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The American Indian Quarterly 27.1&2 (2003) 420-428



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Remember 9-11!

White Belligerency in the Academy

Here at our spring faculty conference we are being asked to engage in a discourse about controversial issues of teaching in a post 9-11 climate.1 For many nonwhites associated with the academy, a crucial issue of course is white belligerence. As I have defined it, belligerence involves both a normative understanding in international relations whereby an aggressor state is engaged in some form or act of hostility (for example, war, declared or otherwise) and an individual personality trait. For the purposes of this discussion, these two understandings are racialized, that is, individuals or institutions responding to racially coded messages that cleave whites and nonwhites along what W. E. B. DuBois termed the "Color Line," or the relations of nonwhites to whites.

White belligerency is not new, however; it exists in a ubiquitous low to midlevel state. As nonwhite experiences reveal and the white historical record distinctly shows, there has been an ongoing controversy over a whole host of issues within the academy that involve the Color Line, like a racially separate but unequal education or affirmative action. Even in the twenty-first century, Vine Deloria Jr. maintains that "racism begins in the universities and to blame the common man for what intellectuals think or fantasize about is almost obscene. Think of all the things that people have said about Indians and you will find they emerged first in academia."2

Though Deloria's charge against the academy is recent, it was being echoed by hundreds of other racial and national communities throughout the United States, especially in the late 1960s; and, in response, the academy opened its doors to the general public more than it had previously. Consequently, with the increase of both nonwhite students and [End Page 420] faculty on college campuses, their scholarship began contradicting long-held and long-cherished white beliefs about the proper white-nonwhite relationship. In effect, the nonwhite examination of whiteness and its property of supremacy was metamorphosing the hard and fast Color Line into a more fluid twenty-first-century "Border Lands." Of course, several white leaders (Bennett 2002, Cheney 1995, Michener 1996, Schlesinger Jr. 1992) have emerged in the last decade or so to sound the alarm over this trend in the academy, and they are proposing solutions that ultimately return to the safe haven of the Color Line.

However, 9-11 has profoundly amplified white belligerency throughout the country and within the academy. Of the former, communities and individuals perceived as subverting, transgressing, or disturbing the all-important pet project, the white war on terrorism, are suspect. Of the latter, most white critics and their supporters have previously presented multiculturalism as a highly liberal project of little to no social or intellectual value. Now it is being packaged by various quarters of the white leadership as a subversive—"see-I-told-you-so"—project that supposedly threatens to undermine any national unity needed in the war on terrorism. Faculty, being the most visible group of the academy, has come in for more than its share of criticism by this group.

To counter suspect activity by faculty on university campuses, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA), founded in 1995 by two white leaders, presidential hopeful Joseph Liberman and Lynn Cheney, whose spouse holds the vice-presidency in Bush's regime, launched a campaign on November 13, 2001, that coupled the academy and 9-11: "Its first project [of its Defense of Civilization Fund] was the notorious pamphlet 'Defending Civilization: How our Universities Are Failing America and What Can Be Done About It,' which claimed that college and university faculty have been the weak link in America's response to September 11" (Berkowitz 2002, 14). This project listed over one hundred comments made by faculty (and students) to show that unlike the rest of the public, the academy is withholding its undying support against terrorism. ACTA's "weak link" claim was a politically deft move putting...

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