Dispossession + Desire

In 1935, W.E.B. Du Bois published a 750-page essay documenting how freed slaves during the brief post-Civil War era of Reconstruction worked to dismantle the plantation economy. This history was a deliberate confrontation with the consensus view of Reconstruction at the time - that emancipation and the enforcement of Black civil rights had degenerated the South into economic and political chaos. Reconstruction governments run by freedpeople and radical whites had, in fact, created public health departments to combat the spread of epidemics; founded social welfare institutions to care for the poor; and established public education in the South for the very first time. “The first great mass movement for public education at the expense of the state, in the South, came from Negroes. Many leaders before the war had advocated general education, but few had been listened to. Schools for indigents and paupers were supported, here and there, and more or less spasmodically. Some states had elaborate plans, but, they were not carried out. Public education for all at a public expense, was, in the South, a Negro idea,” Du Bois wrote. And it was public education that he credited with creating “enough leadership and knowledge to thwart the worst designs of the new slave drivers.” Unsurprisingly, then, after the conservatives of the time (self-identified “Redeemers”) violently overthrew those Reconstruction governments in order to regain political power and white supremacist social control, they reduced support for the new systems of public education.

It is, thus, also no surprise that the Redeemers of our time gutted the Department of Education’s staff this week, just days after I.C.E. detained former Columbia University graduate student Mahmoud Khalil for organizing pro-Palestinian protests on Columbia’s campus last year. While President Trump campaigned on the promise of closing the D.O.E. so that states could run their own education systems, the actual plan is more manipulative than that. The Administration’s objective is to eliminate the D.O.E.’s function as a federal agency that administers student aid programs, funds education research, and ensures equal access to, instead, utilize it purely as a tool for its nationalist prerogatives.

As much as Mahmoud Khalil’s detention is about the dispossession of the First Amendment from protesters, it’s also about the dispossession of ethical dilemmas from society. In other words, it’s about convincing the public that there are no other ways of perceiving things than the ones sanctioned by the state. And that there are no worthy responses to other ways of perceiving than violence. Yesterday, the Trump Administration demanded that Columbia expel or suspend students who participated in last spring’s protests. The University went a step farther and temporarily revoked diplomas as well. The point of such intense repression at the site of educational institutions is to render critical political questions literally unthinkable. To render critical ideological conflicts not merely compromised, but uninitiated.

There’s certainly no past worth redeeming. Student movements have always been suppressed. This country has never been a bastion of free speech for those brave enough to challenge the state’s ethics, just ask the Stop Cop City protesters jailed under the Biden Administration and still fighting domestic terrorism charges. But there is something distinct about this President conducting a parade of horribles and, then, shopping for a new Tesla on the White House lawn, which also happened this week. The naked appeal to material desire isn’t just an extravagant display of wealth and allegiance to corporate interests. Packing the inauguration ceremony with tech billionaires did that well enough on its own. This particular display at this particular time serves the purpose of proclaiming the rightness and value of the dispossession. Desire is just as important to the consolidation of power as any executive order.

This historical moment presents us with a new iteration of an old question - what and who is this society willing to dispossess in the pursuit of new possessions?