A history of white violence tells us attacks on black academics are not ending (I know because it happened to me)

Abstract

This article examines attacks on black academics as an analytical apparatus for connecting histories of U.S. racial violence to the current state of white backlash against black advancement. Through an anatomy of these attacks – of which the author herself was targeted – this essay explores two processes: First, what these attacks do to blackness and, second, what this violence does for whiteness. In the former, this work explains that attacks on black academics are first and foremost anti-black attacks, not dissimilar to attacks on visible African- Americans in other arenas. The intention is to terrorize black progress on the whole. In the latter process, the generative nature of these attacks reproduces collective white identities across region, age, and newly digitized spaces. In the current political moment this digitized mob violence ritualistically reaffirms white hegemony. This essay concludes with an explanation for why the author believes these attacks will continue with regularity.