Publishers Weekly
04/19/2021
University of Pittsburgh education professor Patel (Youth Held at the Border) alleges in this impassioned if uneven polemic that U.S. colleges and universities have played a key role in maintaining the nation’s “colonialist structure.” Patel details how Eurocentric curricula leave Black and Indigenous students feeling as if “their histories don’t count,” and castigates universities for focusing on the “optics of diversity” (such as featuring minority students and faculty in marketing materials) rather than responding to student protests with real structural change. Highlighting the “intertwined nature of study and struggle” for marginalized groups, Patel discusses organizing strategies with civil rights activists including Ruby Sales, but her analysis of how contemporary student protests in support of the Black Lives Matter movement, or calling for the removal of Confederate monuments, can be informed by the tradition of “fugitive learning” among Black Americans is less clear. Though her call for decolonizing the classroom is timely, and her admiring portraits of activist scholars provide useful points of reference, Patel offers few solid guidelines for how teachers, students, and administrators can begin to do “the hard and largely unprecedented work of dismantling racism.” Readers will appreciate the expert diagnosis but wish for a clearer prescription.(July)
From the Publisher
A particularly poignant censure is aimed at universities’ theatrically professed diversity and inclusion efforts, which Patel contends do not actually interrupt settler colonialism and indeed exploit the labor of people of color . . . Thought-provoking interrogation for academics and reformers.”
—Booklist
“In her essential new book, Dr. Leigh Patel examines how to disrupt systemic inequality on our campuses. Hint: it isn’t checkbox ‘diversity’ programs and empty land acknowledgments but a real reckoning with the settler colonialism on which our universities were built and continue to capitalize.”
—Ms. Magazine
“Challenging two centuries of US colonialist higher education, Leigh Patel provides an analysis of and a road map for decolonizing the settler-colonial university.”
—Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author of An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States
“Today, most American universities have adopted obligatory land acknowledgments, recognizing that their massive billion-dollar campuses are on stolen land. And yet, inside the classroom, the administrative halls, the financial arrangements, and in the relations between universities and their neighbors, the legacy of settler colonialism persists, unremarked and unheeded. Until now. Leigh Patel delivers a powerful, penetrating analysis of the settler-colonial roots of the modern university and the consequences for higher education and our society at large. The lesson is clear: we can’t ‘reform’ the university; it must be decolonized through critical study and struggle. This book is the essential guide.”
—Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination
“Leigh Patel’s writing is consistently bold, concise, timely, and filled with nuances. . . . Her moving writing is backed by historical context that brings theory to light.”
—Bettina L. Love, author of We Want to Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom
Kirkus Reviews
2021-06-05
An examination of the unsavory limitations that settler colonialism has imposed upon higher education.
Patel, associate dean for equity and justice in education at the University of Pittsburgh, sees settler colonialism as a primary driver of violence and inequity in late-stage capitalism. The author ties together diverse strands including contemporary protest, structural racism, and power structures favoring Whiteness. “Settler colonialism is based on the logic of owning land,” she writes, “and that there is never enough land to satisfy the landowners’ thirst.” Both by design and due to institutional half-measures, American educational systems have largely failed to redress this malign history: “Whenever education, specifically higher education, has been made to reckon with its settler colonial structure, it has been largely through the struggles of those cast underneath the heel of oppression, fueled by their own formations to study.” Regarding efforts at diversity, which she discusses in detail, she notes, “gift economies are a colonial structure that imagines some people as worthy only through the benevolence of people with higher status.” Despite such public-facing efforts, prominent universities have not properly addressed persistent patterns of class- and race-based favoritism, to which Patel responds with justified, terse fury, reminding readers how many of these institutions were built by slaves. At the same time, the author celebrates a counternarrative of persistent patterns of protests and alternative learning modes by Indigenous people, people of color, and LGBTQ+ communities. “Learning has…never yielded fully to this settler project of colonization of the mind,” writes Patel. Throughout, the author builds a multilayered discussion by referencing other scholars and her experiences as a teacher and mentor, portraying contemporary academia as a minefield for her bright, diverse students, many of whom carry the extra burden of being a “model minority.” Overall, it’s a passionate and intermittently approachable work occasionally hampered by academic jargon.
A lively, politically engaged jeremiad on issues of identity, multiculturalism, and efforts to redress enduring wrongs.
