If I hadn’t taken multiple classes in the Africana studies department, I would have never read Black theorists in graduate school. In some ways, it was worse than my undergraduate education in that regard. In my undergraduate years, I had learned from professors like Kennell Jackson, Horace Porter, and Sylvia Wynter to question the intellectual origins of everything I was assigned, that the destruction of Black life was within those scripts. This means I didn’t read for awe or disciplinary coverage but to understand, like Chiekh Hamidou Kane’s book, Ambiguous Adventure, how they conquer without being in the right. I was expected to read and study deeply (on my own) the Black folx publishing at the exact same time as my assigned white authors alongside the political economies impacting Black life. Granted, my mentors didn’t necessarily tell me to give it a gangsta lean, but sometimes it’s just in you, not on you. I am still striving to meet my undergraduate professors’ standards and expectations, especially since they also modeled prolific writing, publishing, and researching. Because of them, I was a whole different kind of reader and writer by the time I got to graduate school.
For many of my graduate term papers, I often unleashed this title: “Blowin Up Spots: Why XXX Can’t Ever Really XXX.” I wrote a version of this in so many of my non-Africana graduate classes and never seemed to get tired. Those were fun times, way back when I was “the young and the restless” so I still had them good knees and that pitbull-typa strength on folx neck. I would happily unleash a drive-by-shooting on every assigned author in a graduate course and trace the intellectual origins of their anti-Blackness. If you gon make me read this, then Ima REAAAD it! Many of my professors would often try to refute what I would say and I would just go harder with 5-10 MORE books and essays of preeminent Black scholars who disagreed. And why should I care if they didn’t like me? The feeling was mutual and, frankly, I don’t even remember their names now. You can’t be so psychologically overdetermined by imposter syndrome and coon-itis that you no longer recognize anti-Blackness and sub-intelligence. One professor was particularly stupid-brave, writing on one of my papers that “as a white man, he wasn’t interested in my ideas about counterhegemonic curricular design.” I couldn’t tell what was dumber: him thinking that or him putting that in writing. I called him Mickey D (yes, like the restaurant, McDonald’s) because I thought his intellect squared up with the corporate clown and all that overprocessed, unhealthiness. I stepped up to the plate: I copied negative reviews of his weak book, annotated his syllabus’s multiple errors, and took his handwritten comments with me to my meeting with the dean and my advisor. I was just two months into my first semester, but I figured I may as well set it off right. Perhaps surprisingly (to some), the administration was very supportive and validated my concerns about this faculty member, even at a PWI. Mickey D’s class was never required again. If someone’s syllabus was race-evasive and Eurocentric, I dropped the class and if the class was required, I worked with my advisor to bypass it on my transcript. My advisor was either tired of my mouth (or, more likely, amused), because he always accommodated my requests. I can’t stop the university from offering racist and/or outdated classes, but the university certainly can’t require them. My peers never spoke up, but that too is often typical. If it involves other BIPOC faculty and administrators, you can expect a level of public criticism. Racist white actors, on the other hand, often get a full pass, since going up against them would require more courage and risk.
Mickey D’s research was all about Brown and Black children in NYC schools, so it was only ethical that I get him good and told. In fact, that’s my birthright, paid for many times over by my ancestors– like all descendants of enslaved Africans! I wish I could pull him outta retirement (or grave, soon enough down the line) and dogg him out more. His anti-Blackness was typical of so many faculty though: racialized expectations of comportment, forced agreement no matter the inaccuracy or non-logic, continual downplaying of or silence around obvious racism, attempted management/overtalking of BIPOC dissent, lavish over-praise and welcomed participation for racist white actors, no accountability for present or past wrongs, no real analysis of the foundations of racial inequality baked into the program, no interventions in Black and Brown students’ experiences (while parading out the racially ambiguous/white-passing), and endless pursuits at control of BIPOC/queer folx. None of that is surprising, but it is perplexing when university professors try this mess so regularly. Like, ma’am, we are full grown— do you not know you will get your full, grown ass whupped out here?
One of Mickey D’s favorites who loved his Culture-of-White-Comportment was a student with a few more years in the program than we first-years. She was a simple, foolish girl, so I called her Strawberry Shortcake (which was as much of a compliment as I could muster). She would offend and correct us in class and was always super-eager to follow a white male figure. She never did the reading (or if she did, she wasn’t bright enough to understand it), so she never got as far with her corrections as she did with her offensive comments. Despite her obvious deficiencies, she was treated better than most BIPOC students who were light years ahead of her. Now 25 years later, she still hasn’t finished her incomplete grades or her degree. Hey Strawberry Shortcake (I don’t remember your real name, but you know who you are): if you seein this, holla at me so I can re-heat this old beef with you. Never respected you, never will. Maybe start doing some reading this time though!
It wasn’t enough for faculty to include a race chapter or a few BIPOC scholars here and there in their courses; these professors needed to unthink their whole disposition and logic. After all, I couldn’t very well apply Mickey D’s thinking to Black life and arrive at anything other than more routine racism. Some of those same intellectually and politically compromised scholars I wiped my behind with more than 20 years ago are still assigned to graduate students in my discipline. Political irrelevance and white reading lists remain intact. Like, are yall even reading? Just out here Strawberry Shortcaking? Do yall just quote the BIPOC authors you see someone else reference? Or do yall just follow GenAI’s equally white suggestions and word combinations? If you don’t actually implement and materialize the BIPOC thought you claim to study, then you didn’t really read it. As it ends up, the reading methodology my undergraduate mentors taught me still works very well; it rises right back up and shapes how I hear every department meeting, every “cohort meeting,” and every professional space.
Needless to say, I was intimidated when I first started teaching graduate classes 16+ years ago. How would I ever live up to my mentors? This semester I designed a graduate course called FREEDOM SCHOOLS: THE RHETORICS AND HISTORIES OF BLACK EDUCATION. It’s still an awesome responsibility, but I have my own approach. The one thing I always avoid, especially today, is the inclusion of BIPOC theorists without any knowledge and understanding of their deep, intellectual genealogies. As my own undergraduate mentors attest, some of us didn’t just start putting BIPOC scholars on our syllabi yesterday, hoping to chase the newest and hottest theories for relevance without really knowing them. Everybody gotta start somewhere though, so I’m not knocking folx who assign authors and theories whose genealogies they don’t fully know yet. It’s one thing to not know the genealogy though; it’s another to never imagine there is a genealogy and/or situate everything in whiteness/white scholarship because that’s the only place where you locate history and humanity.
If there were ever a time and place to fiercely examine Black educational studies within the long, long tradition of this theory and protest work, that time is now! Black education in the United States is a critical praxis and protest tradition that meticulously planned and deeply imagined my intellectual and political learning from the moment our enslaved ancestors taught themselves to read in defiance of white “owners.” Unlike so many other spaces, Black education does not belong to a single discipline— it pre-exists this kind of university codification. How do you teach a radical genealogy like that? Especially when folx need it even more during nationalist, white supremacist shock and awe campaigns?
The pedagogy must be deliberate, that’s for sure. Of course, I could assign so much reading that my students feel like their heads are on a swivel each week. That kind of teaching is rooted in racial capitalism and looks like the kind of bodily burdensomeness and energy depletion of plantation life. And that’s just too redundant for Black folx.
These days I rely on many communal reading strategies where we are not all always reading the same thing, but each one is teaching one. At its best, it gives you depth and breadth via communal learning of multiple essays and books without over-exhaustion. This semester’s zine project was one such example. Each student educated the class on a specific text and created a public zine to celebrate the text. For the first time in seven years, I haven’t had blatantly, racist graduate students in my classes putting things in writing even MORE stupid-brave than Mickey D (more on this in forthcoming publications). So I have been sharing this semester’s zines and syllabus more. I didn’t share in the years before, because I don’t amplify racist harm to BIPOC from Ph.D. students’ writing– the programs that have selected and promoted them already do enough of that. White supremacy doesn’t need more support and airtime and certainly won’t get it from me. This was a different kind of semester though and I’m grateful. May the Mickey Ds and Strawberry Shortcakes never find my classrooms again since I’ve certainly had my fill of them.
As of today, the grades are in and the semester is officially over. I’ll close it all the way out by sharing this semester’s YA novels. My class also centered 31 Black Speculative Young Adult (YA) novels across two weeks. We can’t only read what Eve Tuck calls “damage-centered” research, so Black YA AfroFuturism is where I see possibility and shape/place-shifting. It gives a face, narrative, and materialism to the refusal and resistance that are our birthright. Yes, the kind of racial antagonisms against Black life described here are rampant. But that’s not all Black living and learning comprise. Imagination and creativity are also always doing their work. There are now so many fabulous Black Speculative YA books that I had to narrow the choices down by focusing only on Black Speculative YA books that intersect with schooling.
Here are the semester’s books (use the arrows at left and right to see the 31 books):
*All starred books are texts in the series not out yet or that I haven’t read yet, so, sorry, can’t tell you nuthing about those right now.
The Civil Rights Movement ushered in a “Renaissance” in Black Children’s Literature/picture books. Black Lives Matter did the same, but especially for Black YA novels this time around the bend. This is not to say that we have so many Black YA & picture books now that we don’t desperately need more, only that some cracks in the hard pavement opened up and Black YA writers had their pens already ready and came through. You can’t ban this! Black Education has always been and will always be!
In some of these books, all by Black authors, Black youth attend Black magical schools. Imagine Marvel’s X-Men School, but all Black, and in Wakanda! Oh my, the things these Black youth will do! Other times, Black youth attend white magical schools or diverse schools where racist antagonisms are rampant since not even magic can unmoor anti-Blackness. Other books celebrate Black youth and their school-friends living their dreams over summer vacation by doing things like hanging with the elders in the spirit realm. Still other books show Black magical children struggling to navigate color castes and economic hierarchies without zapping everyone to pieces (which is what I would do if you messed around and gave me some superpowers). One of my favorite books centered a little Black girl, Onyeka, who always tried to hide her thick, volume-magnified, gravity-defying hair. When Onyeka comes into her power, her hair becomes super-kinetic. Her glorious follicles even rescued her best friend from drowning—and then just looped back to her scalp like nuthin had just happened. Onyeka wears a crown indeed as do all her fellow Black brothers and sisters in these YA books… and in our classrooms!
We started this fall semester with scholars who offer formidable critiques of Brown v. Board of Education, since the course is 70 years after Brown was decided. As Gloria Ladson-Billings argues: “People in this country have grown comfortable and accustomed to living racially segregated lives. We live in segregated neighborhoods. We worship in segregated churches and mosques. We work in segregated professions. We receive unequal health care, banking and loan, and other social services. Why wouldn’t we receive segregated and inequitable schooling? Schooling is merely a symptom of our larger experience. BROWN is an ideal that America has embraced in theory but not in reality. After 30 years of writing about BROWN, I have concluded that we are content to commemorate the decision but not commit to its principles.” Now 70 years later, racial justice and equity in schooling are, at best, an empty promise and performative gesture with a nationalist campaign that tries to undo Brown every week. These extreme sports of racism aren’t new in the history of Black education though and the Mickey Ds and Strawberry Shortcakes have always been willing participants. They may act as if they are working for everyone’s good, but their anti-Blackness oozes from every utterance and decision. Black education acknowledges that this fight might be tiresome, but we have never lost. We have other legacies our ancestors have built for us.
Related posts:
When Robots Come Home to Roost: The Differing Fates of Black Language, Hyper-Standardization, and White Robotic School Writing (Yes, ChatGPT and His AI Cousins)
Not New To This/True To This: Black Language, the Internet, Southern Roots, and the Failed Entrenchments of Whiteness
The Specter of White Mob Violence and the Spectacle of Black Suffering (My Thoughts on Capitol Violence, Delivered at Texas Woman’s University)
Towards a Black Composition Studies: BLACK AS GRAVITAS (PART II)
