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

For nearly twenty years, institutions of higher education have been increasingly coming to terms with their histories of racial violence attendant to 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?

Thinking through memory, history and erasure, we can engage with theorists from a range of locations.  With the analysis of Michael Omi and Howard Winant, (Racial Formation in the United States, 2014), we can see racism in the United States was the product of many generations’ racial projects elevating White persons, White culture and White systems of ‘knowledge’; and Craig Wilder helps us to understand colleges and universities as engines for this work (Ebony & Ivy, 2011).  Kelly Brown Douglas uses these forgotten memories to demonstrate how religious institutions provided the sacred canopy and theo-logic of White supremacist culture (Stand Your Ground, 2015), and Jemar Tisby (Color of Compromise, 2019) demonstrates the collective effort of White Christian theologians, scholars and preachers creating White supremacy culture.  Duke Kwon and Gregory Thompson (Reparations, 2021) propose not only that we use the reconstituted memories to understand U.S. history through the lens of theft, but that returning history to the rightful place in institutional memory is necessary for the possibililty of repair.  At the same time, the refusal to include the painful memory of past racial injustice within our institutional histories is itself a project of White supremacy.  White centered histories, including religious histories, perform a White supremacist function with the simultaneous romanticization of memories of White Christians (who were the perpetrators of racial violence) and the erasure of memories of those who were harmed.  The truth-telling of history and the memory of our institutional participation in the structures and systems of White supremacy is an essential ingredient in any wider attempt to dismantle the effects of this history.  This paper opens with a brief overview of the project of institutional reckoning as a site of contested memory, and contributes to the conversation surrounding these efforts through the key question:  what are the institutional and personal costs of resurfacing such memories? 

In the case of memories purposefully submerged, the process can be both painful and painstaking.  The paper is grounded in the author’s on-going study of their institutional archives and the process that has unfolded for over five years (and undertaken without institutional funding, and so, in effect at little to no cost to the institution).  The paper chronicles some of the painstaking nature of sifting through ledgers, reading reports and tying together a narrative that can count as memory.   Such a project aims to be illuminative of the cost in terms of hours spent attempting to reconstruct institutional memory willfully eclipsed.  For the institutional memory of a northern Catholic college's involvement in an economy of enslavement, the question of cost is further explored with the calculating question: how much involvement in slavery ‘counts’ as sufficient to include in our institutional memory?  The accountant’s measure of ‘materiality’ is introduced as a way that interdisciplinary approaches to the archives can provide innovative measures to navigate what among the calculations in the archives is sufficient to warrant the resurfacing of painful memories of participation in an economy of enslavement. 

At this point in the author's research, collaborative efforts are aimed at moving to an institutional task force to create a fuller institutional memory.  Here, we can report on the range of costs institutions have committed to establishing committees to do this work.  Simultaneously, the question of what cost might be anticipated in the loss of funds from White donors uninterested in interrogating the institution’s past can be included.  Navigating this fraught terrain in Historically White-Serving Institutions, where power continues to be held by persons racialized as White, involves another site of pain, cost and emotional involvement.  Part two walks our way around the possibility of surfacing institutional memory for the purposes of racial reckoning and the many forms of 'cost' that it entails.

For scholars undertaking this work through the lens of religious studies and theology there is a further pain of reckoning with our disciplinary involvement in the creation of White supremacist theologies and religious ideologies.  Part three of this paper explores the emotional costs of surfacing these memories in a variety of ways, with concrete examples.  What emotional toll is taken when delving into the White supremacist ideology written into Christian theology produced and disseminated in the faith-based institutions that support our work today?  What is the painful cost of bringing to memory the names of those enslaved by the benefactors of our institutions, when the cost of their lives (in their lives' labor or slavery’s transactions) fueled the institution in which we do our work?   

For consideration by the Religion, Affect and Emotion Unit, I would be interested in sharing this from an experiential perspective in a lightening session format.