Undermining Indigenous Self-Determination and Land Access in Highland Peru

While current neoliberal privatisation laws provide for protections to indigenous lands, no formal or informal mechanisms exist for natives to actually enjoy such safeguards

Investigating the Epistemology of Ignorance

In exploring the relationship between Neoliberalism and race in higher education, I use literature such as Charles Mill’s “Epistemology of Ignorance,” particularly the component of historical amnesia, as well as T. Elon Dancy II and his co-authors ``Historically white Universities and Plantation Politics: Anti-Blackness and Higher Education in the Black Lives Matter Era” to show the continuing legacy of Black folks’ objectification of American higher education. In this research project, I argue that white students engage in the epistemology of ignorance to avoid their responsibility to social justice with phrases like “I’m not the person to talk about this” or “I have to pick my battles.” Anti-racism for racial/ ethnic equity is then thrust upon the BIPOC community, whose activism is a fight for survival. I use data from my sociology research lab in which a group of six students has been split into two groups of three, conducting interviews with current undergraduate students at BSU. In these interviews, we ask students about their motivation to attend an institution like Boise State, their race and class influence in their academic pursuits, and their interactions with and experiences of diversity on the Boise State University campus and within the curriculum offered by the institution. Some of our preliminary findings indicate a profoundly entrenched and internalized ideology of colorblindness, which tracks well with the literature on mechanisms of racism in the “post-racial” American society. As a solution, drawing from Dancy et al.’s theory of the “New Plantation,” I argue for a Black-centered curriculum to allow students like myself to finally be able to learn and not teach or have to be a show for the University’s performativity attempts of diversity rhetorics

Broker Fixed: The Racialized Social Structure and the Subjugation of Indigenous Populations in the Andes

Responding to calls to return racial analysis to indigenous Latin America, this article moves beyond the prejudicial attitudes of dominant groups to specify how native subordination gets perpetuated as a normal outcome of the organization of society. I argue that a naturalized system of indirect rule racially subordinates native populations through creating the position of mestizo “authoritarian intermediary.” Natives must depend on these cultural brokers for their personhood, while maintaining this privileged position requires facilitating indigenous exploitation. Institutional structures combine with cultural practices to generate a vicious cycle in which increased village intermediary success increases native marginalization. This racialized social structure explains my ethnographic findings that indigenous villagers continued to support the same coterie of mestizos despite their regular and sometimes extreme acts of peculation. My findings about the primacy of race suggest new directions for research into indigenous studies, ethnic mobilizations, and the global dimensions of racial domination

Racial Spoils from Native Soils: How Neoliberalism Steals Indigenous Lands in Highland Peru

Racial Spoils from Native Soils: How Neoliberalism Steals Indigenous Lands in Highland Peru explains how one man swindled his Andean village twice. The first time he extorted everyone\u27s wealth and disappeared, leaving the village in shambles. The village slowly recovered through the unlikely means of converting to Evangelical religions, and therein reestablishing trust and the ability to work together. The new religion also kept villagers from exacting violent revenge when this man returned six years later. While hated and mistrusted, this same man again succeeded in cheating the villagers. Only this time it was for their lands, the core resource on which they depended for their existence. This is not a story about hapless isolation or cruel individuals. Rather, this is a story about racism, about the normal operation of society that continuously results in indigenous peoples\u27 impoverishment and dependency. This book explains how the institutions created for the purpose of exploiting Indians during colonialism have been continuously revitalized over the centuries despite innovative indigenous resistance and epochal changes, such as the end of the colonial era itself. The ethnographic case of the Andean village first shows how this institutional setup works through, rather than despite, the inflow of development monies. It then details how the turn to advanced capitalism—neoliberalism—intensifies this racialized system, thereby enabling the seizure of native lands.https://scholarworks.boisestate.edu/fac_books/1436/thumbnail.jp

Selling Diversity, Promoting Racism: How Universities Pushing a Consumerist Form of Diversity Empowers Oppression

How does racism persist and even worsen on college campuses amidst pro-diversity university efforts? From interviewing college students and interrogating university materials, this article argues that public universities’ heightened revenue-generating functions inspire them to sell diversity as an attractive quality, divorced from its association with race and social justice. Because diversity has become a strong discourse, its uncritical university marketing turns it into a commodity at the cutting-edge of cultural capitalism: a consumerist diversity. White students eagerly embrace this university-sponsored version, seeing it everywhere and in everyone. This is a highly individualistic, disposable, and inherently positive diversity that enables students an easy authentic experience of celebrating humanity. Issues of inequality clash against this feel-good understanding, enabling diversity loving white students to regard calls for racial justice as unjust anti-humanist racial attacks. Diversity efforts by the profit-minded university therein empower white students’ colorblind and even color conscious racism

First the Revolutionary Culture Innovations in Empowered Citizenship from Evangelical Highland Peru

The long-standing marginalization of highland Peru, coupled with the terrible violence of the 1980s and 1990s civil war, make it a difficult place for political mobilization. Nevertheless, one village successfully asserted its self-determination in the face of an exploitative political economy through conversion to Evangelical Christianity. A revolutionary cultural break from the mainstream created a vibrant local subculture that stressed brotherhood and provided meaning to adherents, allowing them to seize local opportunities to assert a more egalitarian social reality. While specific to this village’s conditions, these experiences speak to broader possibilities for innovative social change through novel combinations of cultural practices and political concerns

Essentializing Authoritarianism: Implementing Neoliberalism in Highland Peru

In order to help understand how neoliberalism generates new forms of localized governing and social control, this article investigates the major differences between the Peruvian government\u27s 1995 Land Law legislation, and how the state actually implemented the new policy. The article argues that, contrary to the letter of the Law, the shape of the institutions set up to implement it uniquely served the interests of local elites and made them the proxies of the neoliberal state. Moreover, by incorporating rural villages in an essentialized way, the Law enables and pushes these new state agents to govern in a more overtly coercive and authoritarian manner

Tripartheid: How Global White Supremacy Triumphs Through Neoliberalism

The means of the extravagant rentier diminish daily in inverse proportion to the growing possibilities and temptations of pleasure. He must, therefore, either consume his capital himself, and in so doing bring about his own ruin, or become an industrial capitalist. —Karl Marx, Economic & Philosophic Manuscripts The seeds of the fiasco of an election in November 2016 in the United States, where the less affluent of European descent, including more than half of the women of this group, found their tribune in a vulgar billionaire, has roots in the cross-class coalition that spearheaded colonial settlement in the seventeenth century at the expense of the indigenous and enslaved Africans. —Gerald Horne, The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, and Capitalism in Seventeenth-Century North America and the Caribbean For the past fifty years, the neoliberal reassertion of elite power has triumphed around the world. A new aristocracy concentrates “masters of the universe” wealth and power, even amidst weak economic growth. Upwards of half of the world’s population, meanwhile, has “dropped out of history . . . written off as hopeless or terminal cases.” And the once stable middle class faces fearsome insecurity and downward mobility. Students of these globe-changing processes emphasize structural factors, a point corroborated by neoliberalism’s own prescriptions and structural adjustment programs (SAPs). David Harvey, for instance, describes neoliberalism as a “political project . . . to restore the power of economic elites.” Neoliberalism restructures social institutions to funnel wealth from the poor to the rich, justified as supply-side economics

State of Discord: The Historic Reproduction of Racism in Highland Peru

This article adds to a small but growing call to return racial analyses to the investigation of indigenous Latin America. Applying critical race theory to the broad sweep of Peruvian history, I find that, rather than a holdover from the past, dominant groups have regularly revitalized the system of racialized rule, providing it with new resources to adapt it to changing circumstances and the diverse challenges pushed by native peoples. In particular, while colonization established an overt system of indirect rule to maximize wealth extraction from natives, and subsequent governments adapted rather than abandoned this form of governance that secures racial domination through fragmenting natives ethnically. This rereading of Peruvian history better enables an identification of both the structural and daily ways through which racism is reproduced. I conclude with suggestions for future research that will help flesh out the general framework I provide here

The Racializations of Debt: Rationalizing Tuition in Neoliberal Higher Education

The precarious economy, marked by decades of neoliberal policies, poses students as risk-entrepreneurs willing to bet it all for higher education on the promise of upward mobility (Mahmud 2012); an unfounded expectation resulting in adapted vocational instrumental mindsets to cope with having to enter an unstable labor market (Tomlinson 2018). This results in voluntarily being dispossessed into being disposable through displacement and disciplined through debt. Though this career-objective mindset through higher education offers a chance to challenge precarity, the introduction of increasingly high tuition complicates this seemingly simple pathway associated with merit. This coupled with the perceived sense that white privilege is fleeting, exemplified through the cultural shift from whiteness as status to whiteness as norm (Olson 2008). Historically nonwhites have been subjected to precarity as oppression (Dawson 2024) which acts differently to how non elite whites are receiving economic instability demonstrating a need for racial analysis in this class issue. This all informs my question of how does the racialized perspective of students on the financialization of their institution, such as coping with tuition, affect their participation in neoliberal higher education