Building collective power amidst white supremacist backlash

Abstract

Students and community members forcefully tore down a confederate monument known as Silent Sam at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2018. This action unleashed brutal retaliation and ongoing strife. The toppling of Silent Sam should be celebrated as an antiracist milestone that can inspire deeper reflection, racial reckoning, and institutional accountability locally and in other North American higher education institutions. While the Jim Crow era monument’s massive concrete plinth held aloft an armed confederate soldier, a brass plaque on its base vividly depicted white women’s moral authority in encouraging militarism. I argue that white supremacy is deeply rooted at UNC, the oldest public university in the country, and is reinforced by layers of official lies such as the invented historical narrative of the Lost Cause, celebrating an idyllic slaveholding past that never existed. In order to build on this moment of rupture, scholars must begin to think of themselves as cultural and intellectual workers and endeavor to build collective power through labor unions, creative activities, American Association of University Professors chapters, professional and antiracist organizations. Only in this way, can scholars protect themselves, their colleagues, and students. Signing petitions is not enough! In this paper, I discuss a few ways antiracists built collective power on our campus in recent years. I also analyze the visual lessons of the confederate monument that was erected at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill more than a century ago during an earlier period of brutal white supremacist backlash.