial Death, Violence, and Necropolitics in Higher Education

INTRODUCTION: THE UNIVERSITY AS MEMENTO MORI

“If the child is the fulcrum for the reproduction of relations of inequality, school is the lever.” — Ann Pellegrini (2008), “What Do Children Learn at School?”

“The following day his outline appeared in white chalk on the asphalt. Did the hand of the person who skirted the coastline of his body tremble? The city, its sidewalks: an enormous blackboard—instead of numbers, we add up bodies.”

— Valeria Luiselli (2013), Sidewalks

The university, as an institution, has long stood with blood on its hands and bits of bone stuck between its teeth. From imperial land-grabs, close ties to the eugenics movement, and history-erasing book bans to the employment of state power to racialize curricula and commodify knowledge, the North American academy, in particular, has always played a crucial role in shaping histories of death and violence—ranging from medieval Christian Europe, through the ages of exploration and the Enlightenment, colonial conquest and enslavement, and into the era of modern industrial capitalism. In fact, in the Euro-Western world, “the most significant legacy of empire [in higher education] is the dominance of the university itself as the pre-eminent institution for higher education” (Pietsch 2016 qtd. in Stein 2022). Still, at its finest, the university acts as a site of tireless reckoning and radical imagining against its own racial-colonial legacies. It is a space where knowledge is first and foremost connected to upending, un/learning, and dissolving systems of inequality, and it holds potential as an egalitarian social sphere that serves rather than ravages democracy, justice, and civic responsibility.

As contemporary neoliberalism promises to resurrect the steady-lurking but age-old specter of fascism in the United States; higher education is under siege once again, but unlike ever before. As a result, those same abject and expendable BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, Persons of Color) bodies, which make up the academy’s burial-bedrock, are once more piling up at the front door. Today, the university has emerged as prime h(a)unting ground for right-wing, anti-democratic, and anti-education crusades that seek to fortify white supremacy and “accelerate the death of the unwanted, powerless, and what Judith Butler calls the ungrievable” (Giroux 2024). In this paper, I turn to Achille Mbembe’s (2003) theoretical notion of necropolitics in order to further investigate higher education’s systemic, historical, and ongoing ties to racial violence and death. In particular, I argue that the recent assault and legislative action against diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs in American colleges and universities are driven by and continue to thrive on a fascist politics of exclusion, erasure, and eradication, which ultimately solidifies higher education as a necropolitical institution. Left unchecked, this widespread fear of multiculturalism and hostility towards diversity—a modern mode of racial purity and ethnic cleansing—ensures that educational spheres, both within and outside the classroom, fall short in their primary struggle for equity and social justice. In response to this new politics of death in the academy, this paper concludes by turning towards a radical imagination to explore a means past reform.

LESS HUMAN THAN HUMAN: MBEMBE’S THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK OF ‘NECROPOLITICS’

Achille Mbembe’s (2003) account of necropolitics as a semiotic theoretical framework is primarily positioned as an intervention to Michel Foucault’s (1979) notion of biopolitics. Mbembe argues that biopower fails to adequately address [1.] the “contemporary ways in which the political, under the guise of war, of resistance, or of the fight against terror, makes the murder of the enemy its primary and absolute objective,” and [2.] the “contemporary forms of subjugation of life to the power of death” (12, 39). While biopower more generally refers to the management, regulation, and control over the domain of life (i.e. the power to ‘make/let live’), necropower shifts our focus to the exercise of authority over the domain of death and the ability to govern which subjects are disposable or expendable (i.e. the power to ‘take life’ or ‘expose to death’). Mbembe’s work, building on Foucault’s, presupposes that “the ultimate expression of sovereignty resides, to a large degree, in the power and the capacity to dictate who may live and who must die” (11). This splitting between the living and the dead rests on divisions of the population itself: “the subdivision of the population into subgroups and the establishment of a biological caesura between the ones and the other Others […] is what Foucault labels with the (at first sight familiar) term racism” (Mbembe 2003, 17). Racism—at once both the butcher and the knife—manifests environments of death and makes possible the “murderous” or “suicidal” functions of the state. Insofar as necropolitics hinges on the premise that sovereignty is closely tied to the right to kill with impunity or subject certain populations to deathly conditions, Mbembe is quick to remind us that such a racist politics of death remains a defining feature in both our colonial past and late-colonial present. After all, Mbembe argues, slavery, the colony, and “the very structure of the plantation system” might just represent society’s first marriage between massacre and bureaucracy.

At the heart of necropolitics beats a long history in which groups of marginalized people have undergone—and continue to undergo—the mechanized, serialized, and dehumanized conditions of death. Notably, Mbembe’s notion of necropower includes an authority to not only impose literal death but also more figurative social and civil deaths (such as the death of morality, the death of civic responsibility, and the death of the social body). In this light, a necropolitical institution is one able to render entire social groups ‘killable’ or ‘die-able’ by framing the killing of those populations as the regular state of affairs (Islekel 2022). By standardizing death in this way, necropolitical power nourishes a general sense of indifference, malaise, and loneliness, that manufactures the very conditions for death to multiply by either “small doses” or “spasmodic surges” (Mbembe 2019, 38). What becomes left is a tired and socially illiterate populous that is evermore ready to accept inequality and violence as a natural part of life. In speaking to our modern moment, Mbembe (2003) notes:

“[W]eapons are deployed in the interest of maximum destruction of persons and the creation of death-worlds, new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living dead.” (40)

The modus operandi of necropolitics, therefore, is a violence that is hurried but calculated, quiet but stubborn, impersonal but always around the corner; and more often than not, a violence that is racialized.[1] It is important to note that “violence” here includes and embodies three different but intersecting forms: fast violence (i.e. visible and immediate acts of destruction) such as genocide, suicide bombings, guerilla warfare, police brutality, and incarceration; slow violence (i.e. often imperceptible and gradual acts of destruction) such as poverty, mass surveillance, and environmental loss; and lastly, structural violence such as classism, elitism, racism, sexism, and (neo-)colonialism. For Mbembe (2003), it’s clear that wars in the era of globalization, as opposed to pre-modernism, “do not include the conquest, acquisition, and takeover of territory among their objectives,” but are rather “hit-and-run affairs” (30). As the lines between ‘private’ and ‘public’ political sites blur, new technologies of death develop, and military markets transform war and terror into a means of production, we observe a necropolitical agenda which aims to maximize the utility of ‘killable’ groups before seeing to their massacre (Mbembe 2019).

LOOK MA, ZOMBIES IN THE ACADEMY: EDUCATION AS ‘THE SUBSTANCE’ OF POLITICS AND THE ACADEMY AS A SITE OF STRUGGLE

Much like the factory, the bureaucracy, the prison, and the army, the university emerges as its own unique death-world. Indeed, much has already been said about how neoliberalism plays a vital role in unleashing violence upon democratic social spaces such as the school, the college, and the university.[2] Neoliberal politics continues to attack the education system (and education itself) by using schools as “the intellectual vanguard to create the ideological climate in which capitalist realism could…” (I add, indeed does) “…flourish” (Fisher 2009, 31).[3] Under a pyramid-scheme business ontology, the marketization of education (and therein, the commodification of knowledge itself) has fueled market-driven success metrics and cutthroat academic competition; bureaucratic auditing and surveillance culture; the simultaneous boom of student populations and bust in faculty numbers; government defunding; and ever-increasing tuition rates. The result of such inequality is violence that further perpetuates cycles of inequality. Here, I not only refer to the sensationalized (but still, very real) forms of fast violence that mainstream media typically covers (for instance, school shootings and robberies) but the slow and systemic types of violence that force children to starve while meal programs are proudly rolled back; that reduce minimum-wage so that working class homes are unable to secure basic subsistence with water, food, healthcare, and housing, let alone a quality education (Choi 2016). Put simply,

“[…] the crisis of higher education is about much more than a crisis of funding, an assault on dissent, and a remaking of higher education as another institution designed to serve the increasing financialization of American society. It is also about a crisis of memory, agency, and politics. As politics is removed from its political, moral, and ethical registers—stripped down to a machine of social and political death for whom the cultivation of the imagination is a hindrance—commerce rises as the heartbeat of social relations, and the only mode of governance that matters is Wall Street. Time and space have been privatized, commodified, and stripped of human compassion under the reign of neoliberalism.” (Giroux 2015, 11)

The campus, once a stronghold, is now no more than the lovechild of the shopping mall and penitentiary system. Students, in a space where all the tools should be available for them to become public intellectuals, radical thinkers, and agents of social change, are now reduced to nothing but burnt-out and devalued customer-consumers. If all of this sounds like a terribly anti-democratic war on youth, that is precisely because it is one (Grossberg 2001; Pollard 2014; Giroux 2012). But, it is also a war on hope and possibility—an assault on the specific capacities that we, as humans, have repeatedly leaned on in order to support and defend democracy.

By investing in neoliberal principles of sovereignty—which are themselves grounded in ideas of racial purity, hyper-nationalism, and a culture of ‘battle-royale’ or ‘survival-of-the-fittest’ capitalism—higher education has thus (re-)reinforced the marginalization, disposability, and death of BIPOC youth and students. Through the commodification of knowledge and students, university leaders have cultivated racial capitalism to safeguard the external appearance or ‘branding’ of DEI in schools without attending to any of the structural barriers or root causes of racism in the academy (Coon and Parker 2021) and without acknowledging America’s longer history of slavery, lynching, and Jim Crow (Balthaser and Mullen 2020). The refusal to adopt new policies and programs which support the needs of a diverse student body—who often turn to academia as an escape from violence—leads to very direct threats on BIPOC student lives. Here, we must consider not only racial macroaggressions within the campus climate (such as harassment and discrimination) but also the racial microaggressions which loop back into themselves so that violence cements as ‘turtles, all the way down’. For example, the systematic exile of BIPOC scholars, particularly women of color, from funding and research opportunities have demanded that minoritized students undertake part-time jobs alongside their full-time study in order to secure themselves financially; however, this eventually distracts them from educational pursuits altogether (Linder et al., 2019). Or, how the gentrified expansions of college campuses in urban cities have impacted marginalized communities by increasing local rent prices, fueling displacement and homelessness, and fattening police presence in the area(s)—the latter of these effects directly feeds into higher incarceration rates which, as we know, primarily target young BIPOC men (Torres 2022). On the reverse, subaltern communities that remain less educated are increasingly abandoning the Democratic Party in favor of voting Republican because they have been worn out by a politics of death and despair (Case and Deaton 2022).

From all of this, the necropolitical power lines demarcating which groups deserve to live and which groups are practically already dead gradually solidify in the neoliberal academy: a war between those who have a four-year undergraduate degree and those who do not; those with white legacy status and those without; those who are necessary for the future of the ‘all-American, all-male, all-elite’ university and those who are expendable by virtue of this vision. In essence, what we are seeing is not only a monopolization on death, but a cannibalization of the bodies that most require higher education—require democracy—as a path towards social mobility and freedom.  

A POLITICS OF EXCLUSION, ERASURE, AND ERADICATION: THE WORLD OF ANTI-DIVERSITY BILLS

On June 29, 2023, the United States Supreme Court ruled to entirely abolish race-conscious affirmative action policies in U.S. college admissions. The ruling was a direct result of the Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) cases brought against Harvard University and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. SCOTUS’ ruling effectively overturned decades worth of legal precedent and scholarship that affirms (and reaffirms) the efficacy of race-conscious admission processes in promoting diversity, equity, and inclusivity on campuses (Pereira et. al 2024). During the hearing, the court received statistics indicating that Black students were far likelier to receive an acceptance over white, Jewish, or Asian students with the same credentials. Ironically, SFFA argued that both Harvard’s and UNC’s admissions policies were in contravention of federal law and constitutional rights that bar state actors from any discrimination based on race or color (Foley 2023). Their argument, in essence, employed the 14^th amendment to reinforce the very inequalities it strives to extinguish. The rhetorical strategy utilized by SFFA, while not new, is something to pause on because it sheds light on how language is weaponized to become a “part of the machinery of social death” in contemporary U.S. society (Giroux 2024). Here, consider arguments of free speech and expression in mobilization of racism and racial slurs (Smith and Lomotey 2023); or myths of reverse racism, race neutrality, or postracialism; or the appeal to ‘common sense’ when disputing immigration law, foreign policy, abortion rights, or global warming.[4] To be sure, the methods of persuasion adopted by SFFA seem directly adapted from the 2020 “Executive Order on Combating Race and Sex Stereotyping” made by the former U.S. President, Donald Trump. In the document, arguments against ‘color blindness’ and white privilege are presented as “contrary to the fundamental premise […] that all individuals are created equal and should be allowed an equal opportunity under the law to pursue happiness and prosper based on individual merit.” The language here chameleonizes systemic oppression with the robes of liberty and in doing so, purposively carves out a bottle neck for critical thinking. SCOTUS’ ruling not only removes race from the conversation, but it endorses a notion of colorblindness and racial evasion by way of legality. When flat-out lies become the flesh and bones of ‘truths we hold to be self-evident’ and the protean seeds of totalitarianism or opposition against critical dissent “emerge in the shadows of everyday speech, practices, and social relations” (Giroux 2024), so too, does democracy take a final bow and fascism blink awake.

At the time of writing this paper, the American Civil Liberties Union (2024) is tracking 484 anti-LGBTQ+ bills across different state legislatures; from this 192 bills are explicitly directed towards restricting the rights of student and educators in the U.S.[5] In 2023, over 40 bills were introduced targeting diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts in higher education (Bather et. al 2023) and The Chronicle of Higher Education (2024) reports a total of 84 anti-DEI bills introduced to date.[6] These bills, set out to achieve at least one of the following objectives: ban colleges from hosting DEI programs and employing DEI-related faculty; prohibit colleges from accepting or considering diversity statements in hiring and tenure processes; ban the compulsory requirement of diversity training among staff, students, and administration; and forbid colleges from considering factors such as race, sex, and ethnicity in admissions and employment decision. The already difficult conditions for BIPOC faculty and scholars to obtain tenureship, promotions, or a full professorship have only been magnified and accelerated by ongoing anti-DEI legislation. For African American students, in particular, decreasing enrollment rates result in increased racial isolation, alienation, and ostracization in predominantly white classrooms, dorms, cafeterias, libraries, and the white-majority cities in which they are located (Hamer and Lang 2015).

As such, a primary motive of anti-DEI bills and diversity prohibitions is to more generally capitalize on a politics of exclusion that, by design, leaves whiteness unchallenged. Exclusion, as Mbembe (2019) notes, is a form of force emblematic of the colonial empire, the pro-slavery state, the plantation, and especially, the modern upshot of these sites—the penal colony. Sentences of exclusion act as death sentences, aiming “to remove and eliminate those subjected to them” (Mbembe 2019, 22). Importantly, the exclusion of BIPOC (but also LGBTQ+ and female) scholars from the sphere of higher education works both spatially and temporally insofar as exclusionary practice, such as anti-DEI legislation, wishes to lock the Other out of physical spaces but also guarantee the Other’s disappearance over time. By homogenizing and sanitizing the academy in this way, far-right conservativism and authoritarianism is able to renovate public spaces into indoctrination schemas, pumping in the same fascist mindset it pumps out. The restrictions therefore, are not only on bodies, or a body politic, but on thinking itself. This logics of enmity at play in such necropolitics normalizes exclusion of the Other to such an extent that “rationalizations of nationalism and homonationalism” eventually become normative ideas on how power can be acquired and applied at the expense of another’s life (Mbembe 2019; Torres 2022).

A second key way in which anti-DEI legislation both reveals the institutionalized racism within higher education as well as its modern renditions is through a politics of erasure. Repeatedly, senate bills are embracing methods of educational intimidation and a muzzling of critical voice(s) by calling for curricular gag orders, clean-sweeps of course syllabi, and the banning of certain books which engage with critical race theory or BIPOC histories and voices (PEN America 2021). The assault on racial justice curricula and anti-racist pedagogies serves to amputate the connection between present (in)justices and those of the past, effectively erasing or dissociating America from its violent and genocidal history—an act of historical amnesia or disengagement, as Giroux (2023) describes, and here I add, an under-documenting and un-chaining too. This politics of erasure in higher education not only rids the material and textual archive of its human vibrancy (and thus, in some ways, dehumanizes scholarship altogether) but also intends to hollow-out the human archive upon which all secondary archives are borne. Kofi Lomotey (2023) notes how the experiences of Black, Latinx, Asian American, and Indigenous peoples are still underrepresented and inaccurately documented in the academy, effectively portraying the racial bias of the entire enterprise. Indeed, when the cracks and gaps have been meticulously laid out for you to slip through, the attitude is one of pre-meditated murder. For Mbembe (2019):

“This attitude demands that such acts of death and banishment succeed in erasing—during the enemy’s life, his death, and his relegation—what, in his face, belonged to his humanity. The undertaking of disfigurement and erasure is almost a precondition for execution within the contemporary logic of hatred. Within societies that continue to multiply the measures of separation and discrimination, the relation of care toward the Other has been replaced by a relation without desire.” (65)

That exclusion leads to erasure leads to extermination is a pressing concern the academy must address in light of neoliberal and necropolitical onslaughts. On the direct quantitative ties between race, education, and mortality, Jennifer Brite (2022) conducted a recent study at the City University of New York that reached three key conclusions: (1) Black students experience greater reductions in mortality rates with each additional year of schooling; (2) the least educated of white groups experience similar mortality rates and expected deaths as those similarly educated in Black groups; however, (3) at higher levels of education, white students enjoy significantly longer lifespans. With this knowledge, we can safely say that America’s (alarming) dishing out of anti-DEI bills acts as formal, legally-sanctioned executions. Doubling down, these executions—by exterminating higher education of past, present, and future BIPOC scholars through the various means I have discussed—follow in the heels of the serialized, standardized, and mechanized modes of execution we see of the ‘savages’ in our colonial history. For Mbembe (2003), both visible and “invisible” killings generate the inner workings of necropower (30). Moreover, in our contemporary post-9/11 moment, classical distinctions between ‘executioner’ and ‘victim’ have weakened so that “victims are now summoned to bear, in addition to the prejudice suffered, the guilt that their executioners ought to feel” (Mbembe 2019, 39). That conservative and neoliberal ideologues have led the charge in labelling the majority of BIPOC students as simply ‘diversity tickets’ now comes as no surprise considering these are the same policy-heads that have consistently victimized their whiteness. A politics of extermination is the last domino to fall in the necropolitical institution; and with rising rates of student suicide and sexual abuse alongside decreasing access to healthcare and wellness—all of which heightens in the face of anti-diversity—one wonders how long it might be until the entire castle crumbles down. One wonders if, in light of Mbembe’s notion of necropolitics, that last domino is already halfway to the ground.

A POLITICS OF POSSIBILITY: THE RADICAL IMAGINATION

If education within neoliberalism and the academy, as a necropolitical institution, primarily rests on capitalist and fascist realisms’ capacity to reinforce the notion that no alternative world, not even those we envision, is feasible, then it appears to me that there is no better time to test/push the (un)limits of our imaginations. Schools across America are becoming “morally dead zones” of the imagination, or in other words, disimagination machines (Giroux 2014). In the same way that we are threatened by everyday acts of fascism, we must also find ways to speak truth to everyday acts of dissent or insurgence in order to respond and radically change our current death regimes. We must, at once, stop tinkering with or trying to reform the death machine.

For many who currently reside in the margins both in and out of scholarship, the university can be a sanctuary. Insofar as we need to remember higher education’s role and relationship with (ongoing) histories of racial death and violence, so too must we reconcile with its ability to sustain and produce the antiracist liberalism necessary to keep democracy alive in light of our politics of death; to eventually rid such a necro-politics altogether. We must, in the phraseology of Toni Morrison, sharpen our moral faculties and, I add, exercise a radical form of imagination that aims to imagine the world, life, and social institutions not as they are but as they might otherwise be:

“[Radical imagination] is the courage and the intelligence to recognize that the world can and should be changed. But the radical imagination is not just about dreaming of different futures. It’s about bringing those possible futures ‘back’ to work on the present, to inspire action and new forms of solidarity today. Likewise, the radical imagination is about drawing on the past, telling different stories about how the world came to be the way it is, and remembering the power and importance of past struggles and the way their spirits live on in the present.” (Khasnabish and Haiven 2014, 3)

To imagine in this manner, it is necessary that we reframe the debate entirely. In a nation where the equality and success of the masses act as essential tenets of the American experiment, diversity (and therein, DEI programs) becomes legitimate terrain to address both forms of systemic racism and the acts of resistance against them. We must question, just as much as we defend, the benefits and role(s) of diversity, equity, and inclusivity movements in higher education. We must ask ourselves if DEI, as a neoliberal mode of management in itself, does more to damage the institution than protect it against racist ontologies of exclusion, erasure, and extermination. We must see into a future where diversity, rather than the problem or solution, is an active reality.   

[1] That racism is “the cruelty” central to the concatenation of necropolitics does not relegate or discount other structures of identity politics (such as class, gender, or sexuality) from its logics of death. As intersectional feminist scholars such as Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, bell hooks, and Kimberlé Crenshaw (among various others) have consistently taught us: systemic racism (and a racialized politics of death) never ventures far from structures of class, gender, and sexuality. Further, a disregard of class, gender, or sexuality ultimately “ignores the modes of resistance that emerge in necropolitical contexts that specifically deploy and mobilize gendered categories and identities” (Islekel 202, 4).

[2] Neoliberalism is both a socio-political project and a form of public pedagogy (Giroux qtd. in Harper 2014). As a political ideology, neoliberalism advocates for minimal state intervention in the economy, free-market casino capitalism, an abandonment of the welfare state, and privatization of public goods and services. As a pedagogical tool, neoliberalism invokes a moral blindness of social inequity and injustice by individualizing collective problems, commercializing social relations, prioritizing accruals of wealth, capital, and profits for the few (the 1%) at the expense of the many (the 99%), and depoliticizing systems of oppression, terror, and violence.

[3] Here, ‘capitalist realism’ is defined as the pervasive sense that capitalism is the only possible and realistic political and economic system, so deeply embedded within our contemporary society that conceiving any alternate system becomes nearly impossible.

[4] Indeed, this is the same fascist rhetoric that has constitutionally allowed for assault rifles to be used under the guise of protection and engendered a climate where the atomic bomb justifies itself; the same racial and colonial legacy that permitted state-sanctioned execution in service of ‘civilization’.

[5] Importantly, attacks on diversity in the academy are not events isolated to the U.S. alone. We see such fascist ideology traversing across the U.S.–Canada border with the recent ‘One Million March 4 Children’ coalition that rallied the nation in protest of 2SLGBT+ rights (such as freedom of gender identity and expression) in Canadian schools, and the 2024 intake cap issued by federal government in order to significantly decrease the number of international students in Canadian universities (IRCC).

[6] Out of the 84 anti-DEI bills introduced: 13 have received final legislative approval; 12 have become law; and 38 have been tabled, failed to pass, or vetoed.

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