Slavery to college loans, Part II
Guest writer: kynita stringer-stanback
STONE WALLS is grateful to welcome kynita stringer-stanback as a guest writer. stringer-stanback is a descendant of November Caldwell and his son Wilson Caldwell, important local historical figures, and she has a powerful story to tell. It reaches back to two of UNC’s first presidents who enslaved her ancestors. Her incisive article, “From Slavery to College Loans,” is being published by Stone Walls in two parts with full bibliography. The article originally appeared in 2019 in Library Trends, a peer-reviewed academic journal of Johns Hopkins University Press. stringer-stanback owns the copyright to her article and has agreed to republish it here. The text appears essentially the same as its original version.
Part II is below. (Read Part I.)
kynita-stringer stanback is an information activist.
From Slavery to College Loans, Part II
By kynita stringer-stanback
ABSTRACT
MY STORY BEGINS back in 1793 when November Caldwell was “gifted” to Helen Hogg Hooper (whose father-in-law, William Hooper, signed the Declaration of Independence), the wife of the first president of UNC, Joseph Caldwell. November Caldwell is my great-great-great-grandfather. Currently, I owe over six figures in student-loan debt to the very institution that enslaved my ancestors. We are at a particular place in the political history of our nation. White supremacy is morally corrupt. It requires that we deny the humanity of human beings for one reason or another. It is hard to stand up against white supremacy because folks who do are often ostracized from their families and communities. We have all been socialized to believe in white supremacy—it was one of our nation’s founding principles. In this essay I hope to break open a dialogue about the white supremacist hegemony institutionalized within our neoliberal university system. Connecting the past atrocities of slavery with actual educational experiences of the descendants of those who served the proslavery institutions has not been widely publicized or talked about. We must interrogate our history or we will be doomed to continue to repeat the horrific inhumane atrocities.
[Part I]
AFTER I COMPLETED my graduate degree at UNC, I graduated with over $90,000 in debt. It’s hard to pay back a loan when it’s more than double your yearly income. My first position was only a two-year appointment.
With a forbearance application, the interest rates incurred ballooned the balance. My debt has increased over 30 percent in less than a decade. Now I owe close to $150,000. Recently, NPR reported that the loan-forgiveness program has denied 99 percent of its applicants. Students, who have been working as firefighters, nurses, teachers, and police officers, are watching their financial plans implode due to the rejection of their qualifications to have their college loans forgiven.
What does this mean for me? I’m saddled with a six-figure debt that continues to increase. Institutionalized racism continues to ossify instead of providing equitable educational opportunities to those who have been and continue to be oppressed, repressed, and suppressed. With every published article, I continue to question and challenge institutionalized racism and articulate its white supremacist connections. I sincerely believe that this makes it difficult for me to obtain gainful employment within our profession.
When I was growing up, my elders told me on many occasions that my mouth would get me into trouble. Because I was raised in the South by a multigenerational family who refused to bow, bend, or break, my advocacy for the downtrodden continues to threaten my ability to provide for myself and my family. And yet, I am compelled to write, now more than ever.
White supremacy is morally reprehensible. It continues to compromise the moral integrity of this nation. Fannie Lou Hamer once said, “I don’t want equal rights with the white man; if I did, I’d be a thief and a murderer.” Some of our national leaders identify with hatred. I don’t think segregation is always a bad idea. Sometimes people with similar cultural, religious, spiritual, and gender-specific beliefs and practices need to get together to discuss current events and the social climate. Those communities should not, however, encourage the destruction and dehumanization of others who are different.
It is time for our country—and our profession*—to face our complicated, complex, violent, and inhumane past. The leaders within LIS (library and information science) must interrogate how the organizations they lead internalize and exhibit the phobias, the isms, and the anti’s. They must recognize where ideals don’t necessarily match up with actions. They then have to decide what they are going to do about it all. However, there cannot be an expectation that anything will change if no one is willing to have the tough conversations that need to happen for institutions and organizations to transform and become more inclusive and equitable.
* EDITOR’S NOTE: The author works in the field of library and information science and this article was originally published in an academic journal with an intended audience in that field. However, her insights here, while specific to LIS, are broadly applicable.
DURING MY professional career, I have never been given the authority and autonomy to help push an organization into real change.
According to David James Hudson:
The dominance of diversity’s essentializing, individualist anti-racist politics in LIS has inhibited treatment of regimes of racial subordination as sociohistorical constructs. What kinds of analysis might the treatment of race as a historically constituted phenomenon enable within the field, then? What lines of inquiry open up in LIS when we approach race as a formation produced in and through the exercise of power rather than as a natural, preexistent, and unchanging demographic attribute around which “race relations” are organized.
If the LIS profession is in fact ready, willing, and able to interrogate structural racism, institutionalized racism, and the way the organizations and institutions we represent perpetuate white supremacy and racism, radical efforts are necessary. Apologies and lip service are not enough. If the institutions and organizations are indeed ready to sincerely approach equity and diversity, here are a few suggestions:
Higher salaries, especially in cities where the cost of living is high
Institutional support with housing—providing reduced on-campus housing or housing vouchers
College loan repayment (apart from salary allocation)
Systems of reporting discrimination that actually protect the workers and their civil rights over the interests of the organizations and institutions
Cross-cultural competency training led by people from diverse backgrounds as a mandatory part of professional development
Cede, and relinquish, power—if the entire administrative core of the institution is overwhelmingly homogenous and does not reflect the inclusive student body that most institutions purport to have, it will be impossible to build a community of equity and inclusion
ON APRIL 12, 2007, the North Carolina Legislature along with Governor Perdue apologized for slavery with a resolution signed into law. Chancellor Carol Folt, the first female chancellor at UNC-Chapel Hill, was the first chancellor to apologize for slavery. Both the state of North Carolina and the university have apologized for slavery. But what are they going to do about it? Pay reparations to descendants of slaves? Take down Silent Sam permanently? Offer descendants of slaves free public education? Silent Sam was placed on UNC’s campus by the Daughters of the Confederacy. Julian Carr, during its unveiling, described beating a Black woman until her skirts hung in shreds. The statute was put in place to intimidate my ancestors. It was a reminder that even though it was illegal to “own” Black people, it wasn’t illegal to terrorize.
What does reconciliation look like? The Ghanian Akan adinkra symbol Sankofa translates to mean “go back and get it.” We must go back and get our history. We must face it as a nation and start teaching our next generation the painful, resilient story of this nation.
Whom does it belong to?
Whom does it value?
Who has the most visible and intelligible civil rights?
What happens to those who are not represented in the aforementioned number?
Are they given resources to achieve an equitable position, or are they exploited and further disenfranchised?
As a queer gender-nonconforming Black woman, I would be remiss if I did not connect my experience to the imperialist white supremacist misogynistic capitalist hetero-patriarchal oligarchy. My race, gender, and gender expression all impact the way that I am able to move through society at large.
As of 2017, twenty-eight of fifty states in this nation did not have nondiscrimination laws for LGBTQ people. In twenty-eight of fifty states I can be fired and denied employment based on my sexual identity. Not one public, private, academic, or corporate library within the great state of North Carolina hired me as a fulltime benefit-earning employee since I graduated from UNC with publications, presentations, professional development, and foreign language skills.
In 2018, my alma mater celebrated its 225th birthday. Two hundred twenty-five years ago, it was legal to rape Black women. Today, it is legal to discriminate against queer, gender-nonconforming people. It appears as if we have not evolved—as if our historicity has never been examined and reviewed, and as if our leaders have not gleaned any knowledge that would help our nation grow, change, develop, and mature into a true world leader.
Have the indigenous and first-nation leaders who are the descendants of the original inhabitants been invited to the university in order to begin the healing process of displacement and theft? Has there been any discussion of how to make amends and how to repair the damage and trauma?
Who on the Board of Trustees owes student loans? The trustee member who lives in my hometown owns an 8,000 square-foot home that cost him over $1.2 million in the early 2000s. He and his children have all graduated from UNC—did any of them accrue student-loan debt? Are there any women of color, any gender-nonconforming, transgender, or queer members of the BOT?
This begs the questions: Who does the law protect? Who does the law exploit? What is the reason for this exploitation? In the United States, the benefits go to the wealthiest among us—those who financially profit the most. In this nation, our corporations have the same rights as human beings. This means that humans equate business and vice versa—everyone is concerned with the bottom line and being in the black. Our current president is a titan of (shady) business. He is the first, in my lifetime, to have commercial real estate in Washington, DC, while simultaneously serving the people in public office. He is the first elected public official, in my lifetime, to publicly talk explicitly about sexually assaulting women. He also still manages to have opinions about the reproductive rights of women. He has the ability to shape and form our national policies that impact, not just the citizens, but people from abroad.
As a nation and LIS profession, we have some decisions to make. What kind of society, profession, and earth are we trying to leave for the next generation? Will we ever have the courage to discuss where we actually come from?
Also as LIS professionals, we have access to the truth—the research, the literature, the historical documentation—in ways that others may not have. This in turn mandates that we have a unique responsibility to make sure that we do not become guarded gatekeepers, but instead that we break the chains and allow more access to relevant and authoritative information to combat retrogression.
It’s my humble opinion that until we can face our past, we won’t be able to fully appreciate our present and march into our future as a healthy nation successfully sustaining and developing its people, all its people.
From Craig Steven Wilder’s Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery and the Troubled History of America’s Universities:
The invasion of the Americas and the modern slave trade pulled peoples throughout the Atlantic into each other’s lives, and colleges were among the colonial institutions that braided their histories and rendered their fates dependent and antagonistic. The academy never stood apart from slavery—in fact it stood beside church and state as the third pillar of a civilization built on bondage.
THE PERSONAL is political. The bodies of Black, Brown, and Indigenous women have been used as factories to produce both physical and biological labor and wealth for close to millennia. It is time for a real transformation and change, not just meaningless rhetoric.
Do we still have to submit to the same oppressive structures that continue to enshrine oppression and subject our progeny into debt peonage? Debt peonage is a term coined by Clyde Woods to describe the intergenerational debt that Blacks in the Mississippi Delta were subjected to due to white supremacist planter oligarchs, whose “planter control . . . allowed them to decide who ate and who starved, who was poorly housed and who was homeless, and who lived and who died”. A person who had a strong opinion, who wanted to stand up to oppressive planters, risked financial ruin at best, death at worst. Is the fate better today for a person whose purpose is to stand up to oppression, a person who indeed was sent to make change for a better world? What about a person whose six-figure education and experiential opportunities land them right in the middle of a LIS career?
Every time a person chooses to speak against institutionalized racism, structural racism, and white supremacy, they run the risk of losing. What’s even worse is what would happen if we all stayed silent? In my heart of hearts, I know and believe that there are people out there who want to see something different for this nation and this profession. What we want, and what we’re willing to do to get it, are two entirely different things.
In a sense, sacrifice and relinquishing of power and resources are required. Sometimes apologies aren’t enough. Commemorative statues and plaques do not repair the phenomenological, psychosocial, sociohistorical trauma of those who survived slavery, rape, displacement, and genocide.
Now, as a nation, as a profession, we must reach back. We must engage and evaluate where we come from as a nation. We must face our fears and lean into the uncomfortable, sad, frustrating, and triumphant truth. Doing so will free generations to come, perhaps heal some wounds of the past and hopefully our nation.
As Robin DiAngelo wrote:
The very real consequences of breaking white solidarity play a fundamental role in maintaining white supremacy. We do indeed risk censure and other penalties from our fellow whites. In my own life, these penalties have worked as a form of social coercion. . . . I have chosen silence all too often. But my silence is not benign because it protects and maintains the social hierarchy and my place within it.
We have to start from the beginning. We must understand and speak the undeniable truth that Indigenous and Native peoples were here first. We must investigate, we must tell. We then have to understand that although Europeans were a little late to the party in figuring out seafaring and global travel, Africans, Asians, and Pacific Islanders had been crisscrossing the planet for ages before Europeans began cataloging the physical features of Africans, Asians, and Pacific Islanders (e.g., North American narcotics found in Egyptian mummies).
ACCORDING to the Southern Poverty Law Center, only 8 percent of high school seniors in the United States of America can identify slavery as the cause of the civil war. Often, students are taught US History with very little context and information about people from diverse backgrounds. Contributions, struggles, heartbreaks, and triumphs of Indigenous, Black, Asian, Latina/o, Mexican, Chicana/o, and LGBTQ people are often marginalized or given cursory attention. Students are not taught our history as a nation on a critical, in-depth, and multicultural level. Often students from diverse backgrounds must seek their own history, find their own stories and how those fit into the larger, more dominant narrative of our nation.
Throughout my education in the North Carolina public school system, I only received a cursory education about the contributions of Black people to our nation’s history. I was taught about slavery; Harriet Tubman; Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rosa Parks; the civil rights movement of the late 1950s and 1960s, but an overall comprehensive education about the contributions of Blacks, Asians, Indigenous, LGBTQ, and other minorities was sorely lacking. The knowledge that I gained about contributions of Black historical figures mostly came from my family. I am grateful for my family and all they did to ensure I learned about my history. My great-great Aunt Fannie would sit me down and show me photos of our ancestors and tell me their stories.
From Donaldo Macedo’s Literacies of Power: What Americans are not Allowed to Know:
The United States was founded on a cultural hegemony that privileged and assigned control to the white patriarchy and relegated other racial, cultural and gender groups to a culture of silence. The present historical context points to a changing world where white patriarchal supremacy, designed to silence and subjugate other cultural and racial groups, is no longer working.
The gravity of my father walking with me in the cemetery on UNC’s campus on that sticky spring day resonates with me now more than ever. Economic justice is not a far-fetched ideal that can never be grasped or obtained. We must painstakingly, patiently, and thoroughly investigate our collective complex history. We cannot run from the truth, and we must hold the institutions accountable for benefitting from the labor of our people. We must hold these institutions accountable for the theft and displacement of first nations. We must somehow move into a more just and free future, so that our children and our children’s children’s children will know that we actually evolved and learned from the mistakes.
ONE GOOD THING:
A walk in the woods before the last leaves fell.
SOURCES & CREDITS:
Originally published:
LIBRARY TRENDS, Vol. 68, No. 2, 2019 (“Labor in Academic Libraries,” edited by Emily Drabinski, Aliqae Geraci, and Roxanne Shirazi), pp. 316–29. © kynita stringer-stanback
References:
Barnett, Ned. 2018. Letter to the editor. News & Observer (Raleigh, NC), August 21, 2018. https://www.newsobserver.com/opinion/article217070510.html.
Battle, Kemp P. 1895. Sketch of the Life and Character of Wilson Caldwell. Chapel Hill, NC: University Press. https://exhibits.lib.unc.edu/exhibits/show/slavery/item/3640.
DiAngelo, Robin. 2018. White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism. Boston: Beacon Press.
Documenting the American South. n.d. “David Lowry Swain, 4 Jan. 1801–29 Aug. 1868.” Accessed September 29, 2018. https://docsouth.unc.edu/browse/bios/pn0001638_bio.html. Original source: Dictionary of North Carolina Biography, edited by William S. Powell.
Documenting the American South. n.d. “Original Joseph Caldwell Monument (Wilson Caldwell (Grave).” Commorative Landscapes. Accessed September 29, 2018. https://docsouth.unc.edu/commland/monument/48/.
Fortin, Jacey. 2018. “U.N.C. Chancellor Apologizes for History of Slavery at Chapel Hill.” New York Times, October 13, 2018. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/13/us/unc-carolina-apologize-slavery.html.
Gordon, Taylor. 2015. “10 Pieces of Evidence that Prove Black People Sailed to the Americas Long before Columbus.” Originally posted on Neo-Griot (blog). January 23, 2015. Accessed March 22, 2019. https://www.lahc.edu/studentservices/aso/bsu/knowyourhistory/10PiecesofEvidenceThatProve.pdf.
Hamer, Fannie Lou. 1967. To Praise Our Bridges: An Autobiography. Edited by Julius Lester and Mary Varela. Jackson, MS: KIPCO. https://snccdigital.org/wp-content/themes/sncc/flipbooks/mev_hamer_updated/index.html?swipeboxvideo=1 - page/10.
Hudson, David James. 2017. “On ‘Diversity’ as Anti-Racism in Library and Information Studies: A Critique.” Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies 1 (1): 20–21. https://doi.org/10.24242/jclis.v1i1.6.
Macedo, Donaldo. 2006. Literacies of Power: What Americans are not Allowed to Know. Boston: Westview Press.
North Carolina General Assembly, “Resolution 2007–21, Senate Joint Resolution 1557,” April 12, 2007, https://www.ncleg.gov/Sessions/2007/Bills/Senate/PDF/S1557v3.pdf.
The 168 Congress Joint Select Committee. 1872. Testimony Taken by the Joint Select Committee to Inquire into theCondition of Affairs in the Late Insurrectionary States: North Carolina. (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office). https://archive.org/stream/KKK1871CongressionalTestimony/North Carolina - mode/2up.
Out and Equal Workplace Advocates. 2017. “2017 Workplace Equity Fact Sheet.” http://outandequal.org/2017-workplace-equality-fact-sheet/.
Southern Poverty Law Center. n.d. “Teaching Hard History: American Slavery.” Accessed January 10, 2019. https://www.splcenter.org/sites/default/files/tt_hard_history_american_slavery.pdf.
Spruill, Brittany, Erienne Jenkins, and Brooke Parker. 2013. “Monuments and the Spaces They Occupy.” Commemorative Landscapes. Documenting the American South. https://docsouth.unc.edu/commland/features/essays/spruill/ - bottom5.
Turner, Cory. 2018. “Why Public Loan Forgiveness is So Unforgiving.” WUNC 91.5. Transcript of October 17, 2018, NPR Morning Edition broadcast. http://www.wunc.org/post/student-loan-whistleblower.
UNC (University of North Carolina) Archives. 2018. “David Barham died on this day in 1860 . . . .” Twitter, June 22, 2018, 6:14 AM. https://twitter.com/uncarchives/status/1010148922415828992.
UNC–Chapel Hill (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill). n.d. “History of the University,” History and Traditions. Accessed January 10, 2019. https://www.unc.edu/about/history-and-traditions/.
———. n.d. “November Caldwell (1791–1872).” The Carolina Story: A Virtual Museum of University History. Accessed September 29, 2018. https://museum.unc.edu/exhibits/show/slavery/drawing-of-november-caldwell--.
———. n.d. “Wilson Caldwell (1841–1898).” The Carolina Story: A Virtual Museum of University History. Accessed September 29, 2018. https://museum.unc.edu/exhibits/show/slavery/wilson-caldwell--1841-1898-.
Wilder, Craig Steven. 2013. Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery and the Troubled History of America’s Universities. New York: Bloomsbury Press.
Woods, Clyde. 2017. Development Arrested: The Blues and Plantation Power in the Mississippi Delta. New York: Verso.
Photos:
Photo of Charity Caldwell’s letter to Anne Ruffin, taken at the Southern Historical Collection, by kynita stringer-stanback
Wilson Caldwell photos — The Carolina Story: A Virtual Museum of University History
All other photos by Mike Ogle