Wrecked: Deinstitutionalization and Partial Defenses in State Higher Education Policy

By Barrett J. Taylor

Higher education is a central institution in U.S. democracy. In the 2010s, however, many states that spent previous decades building up their higher education systems began to tear them down. Growing hostility toward higher education reflected changing social forces that remade the politics of U.S. higher education. The political Right became increasingly reliant on angry white voters as higher education became more racially diverse. The Republican party became more closely connected to extremely wealthy donors as higher education became more costly. In Wrecked, Barrett J. Taylor shows how these social changes set a collision course for the Right and higher education. These attacks fed a policy agenda of deinstitutionalization, which encompassed stark divestment from higher education but was primarily characterized by an attack on the institution’s social foundation of public trust. In response to these attacks, higher education officials have offered a series of partial defenses that helped higher education to cope in the short-term but did nothing to defend the institution itself against the long-term threat of declining public trust. The failure to address underlying issues of mistrust allowed conflict to escalate to the point at which many states are now wrecking their public higher education systems. Wrecked offers a unique and compelling perspective linking higher education policymaking to broader social and political forces acting in the twenty-first century. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Release date: Aug 12, 2022
• ISBN: 9781978821439

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Cover: Wrecked, Deinstitutionalization and Partial Defenses in State Higher Education Policy by Barrett J. Taylor

Wrecked

Wrecked

Deinstitutionalization and Partial Defenses in State Higher Education Policy

BARRETT J. TAYLOR

Rutgers University Press

New Brunswick, Camden, and Newark, New Jersey, and London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Taylor, Barrett Jay, author.

Title: Wrecked : deinstitutionalization and partial defenses in state higher education policy / Barrett J. Taylor.

Description: New Brunswick : Rutgers University Press, [2022] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021046742 | ISBN 9781978821422 (hardback) | ISBN 9781978821415 (paperback) | ISBN 9781978821439 (epub) | ISBN 9781978821446 (mobi) | ISBN 9781978821453 (pdf)

Subjects: LCSH: Higher education and state—United States. | Education, Higher—Political aspects—United States. | Public universities and colleges—United States. | Education, Higher—United States—States—Finance. | Deinstitutionalization—United States. | Right and left (Political science)—United States. | U.S. states—Politics and government.

Classification: LCC LC173 .T37 2022 | DDC 379.73—dc23/eng/20220422

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021046742

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

Copyright © 2022 by Barrett J. Taylor

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is fair use as defined by U.S. copyright law.

References to internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Rutgers University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

www.rutgersuniversitypress.org

Manufactured in the United States of America

Contents

Preface

1 Collision Course: Higher Education Politics, Policy, and Practices

2 Policy Legacies

3 Conceptualizing Wreckage: Political and Institutional Transformation

4 Arizona

5 Wisconsin

6 North Carolina

7 Iowa

WITH KIMBERLY WATTS

8 Ways Forward

Appendix: Notes on Methods

Acknowledgments

Notes

References

Index

Preface

I wrote this book from 2018 to 2021, analyzing data from 2008 to 2018. Within that eventful span of time, 2020 was by far the most turbulent year. Racial justice protesters rose against police brutality across the country. The COVID-19 pandemic and its attendant displacements killed hundreds of thousands and remade the lives of countless more. One of the most bitterly contested elections in living memory ended in a sitting President of the United States who refused to accept the results of that election. Indeed, 2020 seemed to contain so much activity that it could not be contained within twelve months. The next year began much as 2020 had ended, with rioters invading the U.S. Capitol building on January 6.

When so much in public life is changing rapidly, who would want to read a book about higher education politics and policy in the 2010s? Especially since the most rapid changes in 2020 and 2021 fall outside the time horizon analyzed here, isn’t everything here old news? Indeed it is—and, in many ways, that is the point of it. This book is the story of how the relationships between states and higher education changed as the political Right changed in the 2010s. Thus, it is part of the story of how things got to be the way that they are in the early 2020s.

When I use the term the Right, I am not talking about individual members of that political coalition. I do not study individuals’ motivations and am in no position to assess them. Instead, I focus on the Right as a political movement and an organized coalition. Two social changes remade this coalition in the twenty-first century. The first is what the historian Carol Anderson calls white rage, meaning fury over progress toward racial justice that is expressed through legitimate channels—governments, nonprofit organizations, and the like.¹ A long-standing feature of U.S. society, the expression of white anger through political processes intensified in the early twenty-first century as bulwarks of white supremacy were slowly, if inadequately, challenged.² The second social change is the accumulation of extraordinary wealth by a small number of households.³ Massive fortunes amplify the political influence of those who hold them, which leads to policies intended to protect accumulated wealth.⁴ These two social forces characterize the United States as a whole, and so shape both major U.S. political parties.⁵ However, they are most influential in the Republican Party, which has united angry white voters and wealthy donors—along with many other elements—into a political coalition.⁶

In this book, I argue that these changing social conditions have placed the political Right on a collision course with a costly and racially diversifying higher education system. Elected and appointed partisan officials have translated political hostility into a policy agenda of deinstitutionalization that undermines higher education’s material and social resource bases. Funding is slashed and trust is undermined. Higher education officials marshal partial defenses of their sector that allow individual colleges or universities to survive short-term budget woes, but do nothing to address the erosion of confidence in higher education as an institution. After these collisions, higher education is left a wreck, still operable but rickety and unreliable. Seeing this wreckage, the public loses confidence in higher education, and the cycle continues. This complex interrelationship of social forces, political coalitions, policy action, and higher education practices unfolds throughout the chapters that follow.

My narrative fits alongside other academic accounts of democratic backsliding⁷ and systematic hostility to nonpartisan institutions from elected officials on the right,⁸ albeit in a way that is far narrower. My focus is on higher education, not on society, politics, and policy writ broadly. Even so, some resonances are clear. This is not only a story about funding and governing higher education. It is also a story about the place of a nonpartisan social institution like higher education in a multiracial democracy. It is a story about the ways in which social conditions have incentivized political actors on the right to express hostility to one of these institutions, higher education, through state policy.

Understanding the complex processes that undergird the relationship between states and their higher education systems helps illuminate whatever comes next. The future will not emerge from thin air. Future higher education politics and policy will continue to draw nourishment from deep social cleavages. My argument is therefore likely to be relevant long after fast-moving events have overtaken the details recorded in this book.

That said, my account is partial and acutely limited. I offer nothing like the last word here. Instead, I offer what I think of as a first word in a different conversation than the transactional manner in which higher education policy is typically analyzed. I offer neither the clear diagnoses nor the straightforward prescriptions that are common in accounts that focus on policy transactions. Instead, I think about social change, higher education politics and policy, and campus practices in an interconnected way. This approach has a long and distinguished tradition.⁹ Ultimately, I adopt it out of hopefulness. Illuminating the ties between social divisions, political action, enacted policies, and lived practices helps us understand higher education’s problems and their implications more clearly. Clearer understanding, I hope, will illuminate paths forward from the predicaments of the early twenty-first century.

—January 2021

Wrecked

1

Collision Course

Higher Education Politics, Policy, and Practices

Public colleges and universities are closely linked to state governments. States charter, fund, and oversee colleges and universities. They provide student financial aid for many who attend. Candidates for elected offices often place their agendas for education at the forefront of their political platforms. Over the course of the twentieth century, these close connections made higher education a central institution of U.S. democracy.¹ Institutions like higher education organize resource allocation and legitimize patterns of behavior in society, thereby allowing individual and collective actors to navigate the social world more predictably.² By so doing, institutions allow a society to become more fully democratic because citizens not only elect those who govern them but also participate in many different dimensions of public life.³

Late in the twentieth century, a political lurch to the right transformed the relationship between many states and their higher education systems. State governments provided less and demanded more throughout the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s. Although it was often a bipartisan project, much of this transformation was led by a Republican Party that was increasingly skeptical of nonpartisan institutions like higher education.⁴ Policies such as dramatic reductions in state funding for higher education⁵ and growing oversight of the enterprise⁶ reflected this skepticism. These policies also strained the bonds of trust between the public and higher education.

In the 2010s, deep social changes placed higher education on a collision course with the Right. Some of these changes were institutional. Higher education has long conferred advantage on people who identify as white and engaged in practices—from selective admissions to curriculum design—that are coded as white.⁷ The alleged golden age in which states spent generously on higher education was really a white age, with people who identified as white dominating enrollments and curriculums.⁸ Students and activists, especially Black students and activists, have demanded reckoning with these legacies—an ongoing process that continues in the twenty-first century.⁹ This reckoning has produced real change, even as higher education has done far too little to address its exclusionary dimensions.¹⁰ Enrollments at predominantly white institutions (PWIs) have become more racially diverse over time,¹¹ while student life and the curriculums at these institutions have become less exclusively white.¹² Simultaneously, the enrollments of many minority-serving institutions have both increased and become more racially diverse, continuing the long-standing practice of these colleges and universities making crucial contributions to racial equity.¹³

At the same time that higher education has become less white, the political Right has become whiter. Republican and Republican-leaning voters are more likely to identify as white and to express skepticism about the existence of structural racism than is the population as a whole.¹⁴ These right-leaning white voters are likely to express anger at anything they think disadvantages them.¹⁵ In the sphere of higher education, race-based affirmative action, immigration reform, and curriculums are favored targets.¹⁶ A higher education system that is slowly confronting its own whiteness is therefore an inviting target for partisans on the right. In the words of the historian Carol Anderson, higher education is likely to evoke white rage.¹⁷

Money also placed higher education and the Right on a collision course in the 2010s. Over time, higher education has become costlier to deliver. Swelling enrollments raised total costs, and reliance on skilled labor drove up per-student costs.¹⁸ Public colleges and universities need public funding if they are to avoid raising tuition to stratospheric heights. Yet, at the same time that higher education confronted an urgent need for public funding, the Republican Party became especially tightly linked to the economic elite. These very wealthy people had both a vested interest in reducing rates of taxation and public spending¹⁹ and the means of influencing higher education policy and practice through nonprofit organizations that they founded and funded.²⁰

These two social forces—white rage and the influence of the economic elite—placed the political Right and higher education on a collision course.²¹ By the 2010s the Right’s mistrust of higher education had become outright hostility.²² This antipathy fueled a policy agenda of deinstitutionalization. Institutions like higher education require both material and social resources.²³ By extension, a policy agenda of deinstitutionalization undermines established social practices through the removal of these resources.²⁴ The retreat of material resources from public higher education has been thoroughly documented. State dollars have long been in decline.²⁵ The defining aspect of the new, more overt conflict is therefore the undermining of higher education’s social foundation. In the 2010s, higher education’s social resources—trust in the good faith of the enterprise, confidence that higher education was governed by expertise rather than by partisan interest, independence from direct state interference—increasingly came under attack from a political Right that had long expressed hostility toward the professoriate and other elites.²⁶ Members of the professoriate, and even the institution itself, were cast as irredeemably leftist and in need of correctives imposed by a hostile political Right.

By undermining the material and social resources on which higher education depended, the contemporary Right, like other social movements,²⁷ questioned the legitimacy of the policies and practices that had long characterized higher education. The resulting policy agenda of deinstitutionalization compromised colleges’ and universities’ ability to select their own students, set their own curriculums, determine working conditions on their campuses, and otherwise operate as central institutions in a democratic society. It repurposed familiar channels for funding and governing the enterprise, making statewide boards and academic centers into opportunities to punish, control, or refashion the parts of higher education that enraged powerful political actors. And, as is typical of deinstitutionalization efforts arising outside a field,²⁸ this policy agenda repurposed established practices in accordance with new power relations, transforming hallmarks of democratic society like free speech into tools for partisan advantage. In short, the Right’s policy agenda left higher education a wrecked institution with more limited independence and diminished capacity both to fulfill its mission and to survive future collisions.

Higher education officials did not merely acquiesce to these attacks. Campus leaders and even some politicians routinely touted the economic returns to higher education. College and university managers found ways to survive budgetary distress, most commonly by raising tuition revenues. These techniques enabled higher education to get through the next legislative cycle, but left fundamental elements of the Right’s critique unanswered. Skating by has proved a poor substitute for a full-throated defense. Because they provided short-term relief without addressing the fundamental issue of deinstitutionalization (e.g., waning trust), I refer to this set of higher education practices as partial defenses.

Partial defenses provide real relief to colleges and universities, some students, and even some faculty and staff members. Yet they also place many people, especially those who hold racially minoritized identities, at risk by leaving long-term problems unaddressed. Partial defenses fail to avert another crash. Focusing on economic development casts higher education as a means to an end such as stable employment. When that end is not achieved—perhaps due to factors beyond the control of anyone involved in higher education, such as prevailing macroeconomic conditions—public confidence in the institution is eroded still further. Managerial partial defenses such as tuition maximization net similar results. Budgets may be repaired in the short term, but at the expense of public trust in what is increasingly seen as a revenue-focused enterprise. A higher education system that professes to believe in diversity, equity, and inclusion but then constrains opportunity at PWIs breaks yet another promise to the public. In these ways, partial defenses contribute to the erosion of trust in higher education, reinforcing the policy agenda of deinstitutionalization.

Politics, policy, and practices. The social forces that intensified partisan political loyalties on the right fostered a policy agenda of deinstitutionalization that transformed the daily practices of people who live and work on campuses. As those practices changed, trust in higher education was further eroded and the cycle began anew. With one vehicle driven by a political coalition eager for conflict and the other helmed by campus officials facing short-term crises that distracted from long-term problems, the political Right and higher education remained on a collision course throughout the 2010s. In the aftermath of this collision, public higher education was wrecked—still in operation but less able to fulfill its mission or survive another crash.

Partisanship and Higher Education Politics

Although some scholars and many campus leaders might prefer the sector to remain above the fray, higher education’s close linkages to the state make it intrinsically political.²⁹ To be clear, colleges and universities are only rarely partisan. Indeed, in my view they should not be partisan, because no party can be trusted to consistently defend the sector, though I acknowledge that much compelling scholarship contests that position.³⁰ Regardless of how partisan they are, colleges and universities are clearly political because they help determine the distribution of power and opportunity in society. Higher education allocates scarce seats, credentials graduates, and legitimates knowledge.³¹ These are intrinsically political decisions because they are ways of translating social values into action by quasi-government actors.

Accordingly, when political parties vie for control of state governments, one of the things they seek to influence is higher education.³² Political parties tend to support different levels of funding³³ and oversight³⁴ for public higher education. In the early twenty-first century, voices from the Right became steadily more skeptical of the value of higher education itself. These actors sought not so much to reform the sector as to tear it down. Their critique reflected two durable features of the U.S. Right: white rage about steps toward equity and concerns about public expenditures from the economic elite.

The Republican Party is the primary collective actor that organizes these social trends into policy. The GOP has united angry white voters and moneyed interests at least since the 1960s.³⁵ This does not mean that individual Republicans are bad people. I do not analyze individuals or their motives in this volume, and for this reason I do not rely on concepts such as white fragility that draw on psychological explanations.³⁶ Rather, I am making a statement about a political coalition, the organizations that constitute it, and the likely consequences of the social forces that enervate these groups. My argument is about collective actors and social conditions, not about individuals.

While the Republican Party is the primary vehicle for a policy agenda of deinstitutionalization, it does not act alone. The party is surrounded by a variety of lobbying, advocacy, and other groups that also shape policy. These bodies channel funding, distribute example legislation, and advocate for particular policy interventions.³⁷ Working together, the Republican Party and allied organizations provided the organizational capacity to translate white rage and plutocratic politics into a policy agenda for public higher education.

To be clear, the Democratic Party accommodates resentful white voters³⁸ and plutocratic interests³⁹ too. Many of its members are skeptical of race-based affirmative action or other policies that proactively address racial injustice.⁴⁰ For this reason, as the political scientist LaFleur Stephens-Dougan has argued, many Democratic and independent candidates for public office engage in racial distancing, meaning the use of political rhetoric that links people who hold racially minoritized identities to criminal behavior and dependence on government programs, or even erases racial representation and critiques of racism altogether.⁴¹ For these reasons, I do not think that the Democratic Party offers the solution to higher education’s ills.

If the Democrats are prone to problems similar to those I review in this volume, why focus on the GOP? The answer has to do with the extent to which these two broad social forces shape the two parties. Democrats are a large, raucous coalition that is difficult to hold together. Republicans, by contrast, are highly unified.⁴² This unity is social, meaning that it is rooted in identities rather than ideologies.⁴³ By the early twenty-first century, the GOP’s members were overwhelmingly white and were almost uniformly skeptical of the existence of structural racism.⁴⁴ This articulation of white grievance marshaled enough votes to support an otherwise unpopular economic agenda that advanced the interests of the economic elite.⁴⁵ While both major parties are complicit in racism and economic inequality, then, the contours of that complicity vary. Only the GOP has become more reliant on white voters and moved to the right on economic policy—a state of affairs with dire implications for a higher education system that is beginning to confront its history of racism and continues to depend on public funding.

White Rage and Higher Education Politics

The politics of race are central to public life in the United States.⁴⁶ As one of the country’s central social institutions, higher education is unsurprisingly and deeply involved in racist practices and the perpetuation of racial injustice.⁴⁷ As the historian Stefan Bradley wrote of Ivy League universities, These elite colleges and universities boasted an egalitarian spirit in their missions but struggled with the manifestation of that freedom.⁴⁸ What was true of this handful of elite universities has been true of most of higher education. It is normative for campus officials to proclaim their commitment to racial justice.⁴⁹ Yet the higher education scholars Shaun Harper and Isaiah Simmons found that almost all PWIs dramatically underrepresented Black students and, especially, Black scholars on their faculties.⁵⁰ Practically all PWIs graduate Black students at lower rates than they graduate white students, a phenomenon documented by the policy analysts Andrew Howard Nichols and Denzel Evans-Bell.⁵¹ U.S. colleges and universities also serve Latinx students poorly, providing far fewer degrees and certificates to Latinx students than to the population as a whole.⁵² If U.S. higher education has made important steps toward more just educational practices, it still has a long way to go.

Critical social scientists use the term whiteness to refer to a central concept that undergirds racism in the United States. Whiteness, in this context, does not refer directly to skin color but to the normalization and prioritization of white people and their experiences.⁵³ In this way, whiteness is about making social arrangements—power, oppression, and advantage—invisible. By extension, resistance to this seemingly natural order of things is cast as deviant rather than just. A critique of whiteness can seem akin to a critique of gravity or any other natural state of affairs. This naturalness produces a phenomenon called white immunity which allows white people to deny the salience of race and the existence of racism on college and university campuses. White men seemed to feel no responsibility for racism and resented being confronted with evidence of its pernicious and persistent effects.⁵⁴ These dynamics often produced a sense of victimization among white men on campus.⁵⁵ Indeed, even overt white supremacists often appropriate the language of the civil rights movement to describe what they perceive as wrongs done to them.⁵⁶ This paradox creates conditions for rage when white people are treated as equal citizens rather than as privileged persons.⁵⁷

It is difficult to overstate the role of whiteness, in the sense of concept rather than physiology, in the contemporary Republican Party. In his history of the late twentieth-century Right, the political scientist Joseph Lowndes implicitly invokes this sense of white victimhood by arguing that the Republican Party understood itself as a people under attack by an invasive federal government, threatened by crime and social disorder, discriminated against by affirmative action, and compromised by moral and cultural degradation. The specter that threatened the Right was an unholy alliance of liberal elites, people of color, the urban poor, and others claiming ‘special rights.’ ⁵⁸ By practicing something like white immunity—ignoring the power structures that favored them and focusing on their sense of grievance over a changing society—the contemporary Right has cast itself as a victim even as it has amassed electoral victories in states across the country.⁵⁹

This sense of victimization makes anger—rage at a world that they believe has treated them unfairly—a defining characteristic of the Right’s politics.⁶⁰ I use the concept white rage to understand this anger. According to the historian Carol Anderson, white rage is anger channeled through legitimate social institutions and triggered when social changes threaten established racial power relations.⁶¹ Almost any advances made by Black Americans threaten the racial power structure, as demonstrated by the social psychologist Clara Wilkins and her colleagues.⁶² White rage therefore has become a ubiquitous part of public life. A sense of racial threat animates higher education policy making, as demonstrated by the higher education scholar Dominique Baker.⁶³ The pull of this anger has proved sufficient to overwhelm other forms of political identification. Indeed, racially resentful white voters tended to vote for Republican candidates in 2016 even if the voters considered themselves to be liberals.⁶⁴

Terms such as rage and anger could be seen as indications of an individual’s state of mind. As mentioned previously, however, this is not my intention. I do not claim that most white people are angry, hateful, or immoral. Indeed, exploring the motivations of individuals is not my goal. Rather, I understand white rage as the result of social structures and practices. These conditions have privileged one group of people for so long that members of that group rarely imagine not getting their way, and so erupt angrily when their positions are called to account.⁶⁵ It is these patterns and power relations, not individual morality, that I indicate by the term white rage.

Because the American state has generally served to uphold whiteness,⁶⁶ white rage often has been routed through the legitimate channels of the state. From Reconstruction through the backlash to the civil rights movement, white Americans marshaled the resources of social institutions—including political parties, nonprofit organizations, journalism, and education—to defend white supremacy and to rationalize those privileges as the natural order of things.⁶⁷ White rage, then, seems less like the violence and grievance of one racial group than as a normal part of public life—legitimate, if not patriotic, in the phrase of the political scientist Davin L. Phoenix.⁶⁸ For this reason, to find instances of white rage, it is crucial to look in legitimate social spaces such as the operations of the state, the behavior of public actors, and the actions of nonprofit organizations.

Higher education policy is just such a space. Governments regulate and fund higher education. A variety of nonprofit organizations are involved as well. It is an institution at the center of society. As education has become ever more central to U.S. democracy, the denial of education to Black students has been a particularly egregious manifestation of white rage. In Carol Anderson’s terms, education reshapes the health outcomes of a people; it breaks the cycle of poverty; it improves housing conditions; it raises the standard of living. Perhaps, most meaningfully, educational attainment increases voter participation. In short, education strengthens a democracy. Throughout the twentieth century, white-dominated governments behaved as if sensing this threat that expanded educational opportunity posed to white rule.⁶⁹ The connection between white identity and affinity for the political Right has only strengthened in the twenty-first century.⁷⁰ It is therefore likely that white rage will be apparent in the Right’s politics of higher education.

Manifestations of white rage have changed over time because the politics of race and the policies that support racism change over time.⁷¹ One crucial change is that, over the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the United States became much more racially diverse. There is, of course, no such thing as a racially diverse person. However, groups of people can become more or less racially homogenous over time. In the case of both U.S. higher education and the society of which it is a part, racial diversity—in the descriptive sense of a shrinking white majority and a growing number of racially minoritized groups—increased notably over time.

In particular, the share of the U.S. population identified as Latinx skyrocketed. Diversity within the Latinx community has also soared.⁷² The history of Latinx as a racialized category is complicated, as are the histories of all racialized groups.⁷³ The historian and Latinx studies scholar Natalia Molina chronicled the ways in which Mexican Americans, though formally considered white in the 1920s, came to be considered a distinct race by the 1960s.⁷⁴ This change reflected both daily cultural practices such as bigoted stereotypes and broad social factors including a series of immigration reforms and practical segregation of schools, neighborhoods, and workplaces. These dynamic social processes produced inconsistencies in bureaucratic definitions of Hispanic, Latino, and other categories.⁷⁵ Even allowing for these definitional complexities, U.S. Census Bureau projections indicated continued growth in the share of the U.S. population identified as Latinx into the middle of the twenty-first century. The share of the population identifying with two or more races also was expected to rise, as was the share of immigrants. By contrast, the U.S.-born white population was expected to decline both in absolute numbers and as a share of the total population.⁷⁶

Advances by Latinx people seemed to trigger something similar to white rage. The social scientist Daniel Martinez HoSang found that, even as California became more leftist in its overall politics, the state’s voters enacted ballot initiatives that denied public services to Latinx immigrants.⁷⁷ In other cases, white rage was directed at Black and Latinx people simultaneously. Simone Browne demonstrated that the rise of the surveillance society—one organized by quantification of people into discrete units that were monitored, transmitted, and reassembled—is rooted in long-standing surveillance of Black people.⁷⁸ Often, as the geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore has highlighted, this racialized surveillance has resulted in massive and rapidly expanding prison systems that disproportionately incarcerated Black people.⁷⁹ Influenced by eugenics and other racial pseudosciences, mass-scale corrections also encompassed Latinx people, as chronicled by Miroslava Chávez-García.⁸⁰ While Carol Anderson’s history of white rage emphasizes the phenomenon’s roots in anti-Blackness, Latinx people, especially immigrants, also elicit anger.

I do not use