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Black studies and the racial mountain
... In other words, in today's world, humanity cannot be separated from 'racialised hegemony' (Gallon, 2016, p. 44). In effect, Manning (2000) defines black studies as 'a critical body of scholarship that sought over time to dismantle powerful racist intellectual categories and white supremacy itself'. (p.19). ...
... (p.19). Embedded in black studies is the desire to centre black voices, experiences, black struggles in the interpretation of history and social realities (Manning, 2000). ...
... (p.44). Consequently, black studies creates an avenue for garnering black people critical insights into contemporary societal issues or phenomena such as gender, sexuality, ethnicity, class, and technology (Manning, 2000). Black studies is not just a methodology that challenges perspectives, philosophies, and other approaches to interpreting the black world; it's an intellectual endeavour that produces knowledge and seeks to transform the world (Manning, 2000, Weheliye, 2014. ...
... In April 2019, Dr. Jamal Eric Watson, executive editor of Diverse: Issues in Higher Education, asked a panel of Black university scholars, "What is the role of the Black intellectual in the age of Donald Trump?" Several responded that one major role is to fight against the proliferation of negative fake news about Black people, which essentially began with the founding of this country. The hallmark of the Black intellectual tradition is to correct and challenge the stereotyping and other racists acts that are common in the ideologies and discourse of historically White institutions (Manning, 2000). The panelists discussed the historical significance of the political activism that led to the creation of the field of Black studies and spoke of their desire to connect Black intellectuals to the Black activists working on the front lines. ...
... Notes 1. But beyond such academics lies a whole world of active critical Black scholars, fondly called organic intellectuals, who were not formally trained in traditional institutions of higher education but who had a critical understanding of their world and led Black liberation efforts in their communities (e.g., Sadie Roberts-Joseph, founder of the Baton Rouge Odell S. Williams Now & Then Museum of African-American History and Community Against Drugs and Violence; activist Tamar Manasseh, founder of Mothers Against Senseless Killings; Manning, 2000). 2. Fields in which no Black students were awarded a doctoral degree in 2017 include soil sciences, agricultural sciences, planet genetics, wildlife biology, medical physics, radiological sciences, atmospheric physics, meteorology, oceanography, chemical and physical sciences, astronomy and astrophysics, plasma hightemperature physics, geometry, geometric analysis, logic, topology/foundations, number theory, robotics, and structural engineering. ...
President Trump’s education policies continue to marginalize Black STEM students at the highest levels of education. Responding to a survey on their racialized educational experiences and future career trajectories, an ethnically diverse group of Black STEM doctoral students expressed anxiety about trying to pursue a STEM career during the Trump presidency. Their responses reflected their heightened sense of urgency to be change agents for racial justice in both the STEM arena and the wider society. These survey findings demonstrate that the Trump administration has created anxiety among minoritized people about pursuing STEM careers and triggered an activist spirit in this group of future STEM PhDs. In this paper, I discuss the ways the racist ideologies, practices, and policies of the Trump administration are impairing scientific innovation and increasing activism among Black STEMers. The findings reveal a vital need to continue discussing the consequences of the Trump administration’s assault on Blacks in the STEM disciplines.
... To return to Marable's (2000) framework of Black stud ies, we ask, How do we make space for students to wrestle with antiblackness in their schools and in the broader world while also describ ing with as much beauty and truth as we can the reali ties of Black life and cul ture not reduc ible to the threat of social death and suffer ing? How do we insist that human flourishing is pos sible for Black learners while also grap pling with being always already a group whose identity is per pet u ally teth ered to a his tor y where blackness and slaveness have been so deeply intertwined? ...
In this essay, authors kihana miraya ross and Jarvis R. Givens make their case for a distinct field of education research—Black education studies, which builds on Black studies and education studies. They explore a key analytic in Black education studies, antiblackness, examining its early and more recent uses as an analytic in education research to forward a more holistic understanding of the concept. In doing so, they highlight the relationship between education as a social institution and the sustained manifestation of antiblackness. The authors conclude by considering how and why scholars might employ Black education studies to center Black life and living.
... 1). Manning Marable (2000) refers to the Black Intellectual Tradition as "the critical thought and perspectives of intellectuals of African descent and scholars of black America and Africa and the black diaspora" (pg 17). These critical thoughts and perspectives of intellectuals from the Global African Community contribute to the Black Intellectual Tradition, which is largely characterized by being descriptive, corrective, and prescriptive. ...
This article examines Black student activism in the context of the Black activist-intellectual tradition. It explores activism as a form of learning. Examining the Black Student Movement in Los Angeles from 1965 to 1975 in the context of student engagement and high impact educational practices reveals that (1) it is appropriate to analyze the Black Student Movement, and related social movements, in the context of student engagement and high impact practices highlighting the intellectual agency of Black student activists, and (2) that the Black Student Movement of the 1960s and 70 s were part of the Black activist-intellectual tradition requiring a reconceptualization of Black student activists as intellectuals. This case study draws upon autobiographies and semi-structured interviews of former Black student activists illustrating that activism is an intellectually and academically enriching activity.
... Byrd (2016) writes, "Black scholars have always produced significant scholarship and advanced their academic disciplines even as they empowered their communities." Byrd's summation is an extension of Marable's (2000) assertion that Black intellectuals' scholarship offers a prescriptive, descriptive, and corrective blueprint to engage "a practical connection between scholarship and struggle, between social analysis and social transformation . . . for the purpose of transforming their actual conditions and the totality of the society all around them" (p. ...
Gentrification impacts many cities across the nation. Affordable housing task forces and legislation meant to address housing inequities are becoming more common, yet the authentic experiences of those affected are often unacknowledged. Absent from the discussion of gentrification are the voices of those deeply impacted, some who are at the center of the work to maintain communities: Black teachers, Black students, and Black families. In many school districts, teachers do not have the opportunity to address the systemic issues that impact their students and communities. Still, it is impossible to ignore the ways societal injustice seeps into the classroom. This article discusses our work as a teacher participatory action research collective exploring the intersection of housing and educational displacement in a rapidly gentrifying community in Southwest Atlanta, Georgia. We highlight our roles as community-centered educators and detail how we intentionally and thoughtfully worked to create a reciprocal space to engage communities in Community Listening Exchanges. We present Community Listening Exchanges as a justice-centered innovation to community-engaged research and scholarship. Our critical and collaborative approach to generating and analyzing data allowed us to uncover how housing and educational displacement relies on deficit narratives to justify the removal of marginalized people. We offer CLEs as a reciprocal research tool that deviates from traditional qualitative research and resists anti-Black, damage-centered narratives.
... African Americans accelerated the production of their own historiography during World War I (Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, e.g.). In the wake of the Second World War rise of antifascism, the US civil rights movement, and international colonial independence movements, broader literatures on peoples of color, White supremacy, and colonialism emerged (Marable 2000). A market for that literature would grow, and African American studies departments accompanied the desegregation of formerly all-White institutions of higher learning, beginning in the late 1960s. ...
... Further, we argue th~H this ne\\' agentic hisrorit)graphy represents an important intellectual shift, Even more than the movement toward the social histtlfy of the late 1960s this intellectual project gives greater voice to its subjects and promises to yield a mure egalitarian and democratic re-reading of the black freedom movement. Finally, our call for furthering this line of research resonates strongly with existing views about the centrality of praxis and prescription in the broader family of African-American intellectualism (Marable 2000). We begin with a brief review of this new historiographic literature, followed by our case studies and conclude with an interpretive section oriented through the conceptual lens of agency as developed by Emirbayer and Mische. ...
In the context of contemporary attacks on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) and curricula that critically interrogate race and power, as well as the Eurocentric nature of traditional teacher education, out-of-school spaces for the critical development of teachers seeking to bring Black studies into their classrooms are necessary. Informed by the historical approaches of Black educators, the authors of this essay partnered with high school and university educators of color to engage in a collaborative process of teacher education, professional development, and curriculum design. The collaboration highlights the importance of curriculum codesign as a teaching method for developing educators’ content and pedagogical knowledge.
This field-defining volume of queer anthropology foregrounds both the brilliance of anthropological approaches to queer and trans life and the ways queer critique can reorient and transform anthropology. Consisting of fourteen original essays by both distinguished and new voices, Unsettling Queer Anthropology advances a vision of queer anthropology grounded in decolonial, abolitionist, Black feminist, transnational, postcolonial, Indigenous, and queer of color approaches. Critically assessing both anthropology’s queer innovations and its colonialist legacies, contributors highlight decades of work in queer anthropology; challenge the boundaries of anthropology’s traditional methodologies, forms, and objects of study; and forge a critical, queer of color, decolonizing queer anthropology that unsettles anthropology’s normative epistemologies. At a moment of revitalized calls to reckon with the white supremacist and settler colonial logics that continue to shape anthropology, this volume advances an anthropology accountable to the vitality of queer and trans life.
St. Clair Drake was responsible for a major shift in the way urban sociologists studied cities. While educated by Chicago school scholars in sociology and anthropology, such as Robert Park and Ernest Burgess, Drake was one of many Black doctoral students who veered from the dominant perspective of his White teachers on race. His skills in ethnographic research were indebted not only to Park and Burgess, but also to the work of Black scholars who came before him, such as W. E. B. Du Bois and E. Franklin Frazier. His unique personal approach to cities and their racial problems transitioned into a more global focus on the Black diaspora, colonialism and the history of African people, and cultures which connected him to a world of social action.
This article examines the lived experiences of Black graduate student activist David C. Turner, III. It explores his intellectual and academic development in his masters program at the University of Pennsylvania and doctoral program at UC Berkeley. It also explores Turner’s on and off campus activism, including his involvements in the Black Liberation Collective, Black Youth Project (BYP) 100, and Brothers, Sons, Selves Coalition. Highly involved Black graduate student activists that successfully balance their studies and activism make themselves increasingly prepared for the job market in general and for the professoriate in particular. This article asserts that highly engaged activism coupled with advanced education prepared Turner for a career as an Africana activist-scholar in the academy. The article reveals his preparation by connecting Turner’s lived experiences with proven effective practices. The objective of this case study is to highlight the on and off campus experiences of one 21st century Black student activist, Turner, to reveal the link between Black graduate student activism, intellectual and scholarly development, and career preparation drawing upon informal conversations and semi-structured interviews.
In this paper, we contribute to the work in progress which outlines the contours of the praxis of Black intellectual traditions by illuminating the ways in which the pedagogy of Black teachers can serve as a model useful for the preparation of preservice and inservice teachers. Researchers have documented that the successful Black educators employ practices derived from critical perspectives that serve as the conduit for their instruction and interactions in schools. Through two different studies of Black teacher pedagogy, we position the work of Black teachers as a timely pedagogical intervention into anti-Black teaching and learning structures in k-12 education and teacher education that challenge the cultivation and enactments of liberatory visions of teaching and learning for Black children.
Researchers have consistently advocated for more culturally relevant and responsive practices in gifted education to better meet the academic and social-emotional needs of Black gifted students. This chapter provides overviews of contemporary views of culturally relevant practices but also provides alternative perspectives of the elements that comprise culturally relevant experiences for Black gifted students by exploring the lives and work of early Black gifted scholars. Recommendations for designing culturally relevant and responsive learning experiences by utilizing elements of African American intellectualism along with curricular models from gifted education will be discussed and shared.
Este artigo demonstrará o potencial indisciplinar do que definiremos como escritas insubmissas da história. Isso será feito em dois momentos: inicialmente através da procura de Hortense Spillers por uma “nova gramática”, capaz de redefinir a forma estereotipada como os negros são pensados e escritos no presente; em seguida, terá como foco o conceito de “fabulação crítica”, proposto por Saidiya Hartman, que é tanto uma alternativa teórica para exceder ou negociar lacunas do arquivo da escravidão, quanto uma reflexão indisciplinar sobre o que faz o historiador. Antes, porém, explicaremos como essas escritas insubmissas da história fazem parte de uma tradição radical negra, que, desde o final do século XIX, tem se insurgido contra o disciplinamento epistêmico ocidental. Desafios teóricos, veremos, que semprem estiveram profundamente conectados com as demandas político-sociais dos protestos radicais contra a violência antinegra nos Estados Unidos. Ao término, a partir das considerações de Spillers e Hartman, este texto enseja pensar a indisciplina como um fim radical possível em um mundo antinegro.
In the United States, scholarship on antiracist teaching in teacher education abounds. Extant research irradiates how antiracist pedagogues practice antiracist teaching and how students respond. The link between antiracist pedagogues’ teaching and lived experiences, particularly with anti-Black racism, is under-scrutinized. This article theorizes antiracist teaching through the experiential knowledge of a Black male teacher educator. It sketches his theorizing of antiracist teaching, illustrating how that theorizing—which is anchored to his lived experiences with anti-Black racism—shapes his provocative pedagogic posture. Implications for antiracist teaching practice and research are discussed.
The interdisciplinary model, which facilitates student engagement with a range of guest experts, encourages the reconceptualization of imperialism in time, space, geography, and self-relation. Through place- and community-based learning, a class field trip to Democracy Now! Studios emphasizes how imperialism is historical and contemporary. The model reconceptualizes spaces of imperialism, such as our lecture by a doula to demonstrate how the territory seized by imperial entities may include our minds and bodies. Students explore imperialism as a global entity and participate in the high-impact practice of diversity/global learning. Actively unlearning by interacting with experts from a range of fields, often people of color, students are more likely to deconstruct biases and limitations that may inhibit their own aspirations.
In this autoethnography, I utilized the concepts of otherfathering, social capital, and testimonio (i.e., testimonial) to explicate the need for and value of Black male mentors in physical education teacher education (PETE). To do so, I describe how three of my mentors operated as otherfathers by imbuing me with the social capital needed to be successful in academia. I conclude by arguing for specific intersectional efforts to support Black men and Black women in PETE, along with the establishment of organizational efforts, to meet the needs of Black professionals in PETE.
This paper, based on my experiences teaching Africana Studies at a Northeastern public university, argues that anti-racist pedagogy must include a RaceSyllabus which reveals to diverse students the artificiality of race as a man-made ideology, neither biologically rooted nor divinely-inspired. Barbara Jean Fields and Karen Fields use the term racecraft to describe how race ideology persists as a subterranean, almost occult force in American institutions and minds. In my teaching I have developed a syllabus which propels students into a novel mental terrain where the racial categories we inherit and inhabit are neither inevitable or natural, but instead are created and re-created by our national economic, political, social, and cultural choices. The RaceSyllabus includes two interrelated learning objectives which, together, propel students to see outside our society’s race-tinted lenses. 1. Students should consider that racial identities in the United States are historically specific. 2. Students should consider that racial identities are geographically specific. These two insights, when taught together, are remarkably effective in exposing the artificiality of our national racial myths.
Black Nationalism represents one of the most heavily understudied ideologies within the
history of urban America. The impact of Black Nationalism has still yet to be gauged. African Americans incurred great frustrations during the 1960s because of the government's lack of responsiveness to problems such as unemployment, overcrowded housing, and police brutality. Today, these ills still exist. Black Nationalists groups have emerged responding to these conditions across the country as the 21st century begins. This project examines the significance of the legacy and tradition of the mostly urban phenomena. Freedom movements of today are all creations of Black Nationalists from the old guard and those who survived government repression during the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements. Since the historical 1995 Million Man March, these organizations have managed to command the media's attention. The effect of President Obama's election has yielded mixed results in the original goals and aspirations of Black Nationalists. Black Nationalist effect on hyper-incarceration is suggested as one of many topics for further research.
California is a state of immense contradictions. Home to immense wealth and long portrayed as a bastion of opportunity, it also has one of the largest prison populations in the United States of America and consistently ranks on the bottom of education indexes. Taking a unique, multifaceted, insider's perspective, First Strike delves into the root causes of its ever-expansive prison system and disastrous educational policy. Recentering analysis of Black masculinity beyond public rhetoric, First Strike critiques the trope of the "school-to-prison pipeline," and instead explores the realm of public school as a form of "enclosure" that has influenced the schooling (and denial of schooling) and imprisonment of Black people in California. Through a fascinating ethnography of a public school in Los Angeles County, and a "day in the life tour" of the effect of prisons upon the education of Black youth, Damien Sojoyner looks at the contestation over education in the Black community from Reconstruction to the Civil Rights and Black liberation movements of the past three decades. Policy makers, school districts and local governments have long known that there is a relationship between high incarceration rates and school failure. First Strike is thefirst book that demonstrates why that connection exists and shows how school districts, cities and states have been complicit and can reverse a disturbing and needless trend. Rather than rely upon state-sponsored ideological or policy-driven models that do nothing more than to maintain structures of hierarchal domination, it allows us to resituate our framework of understanding and begin looking for solutions in spaces that are readily available and are immersed in radically democratic social visions of the future. © 2016 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota. All rights reserved.
This article explores Black teachers’ representation of Nat Turner in textbooks published between 1890 and 1922. While conventional readings of Black teachers during Jim Crow present them to be staunch enforcers of the politics of respectability, their representations of Turner disrupt such readings and imply that the racial discourse deployed in their classrooms was more complicated than common narratives suggest. These schoolteachers represented Turner as both an insurrectionist and respectable—characteristics deemed incongruent under traditional reading of the politics of respectability. Black teachers asserted the humanity of Turner to their students and presented him as an inspiring character, even if his violent revolt created dis-ease for White society. This case captures a central dilemma in the socio-historical fabric of Black life—namely, the persistent tension between Black accomodationism and Black Nationalism. More pointedly, while little is known about what happened in the intimate settings of Black teachers’ classrooms during the Jim Crow era, these examples present an opportunity to explore some of the socio-political dimensions of their pedagogy.
This book aims to expand what scholars know and who is included in this discussion about black studies, which aids in the democratization of American higher education and the deconstruction of traditional disciplines of high education, to facilitate a sense of social justice. By challenging traditional disciplines, black studies reveals not only the political role of American universities but also the political aspects of the disciplines that constitute their core. While black studies is post-modern in its deconstruction of positivism and universalism, it does not support a radical rejection of all attempts to determine truth. Evolving from a form of black cultural nationalism, it challenges the perceived white cultural nationalist norm and has become a critical multiculturalism that is more global and less gendered. Henry argues for the inclusion of black studies beyond the curriculum of colleges and universities.
“Dr. Du Bois’s more than 70 years of struggle, the great body of his writings, speeches and diverse pronouncements, the very example of his consistently active involvement,” David Graham Du Bois wrote in the journal Black Scholar in 1978, “places him in direct confrontation with the objectives of the diabolical oligarchy that rules the United States today.” David Graham Du Bois, W. E. B. Du Bois’s stepson—whose mother Shirley Graham became Du Bois’s second spouse in 1951—felt troubled about his stepfather’s legacy as he pondered the relationship between the US ruling class and the black populations of America and Africa at the end of the 1970s. At the time of his Black Scholar essay, David Graham Du Bois resided in Cairo, and the contemporary question of apartheid in South Africa animated his critique. With this in mind, Graham Du Bois issued a six-point proposal to ensure the enactment of his stepfather’s legacy: a commitment to scientific, research-based facts; a joy in work and occupation; a wide love for all of humanity; an abiding devotion to the betterment of black people; the eradication of racialized capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism; and a purposeful support of socialism and communism. “Those of us upon whom the mantle of Du Bois has fallen … must … confront and expose the distorters of the Du Bois legacy,” Graham Du Bois concluded his essay, “That legacy must be spread among our youth and made the subject of study and emulation.
This chapter addresses the moral and intellectual responsibility of American colleges and universities in producing social scientific knowledge and in promoting social justice by focusing on and explaining the contradiction between knowledge for domination and maintaining status quo and knowledge for liberation and promoting social justice to develop the full humanity of the dominant and oppressive society and indigenous Americans. We know from history that colonial powers, such as Spain, Portugal, England, Holland, France, and the United States, terrorized, exterminated, abused, and misused indigenous Americans during the broadening of the capitalist world system and after. The homelands and economic and natural resources of indigenous Americans were expropriated and transferred to European colonial settlers and their descendants that have no interest in protecting the political, economic, civil, cultural, and social rights of these peoples that are. articulated in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Since these indigenous peoples have not been represented in academic, media, and government institutions, their voices have been muzzled and hidden, and most people are still misinformed and know nothing or little about them. The colonialists and their descendants have also committed “genocide of the mind” on the surviving indigenous Americans (Moore, 2003).”There have been many genocidal attempts... to destroy and/or misrepresent the histories, futures, languages, and traditional thoughts of Native peoples” (Moore, 2003, p. xv).
Relates Black Freedom Movements to literacy education.
