ABSTRACT
Since its inception, the US institution of higher education has been dependent on the labor of Black humans. How that labor has been interpreted and acquired throughout history has endured less than sufficient scrutiny in published scholarship. US colleges and universities must grapple with engagements of Black bodies as property. This chapter explains how theorizations of colonialism and anti-Blackness (re)interpret the arrangement between these universities, in particular, and Black bodies. It explores two dimensions of anti-blackness as manifested within higher education: interpretations of Black labor through colonial arrangements, relationship between labor, ownership, and education, and institutionalization of Black suffering. Essential in white supremacist settler-colonial educational design, Black fungibility manifests violence-effect in positionalities of Black and white people on college campuses. Anti-Blackness as a framework also extends beyond the construction of the Black body as property. While the US settler colony saw a period of white indentured servitude, Blackness became a formal marker of chattel enslavement.
