‘How do we name the air that we breathe?’ – The haunting presence of white supremacy and settler colonialism at UC Berkeley

Abstract

ABSTRACT Social-justice-oriented student activists at UC Berkeley are concerned with structural inequalities and their connection to past unacknowledged atrocities associated with the campus. Through different activist endeavours, students seek to raise awareness of UC Berkeley’s settler colonial past and legacy of white supremacy. They unearth, reactivate, and relocate past atrocities in the present. The students call forth and are called upon by the past to dismantle structures of inequality on campus and beyond and encourage each other to be attentive to these structures. Building on five months of in-person fieldwork among student activists and online fieldwork from 2020 to 2022, I explore how rumours and narratives of the past, in resonance with broader translocal calls for justice, becomes a way for activist students to deal with the unaddressed settler colonial past of the university. . Inspired by a theoretical framework of hauntology, I show how (past) injustices haunt the campus and demand a reckoning with the past and present. I argue that activist students understand current inequalities as directly connected to past atrocities and that this understanding of history positions the students as implicated. Being implicated entails discomfort but also opens possibilities for action.