• Latest
  • Trending
  • All
  • News
  • Lifestyle
Academia Was Built on White Theft thumbnail

Academia Was Built on White Theft

September 11, 2020
Great Island Wellfleet

Cape Cod Ticks: Guarding Your Adventure in the Land of Sun, Sea, and Ticks

June 1, 2023
Tara Reade, Who Accused Biden of Assault, Says She Has Moved to Russia thumbnail

Tara Reade, Who Accused Biden of Assault, Says She Has Moved to Russia

June 1, 2023
Company recalls cheese because of Listeria infection in one customer; testing showed pathogen thumbnail

Company recalls cheese because of Listeria infection in one customer; testing showed pathogen

June 1, 2023
How to Be a Good Role Model for Your Employees, Customers and Community (and Why It's Important) thumbnail

How to Be a Good Role Model for Your Employees, Customers and Community (and Why It’s Important)

June 1, 2023
Women Marrying Themselves as ‘Symbolic Expression of Self-Love’ thumbnail

Women Marrying Themselves as ‘Symbolic Expression of Self-Love’

June 1, 2023
Massachusetts State Police bust up 'large-scale' drug enterprise thumbnail

Massachusetts State Police bust up ‘large-scale’ drug enterprise

May 31, 2023
House GOP sells deal with Biden as restoring 'fiscal sanity' amid backlash from right thumbnail

House GOP sells deal with Biden as restoring ‘fiscal sanity’ amid backlash from right

May 31, 2023
Biden’s student debt plan hangs in balance as major Supreme Court rulings loom thumbnail

Biden’s student debt plan hangs in balance as major Supreme Court rulings loom

May 31, 2023
People on the beach, Cape Cod, Massachusetts

Exploring the Nuances: Debunking Cape Cod’s Overrated Reputation

May 29, 2023
Divorced Tom Brady’s $500 Million Friend Reveals 3 Big Reasons Why He’s Even “Busier” After Heartbreak Retirement thumbnail

Divorced Tom Brady’s $500 Million Friend Reveals 3 Big Reasons Why He’s Even “Busier” After Heartbreak Retirement

May 29, 2023
Joe Rogan Gets Furious at People Calling Out “Nicest Guy of All Time” Dave Chapelle Amidst Latest Controversy thumbnail

Joe Rogan Gets Furious at People Calling Out “Nicest Guy of All Time” Dave Chapelle Amidst Latest Controversy

May 29, 2023
Science finally reveals why champagne bubbles so elegantly thumbnail

Science finally reveals why champagne bubbles so elegantly

May 29, 2023
  • About
  • Advertise
  • Privacy & Policy
  • Contact
  • Donate
Saturday, June 3, 2023
66 °f
Wellfleet
58 ° Tue
63 ° Wed
68 ° Thu
61 ° Fri
  • Login
  • Register
FREE Cape Cod News
DONATE
  • FREE Cape Cod News
  • Cape Cod News
  • News
    • News
    • Massachusetts
    • Breaking News
    • Cape Cod Weather
    • Storm Watch
    • Environment
  • Politics
    • democrats
    • republicans
  • Business
    • business
    • cryptocurrency
    • economy
    • money
    • Real Estate
    • Tech
  • World
  • Entertainment
  • Lifestyle
  • Photos
    • Orleans
    • Eastham
    • Wellfleet
    • Truro
    • Provincetown
    • Brewster
    • Chatham
  • Videos
No Result
View All Result
Free Cape Cod News
No Result
View All Result
  • FREE Cape Cod News
  • Cape Cod News
  • News
  • Politics
  • Business
  • World
  • Entertainment
  • Lifestyle
  • Photos
  • Videos
Home Opinion

Academia Was Built on White Theft

FREE Cape Cod News by FREE Cape Cod News
September 11, 2020
in Opinion, U.S.
Reading Time: 6 mins read
Donate
0
Academia Was Built on White Theft thumbnail
642
SHARES
1.4k
VIEWS
Share on TwitterShare on Facebook

Last week, a white professor at George Washington University outed herself in a years-long charade in which she told people she was Black and built an academic career around this lie. Jessica Krug, who is from a white Jewish family in the Kansas City suburbs, affected an accent and an evolving set of backstories, eventually landing on a version in which she self-presented as an Afro-Latina from the Bronx.

Krug’s colleagues at George Washington privately questioned her claims and recently began to raise the alarm with administrators, which is likely why she came clean. Or as writer and RaceBaitr editor in chief Hari Ziyad put it, “She didn’t do it out of benevolence. She did it because she had been found out.”

In this absurd public disgrace, Krug joins other white people who have made false claims to nonwhite identities in some combination of career predation, white entitlement, and a perhaps unknowable X factor of what-the-fuck: Rachel Dolezal, who maybe needs no introduction at this point, but also lesser-knowns like the former Vanderbilt neurology professor who created an online persona of a Hopi professor and then killed it off during the pandemic. But these are obvious fringe cases—entertaining upon implosion for the general public and quietly devastating to the web of people they drew into the lie and harmed in the process. The more common version of white theft in academia is way less tabloid sensational.

The entire American university system was built on white theft made mundane through the passage of time. The casual mention of schools acting as assimilation academies on a campus tour. The somber press release, all too often made by white administrators, contextualizing past university leaders and the names on campus buildings as slave owners and segregationists. A ceremonial shield gathering dust in a lab thousands of miles away from its creator’s ancestors. It’s a history that bleeds into the present, the echoes of which can be heard every time the academy shows its true colors.


The modern American university system is a tool, not a product, of colonization. The University of North Carolina, the oldest public college in the nation, was, much like many universities in the South, built with the labor of enslaved Black people. So, too, were prestigious Ivy League institutions, like Brown, while presidents at Princeton and Columbia and countless others owned slaves through the Civil War. As Massachusetts Institution of Technology history professor Craig Steven Wilder wrote in his 2013 book on the subject, “The academy never stood apart from American slavery. In fact, it stood beside church and state as the third pillar of a civilization built on bondage.”

To stave off those who felt self-conscious about their complicity in such a violent system, white academics molded their fields of study to fortify their claims of superiority. Entire fields of racist pseudoscience were designed in the nineteenth century to back up the claim that Black minds were inferior and to deny Black people true personhood, to act as a rebuke to the growing abolitionist movement.

The academy did not stop at dismissing living Black bodies and minds, though. It also sought to retrieve every physical ounce of these varied and unique cultures and communities, for the sake of proprietary knowledge and profit. This is how both modern museums and land-grant universities came to be. Signed by Abraham Lincoln in 1862, the Morrill Act, not so dissimilar from Harvard’s Indian College, was a money-making affair, with the stated desire of “turning land taken from tribal nations into seed money for higher education,” as High Country News wrote earlier this year. When the dust settled, 11 million acres had been, often violently and illegally, wrested from Indigenous nations and placed under the management of university endowment funds. To date, the land transfer has netted these endowments at least a half-billion dollars.

As the land was distributed, the universities sought to take also what accompanied these spaces, namely the remains and cultural items that the displaced Indigenous peoples had stewarded and protected until this stage of colonization. Under the guise of fields such as archaeology or anthropology, white professors at these schools scoured Indian Country, digging up remains that had been respectfully buried for thousands of years. As explained in the Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory in an article on the shifting ethics of reburial and repatriation, by the middle of the nineteenth century, “the majority of Euro-Americans thought Native Americans incapable of becoming civilized.”

And in helping convince the public of this, white academics granted themselves permission to disturb these sites in the name of preserving what would, they told themselves, surely be otherwise lost. By the time the institutionalized grave-robbing was complete—federal law giving tribal nations legal power to block such disturbances was not passed until 1990, and even now there are loopholes that need closing—colleges like the University of Michigan and Florida Atlantic University had stolen and stored away thousands of Native remains and countless more artifacts, many of which ended up behind glass display cases at museums.

Much like Krug, these institutions did not proactively change their ways or admit their wrongdoings. Their student bodies were forcibly integrated. Beginning the process of overturning centuries of white-favored racist hiring practices required lawsuits, not a sudden change of heart. Only recently—as in the past three decades—have universities taken a critical look in the mirror. And even then, more often than not, it is the people still impacted by these historical actions, like the descendants of the 272 enslaved people sold at auction at Georgetown University in 1838, who are taking the first step and forcing the universities into action.

When left to their own devices, university trustee boards have proven themselves more than happy to leave the past in the past. Where policies to facilitate the return of Native land should be instead sit useless and performative land acknowledgments. Where restitution for the descendants of those who built the universities should be are instead pedestals for Confederate monuments that the student body—not the university—tore down.

While distinct, the American university system’s legacies of enslavement and violent colonization reveal a common thread: a history of violent white theft. Universities have long acted as sanctuaries for white academics who want to take on the voyeuristic endeavor of professing to be an expert on a group of people to which they do not belong. It turns the window shopper into the salesperson; the gate-builder into the gatekeeper. Trying to grasp why Krug, Dolezal, and McLaughlin did what they did is almost beside the point. Instead, it is time to start asking why people of this ilk all seek validation and cover through the academy—and why the academy always provides it.

Tags: massachusettsopinionuniversityus

FREE Digital Newspaper Subscription!
Sign up for your free digital subscription. The FREE Cape Cod News

Unsubscribe
FREE Cape Cod News

FREE Cape Cod News

Free Cape Cod News is what's happening in the Cape Cod, U.S and World & what people are talking about right now. Local newspaper. Stay in the know. Subscribe to get notified about our latest news.

Related Posts

Massachusetts man charged with spying for China thumbnail
News

Massachusetts man charged with spying for China

by FREE Cape Cod News
May 17, 2023
American Flag
U.S.

The Dark Side of Immigrating to America: What You Need to Know

by FREE Cape Cod News
May 5, 2023
J1 visa Cape Cod
Cape Cod News

J1 Visa Students Face Challenges in Cape Cod – Europe Beckons as A Better Alternative

by FREE Cape Cod News
May 1, 2023
How Would a Recession Affect Me and My Finances? thumbnail
Business

How Would a Recession Affect Me and My Finances?

by FREE Cape Cod News
April 23, 2023
Load More
Please login to join discussion

Follow Us on Twitter

FREE Cape Cod News - Your source for local Cape Cod news, latest breaking U.S. and World news. Every day, all day. Subscribe for your favorite categories.

  • Trending
  • Comments
  • Latest
Great Island Wellfleet

Cape Cod Ticks: Guarding Your Adventure in the Land of Sun, Sea, and Ticks

June 1, 2023
People on the beach, Cape Cod, Massachusetts

Exploring the Nuances: Debunking Cape Cod’s Overrated Reputation

May 29, 2023
Tara Reade, Who Accused Biden of Assault, Says She Has Moved to Russia thumbnail

Tara Reade, Who Accused Biden of Assault, Says She Has Moved to Russia

June 1, 2023
Great Island Wellfleet

Cape Cod Ticks: Guarding Your Adventure in the Land of Sun, Sea, and Ticks

June 1, 2023
Tara Reade, Who Accused Biden of Assault, Says She Has Moved to Russia thumbnail

Tara Reade, Who Accused Biden of Assault, Says She Has Moved to Russia

June 1, 2023
Company recalls cheese because of Listeria infection in one customer; testing showed pathogen thumbnail

Company recalls cheese because of Listeria infection in one customer; testing showed pathogen

June 1, 2023

FREE Cape Cod News On Twitter

Today’s News

  • Cape Cod Ticks: Guarding Your Adventure in the Land of Sun, Sea, and Ticks June 1, 2023
  • Tara Reade, Who Accused Biden of Assault, Says She Has Moved to Russia June 1, 2023
  • Company recalls cheese because of Listeria infection in one customer; testing showed pathogen June 1, 2023
  • How to Be a Good Role Model for Your Employees, Customers and Community (and Why It’s Important) June 1, 2023
  • Women Marrying Themselves as ‘Symbolic Expression of Self-Love’ June 1, 2023
FREE Cape Cod News

Copyright © 2022 Free Cape Cod News

Navigate Site

  • About
  • Advertise
  • Privacy & Policy
  • Contact
  • Donate

Follow Us

No Result
View All Result
  • FREE Cape Cod News
  • Cape Cod News
  • News
    • News
    • Massachusetts
    • Breaking News
    • Cape Cod Weather
    • Storm Watch
    • Environment
  • Politics
    • democrats
    • republicans
  • Business
    • business
    • cryptocurrency
    • economy
    • money
    • Real Estate
    • Tech
  • World
  • Entertainment
  • Lifestyle
  • Photos
    • Orleans
    • Eastham
    • Wellfleet
    • Truro
    • Provincetown
    • Brewster
    • Chatham
  • Videos
  • Login
  • Sign Up

Copyright © 2022 Free Cape Cod News

Welcome Back!

Login to your account below

Forgotten Password? Sign Up

Create New Account!

Fill the forms below to register

All fields are required. Log In

Retrieve your password

Please enter your username or email address to reset your password.

Log In

Add New Playlist