“There’s people . . . in this room . . . who live here!”

While I take up surrounding texts in order to stress inter(con)textual reading, a (print and electronic) flyer and keynote lecture, online safety posts and the publicity material for the Community Police Academy, and a protest video represent the three core literacy events around which my study takes shape. My methodological approach resembles Ahmed’s “ethnography of texts,” as the cultural theorist follows around documents that “give diversity a physical and institutional form” while also following around the actors who use them, to uncover what diversity does/fails to do in educational institutions (2012, 12). Using a framework of “multi-sited”-ness that stresses the moving, interconnected, and networked meanings of a given concept, Ahmed’s study offers the argument that diversity documents often act nonperformatively in failing to enact the effects they name. Likewise, I follow fluid notions of Blackness around to consider how that nonperformativity of institutional diversity commitments that Ahmed highlights in On Being Included come up against the daily / lived effects / affects of them that Black folk experience in historically white educational spaces. Deploying critical discourse analysis (Wodak 2001), I mine linguistic encounters and their contextual exchanges with systemic power following studies using this method on discourses of racism (van Dijk 1986), housing insecurity (Huckin 2002), and disability (Price 2011), while instead paying specific attention to meanings/negations with Blackness. Below, I ground us in these texts shaping relations to Blackness with/in the deep ecology of Midwestern State during the six-month period in question.

The Black Lives Matter in the Classroom events spanned several days (April 1, 4, and 5, 2016) and coupled an interdisciplinary event with that generalized title with a more specialized event titled Black Lives/Writers Matter run by MwSU’s English department. The former aimed to intertwine “arts, humanities, social and political science perspectives to make visible and value Black life in [the Midwestern state] and beyond through scholarly lectures, pedagogy workshops, and community engagement” ([MwSU]BLMIC.org 2016). Framed publicly by conservatives as a question of whether the institution considered supporting the social movement as a “moral obligation” (Friedman 2016), the events drew support from a wide range of campus departments and organizations in support of diversity policy initiatives. These included MwSU’s office for diversity and inclusion, academic departments, and various committees and programs.

The event’s flyer—circulated on its website, as well as in print (posted throughout MwSU’s campus)—includes the names of these supporters. Its white text sets these names in contrast with its dark background, and the names of sponsors along with location information constitute roughly half of the flyer. The flyer’s image, set behind a citation, features prominently the faces of two Black women, with another Black individual obscured behind these two. All pictured in the image have raised fists, and the latter half of the word “FRUITVALE” arches behind them in bronze, in what appears to be community signage. The women wear gold jewelry and natural Black hairstyles, and the woman to the right of the image wears a black hoodie. None of these people appear to be looking toward the camera, instead looking to the street ahead of them. The URL citation for the poster is clickable on the electronic version of the poster (found on the event’s website) and leads to an article about a student protest featuring a version of the photograph from which the poster’s version seems to have been cropped. Centered directly above the flyer’s image, the event title reads “#BlackLivesMatter in the Classroom Symposium.”

On April 1, Carmen Kynard, then associate professor in English and gender studies at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, delivers the lunch keynote for the Black Lives Matter in the Classroom Symposium. The lecture titled “ ‘Ain’t New to This’: Black Lives Matter and the New Black Campus Movement,” lasts about an hour and is followed by questions from the audience.2 Kynard’s talk centers around two narratives about her students of color set in relation to “the appropriation and neutralizing” of 1960s/1970s student protest into current institutional foci on diversity and inclusiveness; that contextualization interrogates how Black Freedom movements of the past find themselves situated in contemporaneous Black protest (Kynard 2016, 3). Through these stories Kynard emphasizes how her students’ projects respond to shifting racial dynamics at public educational institutions, to the #BlackLivesMatter movement and to “new temporalities for cross-spatial, non-classroom-contained learning” (14). The Black feminist dares her audience to heed these students’ examples, to match their creative energies in order to transform their contemporaneous university spaces.

Midwestern State University’s Department of Public Safety posts alerts about violent crimes that occur in campus areas via its emergency management system and its website. According to that department’s annual report, “Public Safety Notices are issued by the University Police . . . Timely Warnings/Public Safety Notices provide information about crimes that have already occurred but still pose a serious or continuing threat” (Department of Public Safety 2017, 24). I analyze alerts publicized in the six-month period between April 1 and September 30, 2016.3 Though the department records seven such alerts in the six-month period, members of the campus community sometimes receive emails and text messages containing additional reports and information that do not always correlate with the publicly posted information.

The alerts posted on the department’s website contain news on crimes ranging from sexual assault to theft that describe suspects via racial and gender markers, as well as through clothing and bodily descriptions. They also provide tips on how members of the campus community might respond, thwart, or prevent victimhood. The alerts present some standard language across messages reasoning on victimhood, offering resources, and contact info, including the phrase “becoming the victim of any crime is no one’s fault,” which appears in all but one post (emphasis mine; Department of Public Safety 2016e; 2016f; 2016g; 2016h; 2016i). While the reports remain consistent in certain respects on the kinds of information provided (date, time, and location data feature in all messages), the ways they describe suspects and sometimes victims differ significantly across alerts. These notices enact the Jeanne Clery Disclosure of Campus Security Policy and Campus Crime Statistics Act of 1990 that requires federally funded institutions to disseminate information on campus crime (Legal Information Institute 2018).4 According to the safety department, the criteria considered before issuing such notices include “Did a crime occur?”; “Did a crime occur on campus property or on other Clery reportable property?”; “Is the crime a Clery reportable crime?”; and “Is there a serious and continuing threat to the campus community?” (Department of Public Safety 2016a).

The Department of Public Safety (2016b) at MwSU runs a four-week program intended to afford “eligible community members an idea of what it’s like to protect and serve on campus.” In its publicity material, the department stresses its commitment to “diversity,” explaining that the academy also affords the university’s police force “yet another opportunity” to learn about the campus community’s issues. The sessions offer participants information on the police force’s policies and practices in the form of discussions and role-playing, and it concludes with a “ride-along.” Beneath this textual description, the publicity page for the program displays graphics and blurbs of the activities involved in it, which notably include the image of red handcuffs with the text “Handcuffing and suspicious persons calls” and a red circular “fingerprint” with “Process, fingerprint and photograph prisoners.” Along with descriptions of who might be eligible for these sessions, an accompanying video advertises some of the program’s highlights. Testimonials by three participants—a Black man, a Muslim woman of color,5 and a white woman—intersect scenes of “role-playing” sessions. The video also contains police officers’ explanations of the program’s aims and philosophy.

On the night of April 6, 2016, a coalition of student groups, collected around a mission to “#Reclaim[MwSU],” engage in a sit-in protest of university administration, emphasizing their silencing, the corporatizing of the university’s food and energy investments, and MwSU’s support for anti-Palestinian companies as issues in need of attention. To that end, students demand thorough and detailed access to the university’s budget and financial investments and for administration to be responsive to social justice efforts (Wainz 2016). The coalition included antisweatshop, pro-Palestinian, and pro-Black groups, among others. The student-led resistance occupies the seat of the university’s president from midafternoon on April 6. Later that evening, when folks outside the building attempt to provide food for the students in the building, police prevent them or the food items from entering. The conversation recorded in the YouTube video artifact follows that incident. The video circulates on social media (such as YouTube and Facebook) and news websites with various titles, including “Coalition for Black Lives Told to GTFO at [Midwestern] State” and “[MwSU] Administration Threatens Expulsion Against Students” (Keep[MwSU]Public 2016).

In the video, six students (who include five students of color and five women) sit in conversation with two white male university officials. The men explain to the students that they must clear the building by 5 a.m. or they will be removed in adherence with the university’s Student Code of Conduct. When questioned by students as to what exactly that removal means, the official describes in detail how they will be physically uprooted from the premises. He goes on to describe that the removal will not only result in their arrest, but also their expulsion from the university. When asked by students why such action would be necessary, the white official in the foreground describes the student group as “threatening” and “disruptive.” He cites the earlier altercation with police: “Do you remember when you all made the rush down there and chanted to folks outside the doors a minute ago? That scared people [thrusts index finger in reproach].” When the group asks, “Who?,” if it scared the “police officers with guns,” the official contends that protestors refuse to understand their position; the students “would scare employees wanting to do their work.” In his paternalistic tone, [MwSU’s] senior vice president of administration urges the group to make “good decisions.” When asked why “students” will not be allowed access to university space (beyond 5 a.m.), the official says the building is not open to “disruptive people.” Even when protestors offer video evidence that the altercation used to reason them as a threat shows that designation invalid, the senior vice president contends that they have a disagreement and underlines his mandate. According to journalist Mary Morgan Edwards, “the final group of about 25 left at about 12:30 a.m., an official said” (2016). The event makes local news and results in heightened police presence for the next day or so around the university president’s office.

In the previous chapter, I theorize a Black Lives Matter framework of inter(con)textual reading to mobilize the Black feminist process of literacy as the practice of freedom (hooks 1994). Inter(con)textual reading flows like rhetorician Banks’s theory of “mixing,” where through “selection, arrangement, layering, sampling, beat-making,” and “blending” texts, contexts, temporalities, and histories surrounding my back-beat, I create “new and renewing possibilities” in analysis (2010, 35). I again take up that methodology that understands these “back-beat” texts under analysis as literacy events. Linking rhetorical theory with literacy studies through critical discourse analysis, conceptualizing rhetorical situations as literacy events offers means to dynamically understand the fluid evolution of meaning in deep rhetorical ecologies; it places focus on how texts’ environment, histories, conjured temporalities, and contexts inform/impact their meanings. We’ll recall underlying questions that mobilize that reading, remixed from Heath’s ([1982] 2001) methodology of studying literacy events: What texts make up the rhetorical environments of the event in question? What identities and activities surround those texts and impinge on the ways in which the environments’ meanings evolve? And how do ongoing activities include that text or the individuals and activities which the text produces/negotiates?

Continuing Threats: White Institutional Defensiveness and Rhetorical Reclamation

Over the six-month period surveyed, all seven online safety posts (Department of Public Safety 2016d, 2016e, 2016f, 2016g, 2016h, 2016i, 2016j) contain the word “black.” It appears 24 times, 13 as a racial descriptor and 11 to describe clothing or hair, all in relation to “suspects.” Each time these posts narrate a body “black,” the description contains a gender marker; “male” occurs twelve times. Safety posts elaborate the descriptor “black” with “light skinned,” “dark skinned,” “young,” “with dreadlocks,” “skinny,” and “with a light complexion.” Clothes associated with the word include “hoodie,” “shorts,” “jacket,” “pants,” “sweat pants,” “sunglasses,” and “high top shoes.” The campus “community” might therefore imagine those “considered to be of a concern and/or a continuing threat” as Black, Black and male, and wearing stereotypically urban hairstyles and clothing. As Black feminist Simone Drake highlights when emphasizing this issue at the selfsame university in a 2016 monograph: “On a campus with a total African American student population of 5.33 percent or 3,630 students, in a state whose African American population is 13.7 percent or over 1.5 million people, and at a university with a total enrollment of 64,868, notices that consistently identify black male suspects, in the minds of many, render all black males on campus, whether they are students, staff, faculty, or guests, as suspects” (2016, vii). Drake even details action taken by a staff member at the institution to create their own internally circulated alert about a Black man wearing a backpack around certain academic buildings, one of which houses the department of African and African American studies. The staff member responsible lets their audience know that they have notified campus police about the issue. In analyzing the vigilante mimicking of the “official” alerts, Drake notes, “For many, then, there is a logical equation between black maleness and pathology” (viii). Black maleness, along with the continual use of the descriptor “black” in detailing criminality (Department of Public Safety 2016d, 2016e, 2016f, 2016g, 2016h, 2016i, 2016j), renders those (em)bodying both constructs as incapable of being law-biding and therefore a threat to safety in these historically white spaces.

The alerts demonstrate criminalization on MwSU’s campus, one of several processes transforming the likenesses of certain identity categories into criminals. This criminalization results directly from what Black feminist S. Browne details as “racializing surveillance,” a “technology of social control where surveillance practices, policies, and performances” mark what might be in/out of place, moments that “reify boundaries, borders, and bodies along racial lines” resulting in discriminatory treatment (2015, 16). Such processes not only stigmatize bodies but also precarious rhetorics embodied by and co-constituting their Black assemblages—here rhetorics associated with deviant Black maleness. These messages might fracture Blackness into the wake of Trans-Atlantic slavery (Sharpe 2016), particularly echoing detailed runaway slave advertisements “defining the slave” and, as a result, Blackness “as out of place” (S. Browne 2015, 72) in the afterlives of Trans-Atlantic slavery. But these processes apply not only to Black males, as they also summon Blackness proper, a likeness, para/ontological images, and resultant imaginaries, with references to dreadlocks, hoodies, and dark clothing. The relation/ships evoked animates Spillers’s idea of “oceanic ungendering,” a literal suspension in the Middle Passage, an “analogy on undifferentiated identity” (2003, 214). Spillers highlights that “under these conditions we lose at least gender difference in the outcome, and the female body and the male body become a territory of cultural and political maneuver” (2003, 206). Sharpe, likewise, reads the criminalization of Black women by New York City’s stop-and-frisk tactics, where Black women were frisked by male officers, justified by wearing clothing common to crimes and having “suspicious bulge” (2016, 85). Indeed, one officer, an Inspector Royster, claims “Safety has no gender” (Ruderman 2012). In the ecological temporalities that fractures animate, Blackness, invoked as the deviant as in MwSU’s security posts, becomes formless (here in terms of white heteronormative gender distinctions) under the white authorial gaze as a means to the end of (re)establishing safety.

In so fracturing us into the wake of Blackness’ non/Being with/in this deep ecology, notions of “community” border and boundary. S. Browne again (re)minds us of how the circulation of runaway slave advertisements assumed a white audience both “consuming at once the black subject, imagined as unfree,” while producing “the readers of such advertisements as part of the ‘imaginary community’ of surveillance: the eyes and ears of face-to-face watching, observing, and regulating” (2015, 72). Those safety posts overtly mark these Black rhetorics as neither a part of, nor a present unwanted part of, who and what belongs in this particular historically white institution’s spaces; Blackness represents an out of place non/being in such an ecology. The posts shape and racialize a white “campus body” through these hypervigilant, antiBlack senses. The notices co-constitute (and geographically close off) campus spaces as belonging to the “campus community,” a white body defined through a mutual concern about “continuing threat” (Department of Public Safety 2016d, 2016e, 2016f, 2016g, 2016h, 2016i, 2016j). But notice how this threat works through the (em)bodied and the imagined to re/produce fear of Blackness as the specter of cultural criminality. As evidenced in Drake’s (2016) vigilante’s actions, white cultural imagination conjures Blackness via the ghostly figure of the Black male—even while gendered amorphous. As in Darren Wilson’s projection of Michael Brown and Susan Smith’s case of drowning her two sons,6 this figure augurs “a specter, the specter” of crime (Sharpe 2016, 82; emphasis in original). Blackness in white imagination, manifested in historically white spaces, co-constitutes that para/ontological atmosphere of certain uncertainty with/against which white “community” becomes defined.

The department itself attempts to more clearly articulate who can make up this community through their aptly named “Community Police Academy.” In promotional material, sections on “Who May Attend” and “Responsibilities of Participants” gesture at who the department considers “eligible community members.” The former warns, “Please do not apply if you have been charged with or convicted of a felony” (Department of Public Safety 2016b), reinforcing the nonhumanness/exclusion/de-citizening of criminalized/incarcerated people. From this statement, we know that the program does not include those criminalized by the US racial caste system as in need of knowledge about campus police’s operations or as belonging to campus spaces. These exclusions reinforce the racing of such spaces by white institutional defensiveness through policy. Colorblindness’s normalization in interrelation/ships with the stigmatization of the prison industrial complex make possible the general palatability of such statements.

The visual of a rounded fingerprint with the invitation to “Process, fingerprint and photograph prisoners,” along with another of handcuffs advertising “Handcuffing and suspicious persons calls” as part of the “Community Police Academy” program’s highlights further categorize whom the department sees as in-/out-side of the campus community. The following statement on participant responsibility stipulates that clothing and other (em)bodied rhetorics play a part in who/what the department accepts as belonging: “Participants are expected to conduct themselves in a manner that will reflect credit to themselves, the university and the agent/organization. This includes personal appearance.” The safety department’s criminalization of Black skin, clothing, hair, and those (em)bodying Blackness (phenotypically and culturally) through security posts intimate what kinds of “personal appearance” or “conduct” might exclude identities—particularly Black identities—from eligibility in campus community: persons embodying ranges of racialized descriptors such as the “black male approximately 25 to 30 years old . . . 5'11" to 6'0" tall with a medium build, medium complexion, a tattoo on his right shoulder and wearing a white t-shirt and black shorts” (Department of Public Safety 2016f). The safety posts characterize such “personal appearances” as threating to the “safe” environs of the historically white university.

Almost predictably, however, publicity material for the outreach program conjures “diversity” as a trope with which it works diligently. The first line of the program’s detailed description reads, “[MwSUPD] is committed to serving a diverse population of students, faculty, staff and visitors” (Department of Public Safety 2016b). Yet race remains a kind of spectral, amorphous presence through the program’s attached promotional video. Although it features testimonials from a Black male employee (classed by captions as “HR Manager” in the “Office of Business and Finance”) and a Muslim woman of color (a third-year student), notions of race and/or Blackness never overtly show up in publicizing the sessions. Those notions, nonetheless, function tellingly and perniciously in what appear as directorial and programmatic decisions to invert stereotypical scripts of those deemed deviant and dominant. The video thus portrays the Black male participant handcuffing a white male assailant—the latter notably (still) dressed in a gray hoodie, with that object reiterating the “personal appearance” of this community’s out-group. The white woman detective described as “Community Police Academy Coordinator” in the video reveals that “the program is . . . uh . . . written for all ages, genders, and types of people.” Her use of age and gender as markers of difference along with general hesitation in her statement and the phrase “types of people” suggest a tense sidestepping of race and racialization around issues (of police/civilian interrelationships) very much plagued by dynamics of racial identity/Blackness post-Ferguson. The video and related publicity material represent institutional white defensiveness by the historically white university, where the institution attempts to alleviate any potential racial stress that might arise in white audiences and “community” members through a series of defensive maneuvers. So, while the Department of Public Safety’s security notices race Blackness as deviant and a “continuing threat” to safety (Department of Public Safety 2016d, 2016e, 2016f, 2016g, 2016h, 2016i, 2016j), it defines “diversity” through a shy away from racial difference that reinforces dominant and potentially stereotypical racial scripts.

The YouTube video of #ReclaimMwSU’s student protest documents a discussion of what constitutes such a “threat” at the historically white university (Keep[MwSU]Public 2016). The more vocal of the white administrators in it deploys language of “violation” to depict the behavior of the protestors, explaining that in order to “have dialogue” the administration desires, and for such dialogue “to extend beyond tonight,” the sit-in must desist. He explains that the activists “are violating the Student Code of Conduct as dictated by [the university president].” Contextualized in a paternalistic, condescending tone, which Fanon notes as a marker of white male rhetoric toward Black folk ([1952] 2008, 19), empowered deployment of language such as “dictated” registers as sinister with the impending threat of police force (Keep[MwSU]Public 2016). Although he explains that “this is your university”—almost to claim a shared belonging of the space—the administrator demands that the students leave the space by 5 a.m. to protect the university staff who work in the building (the proper, safe functioning of the neoliberal machine). An off-screen protestor asks directly, “How are we threatening them?”—the question spotlighting underlying tensions between authorities and the students’ numerous Black and brown bodies. When the administrator explains that protestors’ previous behavior (an attempt to obtain food) “scared” people, they probe, “Who did we scare?” “The policemen with guns?” The protestor’s clapback in the exchange overtly calls into question the (over)policing of Black bodies at MwSU that buttresses historical scripts of such bodies as disruptive threats to white security, as always already out of place; Black beings “fit the description of the nonbeing, the being out of place, and the noncitizen always available to and for death” (Sharpe 2016, 86). Like the email notices and the vigilante response that Drake (2016) narrates show, being a criminalized racializing assemblage at the historically white institution elicits rhetorical and weaponized police/vigilante response.

After various overlapping exchanges, the white male administrator, frustratedly asks, “Are you telling me that we need guns to protect ourselves?” (Keep[MwSU]Public 2016). In making such an assumption, his inquiry turns the “fault” of criminalization on to those criminalized because of their antiracist assemblage. Such a move resembles the public vilification by media coverage of several Black people whose deaths became associated with Black Lives Matter protests: the ideology that #IfTheyGunnedMeDown exposes. When the other white male administrator attempts to deescalate the tension in the room by again stating that the very presence of their bodies in a campus space would “scare employees,” an off-screen voice wonders, “Students would scare employees?” Using racially unmarked language to classify folks as “students” and “employees” through their questions, the activists deploy universal language to gesture at the problematics of that very (colorblind) language. The racial stress for the white institution caused by an assemblage of Black and brown bodies and affects heightens the perceived threat to the safety of whiteness. The protest (em)bodies the deep ecologically affected ghosts of Blackness, haunting white notions of safety. The administrators therefore defensively summon the Student Code of Conduct as a policy that might quell such stress and snuff out racialized insurgency. Later, another voice probes: “Are you saying this university building is not open to students?”—the query emphasizing the politics of belonging in campus spaces, confronting the institution with the challenge of actively defining its fictitious borders, rather than drawing on the negation of Blackness to do so. They seek an adjective since their nouns do not seem to stick signification. The more vocal white administrator responds: “It is not open to disruptive people.” In deeming the group disruptive—and notably “people” rather than students—he rhetorically joins with the safety notices in determining who and what might be a part of, not a part of, and a threat to the stability of whiteness and white spaces and by extension its institutions, while evoking the language of white institutional defensiveness. Anyone can be “disruptive,” just as Nixon’s administration claimed that every/anyone had “freedom of choice” in the United States.

But in response to the marker “disruptive,” one Black woman quite audibly notes, “Some of us are people of color, so . . .” slapping her knees, as the administrator looks away from the group in nonresponse to the point. Her calling out of the racial dynamics of the situation puts racialized dynamics inherent in their treatment on blast. The administrator’s telling look away from racialization evidences the “intense silent resistance,” that “speaking the truth-of-racism-to-power tends at [historically white educational institutions] to be met with” (Kynard and Eddy 2009, W35). In the fracture between them, the protestor rhetorically reclaims possibilities for Blackness and its meanings by illustrating the unsaid of the email notices: Blackness at/for the historically white institution equals disruption to security (Keep[MwSU]Public 2016). Difference, instead of signaling “diversity,” spotlights deviance. The student protestor rallies race conceptually in critiquing the very idea of racialization, in antiracism. Whereas the Community Police Academy video represents the tense defensiveness surrounding the acknowledgment of race as a marker of difference (Department of Public Safety 2016b), the Black woman protestor makes clear the unsaid notion that Blackness disrupts the functioning of white institutions when not incorporated unmarked into its fabric or public practice of institutional policy (Keep[MwSU]Public 2016).

More than a reassertion of cultural ownership over gestures, performances, and objects, these reclamations involve public exposure of racializing Blackness, in upending its stigmatizing energy for rhetorical means and as marginalized literacy. Here lie the rhetorical possibilities in Fanonian fracture. Such agency functions/flows relationally, with potentials for social energy and discursive power through Black feminist and African indigenous frameworks for agency that conceive it as simultaneously, fluidly, individual and collectively interconnected (Chilisa 2017). In the Black woman’s “some of us” she racializes her body along with, in between, and across the protesting assemblage, mapping herself in/directly through the group’s interrelations. That fracture, possible through the rhetorically exteriorized co-constituted self, also mobilizes a past that is not a past by reanimating Black being in the afterlives of slavery. While in the “sensitizing action” of the fracture, “the goal of the [Black being’s] behavior will be The Other (in the guise of the white man), for the Other alone can give [them] worth” (Fanon [1952] 2008, 119), rhetorical reclamations forge otherwise possibilities with/in its affects/temporalities/meanings as actional. In that moment, the Black non/being, “preserving in all [their] relations,” their non/beingness and para/ontology with/in their deeply ecological environments, “prepares to act” (173). That action may take on an interchangeable range of rhetorics to hurl Blackness as object-being at the white institutional frame, as with Black autoethnography, hashtagging, and inter(con)textual reading in previous chapters and Black disruption in this one.

Rhetorical reclamations bear similarity to the rhetorical theory of “recognitions in between,” forwarded by Wendy S. Hesford (2015) via Arabella Lyon (2013), as they also “represent the temporal present,” while pointing “to the moment of relationship among rhetorical actors where future political potentials are formed” (Hesford 2015, 552). Hesford argues that recognitions in between spotlight the limitations of classical liberal and neoliberal recognition logics and generates alliances not possible via those logics (539). The rhetorical theorist offers #BlackLivesMatter die-ins as sites of collective recognition, “where recognition exists in between bodies and identities . . . to connect those who came before with those who come after,” highlighting “a shared history of struggle and hope” (552–553). In the case of Black rhetorical reclamations, however, the Fanonian fracture, the temporalities of the wake, specifically transfigure Blackness into non/being as deviation and always already living in the aftermath of slavery. These reclamations thus cull the particular plasticizing commodification of Blackness, through object-being, in a rhetorical otherwise made possible through histories of antiBlackness. Rhetorics of the Black student protestor here revitalize a push for Black freedom through (re)claiming a social death (in identifying the assemblage “disruptive”) in the ways that #BlackLivesMatter reiteratively draws on the idea that Black lives do not matter in asserting that they do. The movement’s cling to Black feminist thought (and insistence in the Black of #BlackLivesMatter) and the protestor’s reclamation mobilize to invert the philosophical, hermeneutical, legal, and material control of Black women’s (em)bodied rhetorics dating back to Trans-Atlantic slavery that conjure Black women as carriers of Blackness (and thus deviance).7 Black feminist rhetorics invert a denial of agency to expose the white racializing power structure. Through the wake work of the fracture, these relations (might) emerge between/across called-upon histories/contexts/temporalities with/in Wynter’s (2001) sociogenic principle in the Black woman’s retort in distributively energizing deviance back at the administrators’ racially colorblind logic.

While Lyon points out that “any act in-between is not easily owned or attributed” (2013, 58), rhetorical reclamations ground their own specific cultural temporalities and histories. Such gestures, performances, and objects mobilize their historiographical/temporal rhetorical agency. Yet, what Hesford argues of #BlackLivesMatter die-ins as recognitions in between also applies to rhetorical reclamations as they “put forth an understanding of agency based not on autonomous, atomistic self, but grounded in social interdependences” (2015, 553). The Black rhetorical reclamations outlined in this chapter and project proper work through such ecological inter-/intra-connections in Black feminist and African indigenous notions of agency to destabilize white institutional defensiveness, which has become standard operational procedure for white institutions. They deploy Cohen’s (2004) appeal for disruption/deviance to be reconceptualized as generative for transformative possibilities for Black folk in their social deaths and object/being-ness. Rather than reactionary posturing aimed squarely at rehabilitating white culture, these reclamations alternatively cull Black histories, temporalities, languages, and literacies as Black invention. They, in ways, use the epidermalization of Blackness for Black contagion.

Kynard’s keynote for the #BlackLivesMatter Symposium, likewise, calls out the neutralization of Black protest in aid of notions of inclusivity, instead focusing on how her students act as “practitioners” (2016, 2) to push against these institutional moves/motives. Through their experiences and projects, such as her student Andrene’s creation of the e-portfolio website “Pretty for a Black Girl,” Kynard demonstrates how Black insurgency operates in the classroom to invert neoliberal value-systems of literacy. The rhetorics of Andrene’s website undercut degrading racist stereotypes, Black women’s struggles with colorism, and the marginalization of Black vernacular. For instance, Andrene’s section headings draw from Black cultural vernacular: “Burning through the Cerebral Cortex,” in particular, references Oprah Winfrey’s description of Black women’s problematic and oppressive histories with hair straightening. In demonstrating how students of color innovate through what Kynard calls “vernacular technocultural competence” (14), the Black feminist’s keynote works to turn the heteropatriarchal capitalist project of offering Black bodies space in white institutions back at those institutions. Unlike the stigmatization of Black bodies by safety notices, and distinct from imagery of Black protest for publicity, the keynote—following Spillers—strives beyond the historical use of Black folk as “raw material” for white means (14). Kynard’s student example protests hair-straightening practices and colorism—that have destructive historical and ongoing consequences—through “Pretty for a Black Girl,” operating in online and the keynote presentation’s temporalities, while signaling how Black student protest extends (and has historically extended) sociopolitical possibilities for subverting literacies dressed up as racializing surveillance like the e-portfolio. The keynote thus acts as its own kind of rhetorical reclamation co-constituted by those of Kynard and Kynard’s students.

The presentation not only emphasizes Kynard’s students’ projects and experiences to inform disciplinary fields and universities on re/shaping education from multiple knowledges, but also focuses on the energies of cultural expressions (and modes of expression) deeply engrained in Black cultural temporalities. The presentation’s focus on Kynard’s student’s cultural force in critiquing matters such as Black hair and language—along with pro-Black attitudes grounded in the Black Freedom movement and Black feminist ideology—ephemerally reclaims space in the white institution for subversive energy. Such energy comes through student resistance to dominant cultural forces, rather than institutional policy practice. On the flip side, the poster for the symposium, through its images, represents similar cultural expressions in its display of Black clothing, hair, and embodiment. The flyer foregrounds young Black women’s roles in the Black Lives Matter movement, Black power fists, and a black-and-gold color scheme (in clothing, jewelry, and even the backdrop signage). The listing of eleven institutional organizations that cut interdisciplinarily across the campus use as much of the flyer’s space as the image, endeavoring to signal an ethic of resistance grounded in the work of Black women and supported by a coalitional range of allies. However, while the poster utilizes these rhetorics to publicize presentations such as Kynard’s, their appropriation by the selfsame university that marks Blackness as a ghostly threat potentially renders the visualized Black student protest’s agency moot. These images, in white cultural imagination, possibly reinscribe notions of Blackness (beyond the white community) commodified as deviance in the white gaze, while selling wokeness as white progressiveness.

On the surface, the visuals for the Black Lives Matter in Classrooms Symposium run opposite these widely circulated criminal perceptions of relational Black assemblages and that arise from safety notices (Department of Public Safety 2016d, 2016e, 2016f, 2016g, 2016h, 2016i, 2016j) or those definitions of diversity at MwSU more subtly represented through Community Police Academy (Department of Public Safety 2016b) material. They draw on the same kind of specificity in representing Black bodies as the notices: not only through skin color, but, importantly, through dark clothing—a hoodie in particular—natural Black hair, and dark shades. The images, indeed, belie the conception of Blackness as criminal specter that results from the circulation of the safety department’s posts. But although they publicly provide visions of Black student protest circulated widely at the historically white institution, their use by the institution’s eleven listed funders runs the risk of co-opting such imagery for those funders and the institution’s public and financial benefit. And while the Black Lives Matter Symposium flyer does similarly mark its visual rhetorics racially—not (colorblindly) shying away from racial identification—the poster lists the symposium’s institutional supporter, its office of “diversity” and “inclusion,” close to the top of its allies, opening up potential readings of neutralized, objectified Blackness in nonperformativity for institutional benefit.

Universal Whiteness, Feelings, and the Question of Black Antiracism

That white male administrators’ visible turn away when confronted with race by the Black woman protestor’s rhetorical reclamation, along with his earlier characterization of the protestors to diffuse the situation—he calls the protestors “smart kids”; he wants them to “make good decisions” (Keep[MwSU] Public 2016)—(em)bodies and reflects a general attitude of refusing to acknowledge the racialized dynamics of criminalization by white institutions. In such refusal, the racial stress caused for empowered white assemblages by such situations often results in language of universalized morality such as “smart” and “good”—language signaling white institutional defensiveness—here couched in the infantilizing rhetorical finger-wagging of paternalistic “care.” That language exemplifies the “more subtle forms where [Black student protestor’s] political activism is downplayed so as not to create conflict” (Kynard 2013, 239). The video advertisement for the Community Policy Academy deploys comparable rhetoric, as its coordinator skips over race as a marker of difference (immediately after highlighting age and gender) to claim: “everybody will be successful in this program” (Department of Public Safety 2016b). Race and Blackness—and by extension difference, such as with the ungendering of Blackness in the pursuit of white “safety”—do not matter so long as some universal good is achieved. As Ahmed explains via an interview with a research participant on the politics of “perception data,”8 “diversity work becomes about generating the ‘right image’ and correcting the wrong one . . . about changing perceptions of whiteness rather than changing the whiteness of organizations. Changing perceptions of whiteness can be how an institution can reproduce whiteness, as that which exists but is no longer perceived” (2012, 34; emphasis in original). The video, therefore, naturally, fails to highlight the exclusionary politics used in determining who might constitute the “everybody,” whereas the eligibility criteria use the language of “conduct” and the prison industrial matrix to mobilize its white institutional defensiveness (Department of Public Safety 2016b).

Similar to the video, though, campus safety notices use the standardized statement: “Becoming the victim of any crime is no one’s fault” (Department of Public Safety 2016e, 2016f, 2016g, 2016h, 2016i, 2016j). Though significantly undercutting a culture of victim-blaming that can be particularly damaging when campus crimes like sexual assault face publicness, the statement comes attached to all but one of the Department of Public Safety’s posts speaking to “any” violent crime. In an attempt to exculpate and soothe its audience from the racial stress of its tense power dynamics, the sentence places victimhood in a subjectless, cultureless vacuum. No one is at fault; you are “smart kids”; “everyone will be successful” (Keep[MwSU]Public 2016). It also, despite attempts to eschew “blame,” potentially exonerates all readers and consequently the institution of social responsibility for the spaces in which “crimes” occur. Who is the “one” that is free from fault (Department of Public Safety 2016e, 2016f, 2016g, 2016h, 2016i, 2016j)? Should audiences understand violence as randomly occurring in campus spaces and not tethered to bodies, interactions, or cultures? Or is it that responsibility is shared among all of the readers of the message (the “campus community”) and therefore not falling on any one person? Like the nonperformativity that Ahmed characterizes as inherent in institutional language on diversity (2012, 117), the message’s defensive posture tries too hard to soothe racial stress for the white community and almost becomes a nonmessage. What it does, however, arguably—by not tethering blame to any/body in particular—is leave such blame to the ghost of Blackness, that spectral criminality not belonging to this community, that certain uncertainty of para/ontological Blackness.

The ambiguity of the statement is then complicated with the following, which appears on all seven posts: “We remind you to increase your overall safety by being cautious and looking out for one another; being aware of your surroundings and looking assertive; walking with a trusted friend or co-worker, when possible; if a situation makes you feel uncomfortable or unsafe, choose an alternative” (Department of Public Safety 2016d, 2016e, 2016f, 2016g, 2016h, 2016, 2016j). If the former interpretation of the initial statement is read to mean that no person or institutional body is at fault for violence on campus, then the tips that follow belie that notion. The final statement, which flatly offers alternative “situations” to discomfort and danger, also puts some responsibility on members of the “campus community” for their bodies, interactions, and cultures. Of importance, however, “one” and “you” as subjects come after very specific third-person racialized, gendered descriptions of persons involved in violent altercations. This shift sets up a binary between a racialized “they/them” and a generalized “one/you,” a Black or right scenario, a contrast between heavily gendered, classed, racialized language regarding Blackness. The seemingly colorblind, vague tips—the rhetoric of institutional white defensiveness—on maintaining the safety of this “one/you” highlight the coded language of those tip-toeing pieces of advice. Such language resembles that of workplace cultural competence training courses, where “racially coded language reproduces racist images and perspectives while it simultaneously reproduces the comfortable illusion that race and its problems are what ‘they’ [people of color] have, not us [whites]” (DiAngelo 2011, 55). These rhetorics have the insidious potential to continue to mark Black bodies in white educational spaces as disruptions to a universalized white comfort, as has historically been the case.

In late September 2016, faculty in the historically white university’s department of English bring the department’s attention to white supremacist posters found throughout academic buildings at Midwestern State. The posters, which bookmark the end of the six-month period under analysis, visually illustrate the vagueness of white nationalist heteropatriarchal ideology found in standardized statements about “fault” and boilerplate language used by white administrators to paper over relational, intersectional resistance (Department of Public Safety 2016d, 2016e, 2016f, 2016g, 2016h, 2016i, 2016j; Keep[MwSU]Public 2016).

The mandate “SERVE YOUR PEOPLE,” while superficially straightforward, raises several questions, most significant: To whom does the poster direct its message? Since the group claiming ownership of it, Identity Evropa, openly identifies as white supremacist, then “your people” might well be understood as white people at the educational institution. However, what the poster leaves unclear is the particular subject of the imperative. Who is the understood “you” that should “SERVE YOUR PEOPLE”? The institution? White faculty? White staff? White students? Identity Evropa’s goals to “promulgate the idea that America was founded by white people for white people and was not founded to be a multiracial or multicultural society” (Anti-Defamation League 2018) along with the grayscale image of Julius Caesar attached to the alphabetic text suggest all of the above—a centralized message from a centralized dictating power—but the poster’s ambiguity leaves the possibility for any of the above. It aligns with the them/you binary dynamics of the university’s security posts. Like victimhood being “no one’s fault” (Department of Public Safety 2016d, 2016e, 2016f, 2016g, 2016h, 2016i, 2016j), suggesting some other collective as possibly responsible for crime, the poster suggests service of white people as some one’s responsibility in relation to the inclusive “YOUR” people, a singular duty. In Wynterian terms, whiteness in the form of the white heteropatriarchal male (and his apposite institutions) overrepresents the genre of universal Man (Wynter 2003)—The you, in relation to the third-person them (re/calling Fanon [1952] 2008) here—targets universal Man, signaling whiteness.

Conversely, the Black Lives Matter Symposium material, through Kynard’s (2016) keynote, frankly calls such amorphous, ambiguous appeals to the universal—as with “All Lives Matter”—into question. Kynard’s keynote touches on this issue in discussing white male students’ feeling the need to ask why race might be important, noting the risk inherent in response as a Black woman instructor prone to complaints based on racial stereotypes (of being overly aggressive and “extra”). As opposed to the white supremacist appeal to absolute dictatorial rule or the deployment of universalized colorblind language, Kynard’s (2016) keynote spotlights Black students’ projects that protest continuing histories/temporalities of oppression—highlighting the specific rhetorical potentials of marginalized bodies in university spaces. Moreover, its centering of student protestors situates the keynote as possibly more immediate to a potential college audience than the static, decontextualized Louvre sculpture of Nicolas Coustou’s Julius Caesar. Situated in their own histories, Kynard’s students’ projects conjure their “central role in reshaping schooling” (Kynard 2013, 239) that continue to be ignored. Meanwhile, the white supremacist appeal to centralized rulership and as a message from above to below (via the angle of the photograph) speaks to the material processes that constitute white authority at the historically white institution. The white administrator’s message surrounding the violation of the Student Code of Conduct is “dictated” from a similar angle (Keep[MwSU]Public 2016). The “variably subtle” (Anti-Defamation League 2018) directive to “SERVE YOUR PEOPLE” aimed at a vaguely understood audience aligns with (invisible) notions of whiteness in security notices.

The word “white” appears only three times in the seven such notices to describe clothing (“pants,” “shoes,” and “Nike logo”), while the world “color/ed” appears only once in the description of clothing (Department of Public Safety 2016d, 2016e, 2016f, 2016g, 2016h, 2016i, 2016j). No ethnicity descriptors occur in the alerts. Racialization with regard to deviance on MwSU’s campus occurs only with reference to Blackness, nuanced in terms of gender, age, and clothing. These security posts clearly mechanize antiBlackness through Blackness’ conjured threatening spectrality. The notices do not describe a number of individuals featured in the them in terms of race but only by gender, however (perhaps because they are deemed crime “victims”). This move eerily echoes the Community Police Academy coordinator’s mention of difference via age and gender only (Department of Public Safety 2016b). In the six-month period surveyed in safety posts (Department of Public Safety 2016d, 2016e, 2016f, 2016g, 2016h, 2016i, 2016j), the sharp contrast of all suspects being marked “black,” with all other described individuals being racially unmarked, reinforces the ubiquitous invisibility of whiteness in US culture “against which difference is constructed” (Lipsitz 1998, 1). Whiteness, thus, need not “acknowledge its role as an organizing principle in social and cultural relations” (Lipsitz 1998, 1) while also not being particularly tethered to certain bodies or clothing (Dyer 2005). Although statistically persons described as “black” make up 100 percent of those described as “suspects” in the alerts (Department of Public Safety 2016d, 2016e, 2016f, 2016g, 2016h, 2016i, 2016j), results of a search of the safety department’s daily crime log from the six-month period, which rendered 1,522 reports, do not describe those reporting or involved in crimes using race—only gender, profession, age, or name (Department of Public Safety 2016c).9 The editing of what appears in security notices directly circulated to the campus community, then, offers a specific, racialized Black picture of what criminality and security threats look like on this particular campus. That picture, when rhetorically reclaimed in Black protest by those deemed deviant, as in the Black woman protestor’s statement “well some of us are people of color, so . . .” (Keep[MwSU]Public 2016), might be mobilized as Black rhetorical agency in Black feminist antiracism, as also evidenced by Kynard’s (2016) symposium keynote.

Public backlash to that symposium centered around the idea that the white institution postulated engagement with the Black Lives Matter movement as a “moral obligation” for students. The conservative news website Campus Reform, in an article notably titled “[Midwestern State] encourages students to participate in Black Lives Matter movement,” undercuts the symposium’s “claims” that antiracism efforts mean to counter structural racism—and thereby “help” the white institution’s public perception and functioning—by citing the institution’s African American president and a conference on hip-hop culture held at the university (Friedman 2016). By framing the event in relation to the university president’s race, as a part of a larger drive to focus on Black culture, and splicing parts of the symposium’s material on the question of “moral obligation,” the article implies a kind of “Black takeover,” racing coalitional antiracist efforts as Black. It plays on white fears, using white feelings as a means to justify racist backlash. The news article suggests that the university as a singular entity “encourages” participation in the movement—in its title—and wants students “to endorse the aims of the Black Lives Matter movement”—in its first line. Another such article uses the word “heralding” to describe MwSU’s publicity of the event, framing it in relation to the July 2016 shooting of Dallas police officers and other academic institutions’ engagement (“from kindergarten to college”) with the social movement (Kline 2016).

Conservative reaction to institutional antiracist efforts at the historically white institution thus intimate those efforts as the replacement of whiteness. This very concept of replacement underlines “the new white supremacist slogan ‘You will not replace us,’” a phrase “adopted and popularized” by Identity Evropa (Anti-Defamation League 2018, n.p.). As pop culture critic Jeff Chang explains in recounting the rhetoric of the Trump presidential campaign in 2015 and 2016, “Racial apocalypse is the recurring white American narrative in which the civilizers, the chosen people meant to fulfil their destiny, are overrun by the savages, the barbarians who embody chaos and ruin . . . The end of whiteness is one of the oldest, most common Americans tell to scare ourselves” (2016, 14). These fears evoke policy stances and practices that either avoid the subjects of race and Blackness (through colorblindness) or manipulate them as objects for the purposes of institutional gain, as demonstrated in the Community Police Academy’s video ad (Department of Safety 2016b)—stances that exemplify white institutional defensiveness.

Such a threat, even understood via “peaceful” demonstrations like student sit-ins, “scare employees who are wanting to do their work,” as posited by white university administrators in the footage of the on-campus protest (Keep[MwSU]Public 2016). That the historically white institution would publicly “endorse” Blackness through symposia, hold discussions on the morality of social in/justice, or even acknowledge that “disruptive students” (Black and brown students) belong in university spaces causes public racial stress. That racial stress manifests itself in individual “white responses”—which “include anger, withdrawal, emotional incapacitation, guilt, argumentation, and cognitive dissonance (all of which reinforce the pressure on [institutional diversity programming] facilitators to avoid directly addressing racism)”—is what Robin DiAngelo describes as “White Fragility” (2011, 55–56). The Nixon administration’s decoupling of racism from institutions to make it a one-on-one issue trickled through to contemporary neoliberal culture means that far-right journalists can call upon these responses as tactics for maintaining the status quo. Further, when institutions create policies or policy statements that posture defensively on the subject of race and Blackness, they enact these affects through rhetorics of institutional white defensiveness.

Such public or institutional defensiveness often arises in ways that deflect attention away from evidenced injustice or articulations of being by Black folk, instead placing emphasis on individualized (white) feelings. In the promotional video for the Department of Safety’s Community Police Academy, for instance, much work goes into describing the feelings that arise for police officers in the act of doing their job (Department of Public Safety 2016b). The program slyly allows these descriptions to come from people of color—primarily a Black man but also a Muslim woman of color—rather than the police themselves. The video first frames the academy as responding to public perceptions of police; a white woman officer atop a horse explains, “We’re gonna talk about that fear.” The video does not explain who has what fear, or why, or how it might be historicized and racialized. It leaves questions of how exactly the program confronts that fear, instead addressing it through articulating the affective experience of police via Black and brown bodies. But, as the security posts remind us, the specter of Black criminality structures who the subject “we” (as in “we’re gonna talk”) of the community includes.

After the program coordinator explains the “memory you’ll never forget” from “doing something hands-on,” footage of the Black male staff member splices in: “High stress, high stress absolutely,” he explains. As scenes of him apprehending a white hoodied male cut in and out, he continues, “You’re caught between several emotions.” He cuffs the white “suspect” while his voiceover contends “You don’t have a lot of time to, uh, to think about what you wanna do . . . and as you assess the situation, you cannot hesitate.” Through the experience of a Black male middle-class staff member, the safety department provides an account that asks its audience to empathize with police officers, humanizing them through multiple affects—“high stress,” “several emotions,” “cannot hesitate”—while not once mentioning the hardware the program equips the man with for the role-playing exercise. The video also fails to clearly note why hesitation becomes an invalid option in the situation. Through the scene the Black man holds a gun and handcuffs while wearing a safety vest, all co-constituting his assemblage. “It really gives you a very good understanding of what law enforcement goes through,” he concludes. The video’s focus on (empathizing with) the feelings of police, its unracing and sidestepping of the acute problem of racial profiling and police brutality in the post-Ferguson cultural moment, and reactive use of Black and brown bodies to potentially defend impulsive (and possibly lethal) actions by the police illustrate the pernicious ways in which institutional white defensiveness employs the language of feelings and universal humanity to articulate in/difference—and in some ways dismissal—toward antiBlack social injustice and state violence.

University administration also utilize such tactics and language to invalidate student resistance (raced, deviant, and disruptive) at Midwestern State. In the protest video, for example, students point to cell phone videos of the altercation with police that allegedly “scared people” to validate their nonviolent belonging to university space (Keep[MwSU]Public 2016). The white male administrators dismiss the videos based on the “fact” that “people who were here, who work past five o clock, left early tonight . . . You know why? They were scared you guys were going to do something.” The less vocal white administrator (in the background) states, “That’s the truth, you guys, that’s the truth.” White truth marked “universal” re/presents the only valid truth, as Black beings, historically, lack “the possibility of universalism that comes with reason” in the face of Enlightenment rationality, as Mbembe notes (2017, 86). Therefore, when an off-screen protestor asks if administrators would change their positions if students could “prove” via video evidence that there was no “rush” to the doors deemed “scary” and the reasoning behind the threats of the students’ removal (and nonbelonging), the white administrator in the foreground admits, “No, I wouldn’t change my position” (Keep[MwSU]Public 2016). Much like the idea that videos documenting (sometimes lethal) violence by police against Black people and people of color have failed legally to prove injustice both post-Ferguson and prior, the administrators regard the criminality of the “disruptive” (Black) assemblage to be inherent and indisputable. Much like Darren Wilson’s fear of the overwhelming “Hulk-Hogan-like” strength of Mike Brown, white capitalist heteropatriarchy adjudges those deviant as always already non-law-abiding, placing importance on white feelings, impulses, and appeals to universal reason to unmake Black lives.

See(k)ing Black Possibilities

So, what, if any, alternative possibilities exist for Black folk who live and co-constitute these deep rhetorical ecologies? How might they navigate these spaces in the historically white institution to create generative or perhaps transformative potentials for Blackness? Just as Black folk at Midwestern State have the “option” not to dress in hoodies, in dark sunglasses, and in black clothing and not to wear natural hair, as those criminalized in safety notices—though, of course, they cannot change their biological skin color—the white administrators in the video afford students the “option” of leaving (Keep[MwSU]Public 2016). They miss the important objection that these Black and brown students have to their “philosophy,” the latter being that if deemed disruptive, as the administrators put it, “we are going to take you out.” “People live here,” the most vocal Black woman protestor proclaims; “there’s people . . . in this room . . . who live here!” Instead, the administrators offer the “option” of leaving or, they say, “our police officers will physically pick you up and take you to a paddy wagon and take you to be arrested”; the students will be “discharged from school also.” The possessive adjective “our” before police indicates the relationship between university administration and its safety services. Despite attempts at dialogue by protestors, the white male administrators wield the force as a weapon to vanquish their resistant rhetorical agency, since “we don’t have an agreement” on video evidence according to the more assertive white male administrator. The protestors’ Black and brown push against the neoliberal university, considered a “disruptive” threat to security, must be expelled—it does not belong.

Neo-Nazi Andrew Anglin, who attended Midwestern State for a semester in 2006 (O’Brien 2017), declares the university administrators’ actions in the video a victory for the state—it made him “proud” to be from it (Anglin 2016). Indeed, as Kynard spotlights, “blatantly racist public forums” often question Black student protest’s transformative potentials (2013, 239). Anglin (2016), moreover, races the protestors’ “Black” on his now publicly defunct website the Daily Stormer.10 He tellingly titles his article “[MwSU] Administration Tell Black Lives Protestors to GTFO or Get Arrested and Expelled.” The now infamous neo-Nazi’s involvement with the organization of the rally that mobilized hate into murder in Charlottesville, Virginia, demonstrates the very real, dangerous white supremacist entanglement in these deep rhetorical ecologies at historically white universities—involvement that the utility pole flyer at the beginning of this chapter directly spotlights and attempts to push against. In addition to the implications of a neo-Nazi endorsement of such behavior, however, the ideologies of administrators at Midwestern State—hidden in plain sight through white institutional defensiveness publicly exposed through the video’s rhetorics, put in Black feminist inter(con)textual relation/ships with other notions of Blackness at the historically white institution—reveal much about racialization and antiBlackness in such spaces. The video, arguably, demonstrates what happens when Black student protest comes up against the enactment of policy (here, in particular, the Student “Code” of Conduct) (Keep[MwSU]Public 2016). Further contextualized with the national attention garnered by Black student protest at the University of Missouri in late 2015, the video of student protest at Midwestern State shows tensions not only at a regional but also at a national level; “nearly one hundred universities and colleges would receive demands demonstrating for racial equity . . . during the 2015–2016 school year” (Chang 2016, 34). Eventually, the “Black Liberation Collective, a national network of Black student activists” would emerge from various disparate campus struggles (Ransby 2018, 80).

The student protestors in the video, especially the Black woman in red, offer a practical Black feminist framework for undercutting the manifestation of oppressive whiteness in these white spaces (Keep[MwSU]Public 2016). When she emphasizes that “there’s people . . . in this room . . . who live here!” she illuminates the disconnect—the generative fracture—in between and along life and work. In direct contrast with the white administrators’ continued logic that “scared” white employees “don’t want these kinds of things happening at their jobs, don’t want to be exposed to this,” she calls attention to her (em)bodied Black (student) precarity in simultaneously living and working in such spaces, while doing antiracism through disruptive rhetorical agency. Like her earlier declaration that “some of us are people of color, so . . .” she reveals the dynamics of the rhetorical situation that racialize, gender, and class the space across and in between rhetorical actors with/in the deep ecology through rhetorical reclamation. Again, her rhetoric draws not on a “transparent I” of Western Man (Ferreira da Silva 2007) but in summoning herself outside of herself, as a part of a disruptive collective through Black feminist relationality, with (Blackened) spatiality being an interconnector to a now: “There’s people in this room . . . who live here.” The agency the protestors exhibit through such literacies—the Black feminist notion of literacy as the practice of freedom—continue a tradition of what Kynard calls “vernacular insurrections.” Black communities use these insurrections’ “expressive” “counterengeries” . . . “not only as counterhegemonic, but also as affirmative of new, constantly mutating languages, identities, political methodologies, and social understandings that communities form in and of themselves, both inwardly and outwardly” (2013, 10–11). Linking up with the historical tradition of Black student protest that Kynard illuminates in her monograph, the MwSU protestor’s Black rhetorical reclamations confront the dynamics of post-Ferguson US race relations and widespread stances and rhetorics mobilizing institutional white defensiveness. While those race relations still render Black identity criminal through mechanisms like safety notices in white campus spaces, rhetorical reclamations animate Blackness in the face of the antiBlackness always already co-constituting it in the afterlives of Trans-Atlantic slavery.

The Black Lives Matter in the Classroom Symposium poster represents other such fractures: in the spaces between the white university and racialized disruption, between the symposium’s temporal moment and its histories, between institutionalized ideas of “diversity” and activist visions of social justice, and between communal literacies and academic conversation. Because of these fractures in bringing Blackness under contact with (and in ways in service of) whiteness, it grapples with histories of capitalism, always already racial capitalism (Robinson 1983) from which “a predominantly white institution derives social or economic value from associating with individuals with nonwhite racial identities” (Leong 2013, 2154). But unlike the doctoring of photos by the University of Washington to improve its admissions profile in 2000 (Chang 2016, 16–20), the poster does not attempt to integrate Black images into an already prescribed visual of centered whiteness. It still, though, positions imagery of Black student protest in the ecological contexts, histories, cultures, and imaginations of white institutions that have long worked to snuff out such photographed resistance to provide illusions of safeness for white audiences, parents, students, and alumni. The institution, of course, simultaneously gains from racial capitalism—it is a “systemic phenomenon” (Leong 2013, 2154)—even while the ways the poster deploys Blackness undermines a historical practice of tying together impressions of diversity and excellence spearheaded by the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Michigan in the 1980s (Chang 2016, 17). So, despite setting in relation Black feminist rhetorics and the disruption of Black student resistance with institutional sponsors, the poster and the symposium it publicizes nonetheless wrestle with the prospect of counteracting the efficacy of Black protest by rendering it a rhetorical object for the purpose of promoting institutional diversity.

Nonetheless, the flyer confronts its audiences (and its historically white spaces) with visual connectors to histories of the Black liberation movement. The poster also draws significantly on the online archive of #BlackLivesMatter activism by using the digital phraseology in publicizing the name of the symposium. “#BlackLivesMatter” conjures connections to #ICantBreathe, #IfTheyGunnedMeDown, and other intertwined online movements and their ever-evolving archive.11 In the electronic version of the poster, a hyperlink visibly mapped onto its image leads to a further captioning attribution of the photograph that centers student activism: “Students participate in a Black Lives Matter protest in Oakland, California, January 19, 2015. (look2remember).” The link signals the poster’s “hypermediacy,” while “remediating” digital rhetorics of student protest (Bolter and Grusin 2000). The link also provides an article on the possibilities of understanding relationships between the Black Lives Matter movement and Black communists in Alabama during the Great Depression (Jaffe 2015). The connections made via the poster’s link—between the symposium at the historically white institution in the Midwest to Black workers in the 1930s South and Black student protestors at Oakland’s Fruitvale Station in 2015 (together with the cultural memory of the police shooting of Oscar Grant in 2009)—demonstrate digital potentials of Black feminist relationality ([MwSU]BLMIC.org 2016). The student e-portfolio analyzed in Kynard’s (2016) symposium keynote, however, shows more fully these possibilities through student resistance to dominant cultures, as opposed to ones so closely (and inherently) tied in/to a historically white institution’s neoliberal functioning.

Kynard’s centering of the student’s agency also does work to flip normative power relations between student/instructor. The example of student work becomes the means by which rhetorical reclamation arises, with Kynard taking the position of interlocutor. In pushing against white conceptions of phenotypic attractiveness, Kynard’s student’s dynamic uses of Black vernacular, her focus on and imagery of Black hair, and her use of a Lorde quotation as a defining footer demonstrate how the very genres of academic discourse might be rhetorically reclaimed in Black agency in public digital spaces. Those fluid, relational meanings of Blackness in Andrene’s project counteract the safety notices’ individualized descriptions that criminalize Black bodies and play into dangerous, stereotypical scripts about Black folk at the particular campus, such as the menacing shadow of the “Young black male wearing a black hoodie with a white Nike logo and black sweatpants” (Department of Public Safety 2016g). Instead, the keynote’s focus on a Black woman’s student protest employs digital relationality to evolve histories that co-constitute Black feminist antiracism through Black rhetorical reclamation (Kynard 2016).

Kynard also shared some context on her contemporaneous teaching situation in her keynote by telling the story of a group project between four Black and brown students that became compromised when one Black Dominican student disappears. His absence, assumed to be related to his undocumented immigration status, results in Kynard being asked by her students to step into his role in the group. The coalitional efforts by group members—both inherent in the assignment design and emergent through “a ripple effect in the hearts, imaginations, and lived opportunities of multiple people” (2016, 8) that one student’s disappearance causes—exemplify Black feminist ethics of empathy and equity. Kynard’s sense of responsibility to “represent” for the missing student, like her centering of Andrene’s e-portfolio, cuts away at hierarchical distinctions between teacher and student that neoliberal institutions tend to reinforce through an education-as-commodity principle. Coalitional frameworks that the keynote analyzed, shared, and enacted illustrate the political imaginaries foregrounded by Black feminist thinkers like Hill Collins, how “it is possible to be centered in [Black women’s] experiences and engaged in coalitions with others. In this sense, Black feminist thought works on behalf of Black women, but does so in conjunction with other similar social justice projects” ([1990] 2000, x). The coalition of student groups behind the #Reclaim[MwSU] movement in the video likewise reveal relational, intersectional resistance efforts. The student groups involved include “the International Socialist Organization, United Students Against Sweatshops, Real Food Challenge, Committee for Justice in Palestine, Sierra Club Student Coalition, Still We Rise, and [MwSU] Coalition for Black Lives,” (Wainz 2016)—all working toward calls for transparency from the white university in its operations. In both the video’s and the keynote’s rhetorical reclamations, Blackness, though variously positioned as disruptive/deviant by the institution, works through these quotidian, relational, historiographic, temporal, collective forces in a multiplicity of literacies to reveal white supremacy in its contemporary practical manifestations.

“Remembering / we were never meant to survive”12

I call attention to the ways in which Black rhetorics and literacies engage with day-to-day interaction with the practice of policy at a historically white institution in order to conclude a project aimed at centering those Black ways of being (otherwise). In defining Black rhetorical reclamation through reconceptualized Black disruption as a means to resist institutional white defensiveness, I draw together ideas presented in earlier chapters, while particularly explaining how such reclamations push against aggregative white institutional defensiveness in policy practice at Midwestern State University. Rhetorical reclamations reveal means to interrogate those relations, to think of the fractures between them as actional, mobilizing the deep rhetorically ecological approach to read/write/think Black meaning-making and institutional power dynamics. They offer rhetorics for generative Black being in Fanonian fractures that pose further questions and spur future meanings, allowing evolutions in deep ecological meanings to continue.

While the exigence of this project lies in potentials for Black beings in rhetoricizing various Blacknesses that may be put to various means and ends, I choose to chip away at destructive antiBlackness at historically white educational institutions through such reclamations. I join with Cacho (2012), Kynard (2013), and others in operationalizing them for legal scholar Derrick Bell’s philosophy of “Racial Realism.” In doing so, “we must simultaneously acknowledge that our actions are not likely to lead to transcendent change and, despite our best efforts, may be of more help to the system we despise than to the victims of that system we are trying to help. Nevertheless, our realization, and the dedication based on that realization, can lead to policy positions and campaigns that are less likely to worsen conditions for those we are trying to help” (1992, 378). By spotlighting those who are deemed as threats, disruptive, deviant, and socially dead, by emphasizing those who are raced, gendered, and classed as precarious, I suggest, instead of seeking the end of the tunnel or even its light, rhetorical reclamation as a move that rearticulates the situations we are put with/in Black non/being.

Through this Black feminist rearticulation (Hill Collins [1990] 2000), owning disruption/deviance and, in ways, social death, as a fundamental with/in Blackness, as Cohen (2004) envisions, might fuel versions of Blackness that seek to argue otherwise with/in Blackness’ in/fungibility and para/ontology. While white institutions and publics deem Black bodies an excess to commodify and control, mapping that deviance onto extant cultural scripts, fracturing meaning in white spaces might re/cast these scripts by re/turning Blackness unto the white institution opening new(er) avenues for struggle. Bell reminds us, indeed, that “confrontation with our oppressors is not our sole reason for Racial Realism” (1992, 378). I’ll admit, it’s not my primary motive; I often daydream of never knowing US racial politics, of remaining content with my little islands. But “Continued struggle can bring about unexpected benefits and gains that in themselves justify continued endeavor” (378). And that fight to rhetorically reclaim involves risk. But when even authorities and publics turn “white” modes of evidence (videos, statistics, surveillance technologies, etc.) on Black bodies as inadequate in the face of white fear and racialized modes of protection of white spaces, then Black bodies must find opportunities in navigating, reshaping, and non/being (in) the fractures afforded. So, I inhabit those in-between/across spaces when conjured with these disruptive rhetorics and literacies, in the words of Audre Lorde, by “remembering/we were never meant to survive” (1978, 32).