In Their Own Words: Rachel Spraker

Rachel Spraker (she/they) is assistant vice president-equity and inclusive excellence at the University of Virginia, one of 15 staff members in the university’s Division for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.

Here’s how the web page describes her job (words in bold highlight rhetoric characteristic of intersectional-oppression ideology, colloquially referred to as wokeness):

Rachel develops, implements, and evaluates policies, practices, and programs which seek to advance the representational diversity, inclusive capacity, and sense of belonging of the University’s workforce and learning community. Rachel has previously served on the executive board of the American Association for Access, Equity, and Diversity and as an equity consultant for institutions of higher education.

Rachel grew up in a small town in rural Appalachia in what is now called Virginia, on the traditional territory of the Tutelo people. Rachel was a first generation student at UVA where they earned their bachelor’s degree in history and foreign affairs. Rachel holds a Master of Science in Sociology from Virginia Commonwealth University with work focused on landscapes of racial violence and is currently a doctoral student at UVA in the School of Education and Human Development.

Spraker has not published any academic articles, but her approach to diversity, equity and inclusion can be discerned by the ideological framework employed in her master’s thesis and articulated in several video recordings. Of particular interest are her thoughts about “environmental violence,” “dying of whiteness,” “white toxicity,” the “emotionality” of whiteness, and the justification of racial preferences.

Here follows the abstract from Spraker’s 2017 master’s-level sociology thesis, “What’s Haunting Jackson Ward? Race, Space and Environmental Violence.” By way of background, Jackson Ward is a historically African-American neighborhood in the City of Richmond that has been gentrified in recent years.

This research is about examining the way in which racialized environmental violence contributes to exploitative social relations becoming embedded in the everyday world. I argue that the space of the everyday has been produced through cycles of social relations proceeding from and/or tied to racialized environmental violence. I continue the work of critical scholars in asserting that social and environmental violence is linked in the same ideological impulse which seeks to hide itself behind a variety of alienating processes. The slow way in which environmental violence works is particularly impactful in these processes because of its attritional lethality, contributing to premature death. I studied these processes by examining the histories surrounding the site of a construction day labor firm in Richmond, Virginia. My methodology includes archival research on newspapers, public documents, and secondary sources establishing that the patterned co-location of social and environmental violence does not occur by chance.

In the following clip, taken from a 2021 AntiRacist Table video on Advancing Racial Equity at the University Level, Spraker cites the book, “Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment Is Killing America’s Heartland.” In that 2019 book Jonathan M. Metzl argued that racial resentment fueled policies that led to increasing deaths by gun suicide, falling life expectancies, and rising dropout rates. Spraker adopted Metzl’s narrative in speaking about where she grew up.

Pull quote: “In the place where I grew up, you could see it, where white people were dying of whiteness, too. … I had a couple of cousins, they had friends, like, the toxicity of whiteness around them, and certain things that were happening for them. … many of them were dying prematurely also … in their twenties.”

In the next clip, also from the AntiRacist Table video, Spraker used the term “emotionality.” She does not define the term, perhaps assuming that listeners understand its meaning. In searching for an explanation, we came across an article, “When White Dwarfs Burn Our Color: Whiteness, Emotionality, and the Will to Thrive in Higher Education.” As examples of “the emotionality of whiteness” in the context of discussions about race, the authors mention “resistance, deflection, and color-evasive discourse [that] can derive from feelings of shame, guilt, and discomfort.”

Pull quote: “I work at a predominantly and historically white institution … so there’s a lot of emotionality in a lot of different ways. I think one thing that’s been important for us in some of our … education work and specifically the anti-racism education work is to help people understand that our goal is really simply just to give them context and tools for reflecting on the world around them. And so specifically for white folks… it’s about … helping them focus on the distinction of whiteness as an identity and whiteness as an ideology …  and being able to make that distinction, giving them thinking tools and reflection tools to understand that difference of when you’re talking about ideology which is where a lot of it sits is that you’re really talking about those structures.”

In the following two clips, from a Towson University Office of Inclusion and Institutional Equity program in 2022, Spraker discussed remedies for past historical wrongs.

Pull quote: “There’s also some things happening that just tie to americanism in a particular way or around these sort of notions of individualism, merit, what you do about past harms? So why should I as a person who’s coming up to this decision I am innocent of these past harms why should I lose in this so-called you know this perceived zero-sum game lose out to someone who’s getting this preference for something that I didn’t even do?”

She goes on to answer the rhetorical question:

Pull quote: “It’s seen as bad that we’ve put this [racial] preference on there because it’s perceived that we have an otherwise level playing field … not recognizing that in fact maybe we don’t have a level playing field yet after multiple centuries …  of systemic distribution of benefits of the state and civil society.“