Attached Paper Annual Meeting 2024

The Price and Pain of Memory: Institutional Reckoning with White Supremacy

Abstract for Online Program Book (maximum 150 words)

For nearly twenty years, institutions of higher education have been increasingly coming to terms with their histories of racial violence involved with slavery and its afterlives.  From the 2006 Brown University Slavery and Justice Report to the 2024 Yale & Slavery Research Project, the work of recovering histories has become a practice of institutional reckoning.  It is, in a sense, a project that requires reconstituting painful memories that have been willfully erased.  Following the theoretical path of Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart, this work of uncovering histories and reconstituting institutional memory is part of the truth-telling necessary as a first step to healing from our national trauma of White supremacy and racism. But what are the many costs -- financial, emotional, personal and institutional -- for doing this essential work?