Forgetting Fulbright: opposing racist public memory at the University of Arkansas

ABSTRACT In summer 2020 at the University of Arkansas, a Black-led protest movement known as #BlackatUARK challenged the presence of a statue to William J. Fulbright due to his racist voting record. Despite the Arkansas state legislature quickly passing a law that made the removal of the memorial illegal, contributors to #BlackatUARK demonstrated how to forget Fulbright by recontextualizing his memory as continuous with a broader history of anti-Blackness on campus. We argue that efforts to forget Fulbright are skillful techniques of anti-racist communication that can be understood as (1) deep ecological worldmaking, (2) wake work, and (3) dissonant history generation.