I go to one of the top private schools in the country, whose alumni span from the Duchess of Sussex to a member of the Supreme Court. Roughly ⅓ of students pay the full price tag of $72,000 per year to attend. But when I sit in a classroom on my campus, I don’t think of how “elite” my university is; I think of slavery, which made the school possible. I think of genocide. I think of how the ideas of justice and liberation that I read and study about are bullshit if no one ever gets to actualize them. I feel selfish for accepting that this institution somehow gives my life more value than the lives it’s destroyed.
I know that my university won’t ever help me to be free, because its own existence is predicated on upholding white supremacy.
In academia, the more you learn about oppression, the easier it is to detach yourself from your role in perpetuating it. It’s true that it’s different for us than our white peers because we are rarely ever given the privilege of generational success, so we have to make sacrifices to ensure our families are straight and well taken care of. But you can be both oppressed and an oppressor. I’m not immune to that.
The famed contemporary scholar Eve Tuck tells us that decolonization is not a metaphor. She argues that using the language of “‘decolonizing our schools,’ or using ‘decolonizing methods,’ or, ‘decolonize student thinking’, turns decolonization into a metaphor,” rather than the literal process it needs to be. You cannot repurpose a space used to conquer and murder if you still operate within it. It’s impossible to move from a settler to innocent if the system is still upheld.
My school won’t teach me the ways my community can rescue itself from the shackles of environmental and economic injustice. They won’t let me imagine a world free of prisons and borders, because if they did all this then they couldn’t use my mind and my labor, or hoard their extensive wealth and resources. A world without the need for physical prisons and metaphysical ones, like borders, depends on the destruction of entities that maintain oppression.
Formal education in America was founded as a self-serving institution needed to preserve social structures created by colonization. It leaves those who are colonized with a limited sense of their past, and narrows their ability to dream of a better future without it. It’s a nonstop cycle of trauma, making sure there is no chance of long-term healing within it. It needs to be all of these things to do what it was created to do: maintain colonial rule.
My school’s founder, John Evans, made his fortune and fame off of genocide. He led one of the most deadly massacres of native people that this land has ever seen. Illinois, where my school is located, allowed slavery for over a century before they developed some of the most strict Black Codes in the country. Black Codes were laws which literally criminalized Black movement, putting Black folx into prison for as little as walking down the “wrong” street, and then utilizing their bodies for prison labor. During the peak of the enforcement of Black Codes, my school began its “perpetual” scholarship, allowing wealthy white men to buy their way into the school and guarantee their heirs free tuition. My school still honors these scholarships.
Today, we have the seventh-largest individual endowment in the country—$11.08 billion—and that cannot be separated from how the institution was founded. Higher Education is one of the most profitable establishments in our country. Almost one trillion dollars moves through the industry annually, and my school has board members who profit off of the deaths of Iraqis, the caging of children and the poisoning of our earth.
Being used as a token for promotional purposes is the least of my worries, especially when people have died so that I can sit in a classroom. If blood is on the hands of the trustees and the institution, there’s some on mine too. My existence legitimizes this place and all of the space it takes up.
Still I take their money because it gives me validation and something tangible to hold on to as ‘success.’ I’ve used it to travel the world and see things that my ancestors probably didn’t even know existed, which is something that I’ve struggled with. Too many aspects of higher education are self-indulgent works camouflaged as righteousness. My travels have further ingrained my role in propagating Western elitism and disrupted power structures wherever I go, and I always walk the blurred line of colonizer and colonized as a Black American.
I do believe that education is an inherent right and everyone should be able to utilize their ability to learn, but learning in America means theorizing concepts, from poverty to war, that are often deemed far-fetched and intangible inside of a university classroom. But they’re real as hell for people across the globe in places like Yemen and Nigeria—including some folx in the classrooms. That means, like Amber Butts wrote, when “I go back to school, I go back knowing that the work/ my work is made possible by the lives, deaths and manipulations of poor Black folk. If I go back, I face this and I never forget that these lives and deaths make theory accessible.”
When I sit in a classroom, I’ll always feel like I’m sacrificing humanity for my own benefits, no matter how pure and community-oriented my intentions.
I can’t learn in a classroom anymore, but this realization didn’t come quickly. It is still ongoing. It’s been a lifelong journey, literally. Eighty percent of my life has revolved around a classroom and the regurgitation of academia. At this point, all my school has to offer me is a $288,000 piece of paper, and I don’t want or need that. Yet, I’ll still sit in a classroom next Monday because, at this very moment, without it I’ll feel purposeless. My livelihood has always been academia, so my purpose has always been to produce knowledge, valuing theory over people. Today, a major purpose of academia for individuals is to elevate, or maintain, their social standing, and that contradicts and overpowers my intent to understand the world around me in order to live freely.
College degrees inherently create separations among folx because they hold so much value in Western society, and that value produces competition. For me as a Black student, that mindset of competition feels amplified; it’s either me or my wealthy, white peers and it’s also either me or the starving Black and brown children across the globe. And that feels selfish to me.
It used to be easy to convince myself that my education was always bigger than myself; it was for my family, the people I grew up with and my community—but now I know this community is not the only one suffocated by the ever-expanding structure of our colonial world. We all deserve to be free, but my freedom feels tainted knowing that it was enacted through the death of Black and brown folx.
My participation puts me at fault for the destruction of our world, but I still feel like I deserve to learn. As I begin to heal and to dream of a better future, I need to figure out how to learn with love and freeness, separated from the confinements of a system that stole my freedom in the first place. It won’t happen overnight or easily, but I have to separate myself from the classroom and the only way of life I’ve ever known. And the only way I can do that is by taking the chance on myself and believing that I can thrive by doing work with my people, outside of institutional settings. Then I will finally learn what it means to manifest a life full of collectiveness, community and freedom while living unattached to the inner workings of a system that is meant to divide, conquer and murder.
Suggested Readings:
Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization is not a metaphor,” Decolonization: Indigeneity,Education & Society Vol.1, 2012
Sharon Stein, “Facing Up to the Colonial Present of U.S. Higher Education,” 2016
Natalie Frazier, “A Black Ass Nightmare: My Four Years at Northwestern,” BlackBoard Magazine, 2016
Adam is a journalist from Los Angeles who cares about Black lives, Abolition and Decolonization. He’s reported internationally in Palestine, Uganda and Vietnam, and most recently with the Chicago Reporter. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamLMahoney.
