Back to the Woodshop: Black Education, Imperial Pedagogy, and Post-Racial Mythology under the Reign of Obama

Abstract

For centuries, European thinkers, and their contemporary white followers, have run rampant in the halls of academia prematurely championing the success of liberalism to speak to the experience of those historical groups of people excluded from modernity, while simultaneously celebrating the universal embrace by the supple bosom of whites’ anthropologically specific ideas of reason and humanity. This philosophical impetus has solidified the political regime of integration as not only the most desirable but also the most realizable condition of Black (co)existence in America. The education of Black Americans has been collapsed into a single ideological goal, namely, how to mold these Blacks into more functional and productive members of American society under the idea of equality established by Brown v. Board of Education. Unfortunately, however, such a commitment elevates the ethical appeals made by Brown, which focused on higher ideals of reason and humanity found in liberal political thought and the eventual transcendence of racial identity, to moral code. This ideology, instead of attending to what Blacks should learn or the knowledge Blacks need to have in order to thrive as Blacks in America, forces Blacks to abide by the social motives that aim to create good Negro citizens. When responding to the great debate over Negro education and Negro labor in the United States, Du Bois remarked: My thoughts, the thoughts of Washington, Trotter, Oswald Garrison Villard were the expression of social forces more than of our own minds. These forces or ideologies embraced more than reasoned acts. They included physical, biological and psychological habits, conventions and enactments. Opposed to these came natural reaction; the physical recoil of the victims, the unconscious and irrational urges, as well as reasoned complaints and acts. The total result was the history of our day. That history may be epitomize in one word—Empire; the domination of white Europe over [B]lack Africa and yellow Asia, through political power built on the economic control of labor, income and idea. The echo of this industrial imperialism in America was the expulsion of [B]lack men from American democracy, their subjection to caste control and wage slavery. (W. E. B. Du Bois— A Soliloquy on Viewing My Life from the Last Decade of its First Century: The Autobiography of W.E.B. DuBois—1968)

Impacting Resilience of Black Students Through Critically Conscious Institutional Leadership and Policy

“…The idea of awareness of anti-blackness stands in direct contrast (and response to) the postracialism that drives much of the diversity initiative and multicultural nature of education. Theorized as a de-contextualization of racism, postracialism separated the concept of racism from societal organization and leaves it within the realm of thinking (Curry, 2015). It is the desire to remove racism from true consideration that supports much of the colorblind ideology that exists within our educational institutions.…”

Every Student Succeeds (Except for Black Males) Act

“…Unfortunately, however, Black male student outcomes may have been juxtaposed, interpreted, and filtered through White supremacist lenses on the national, state, district, and school levels, which ultimately has impacted what has happened on the classroom and student levels. Further, neoliberal logics also may mar these well-intended policies and strategies, and render them ineffective to the communities and people they are intended to support (Baldridge, 2016;Curry, 2015).…”

A Third University is Possible? A Collaborative Inquiry within Engineering Education

“…But we want to focus in this paper on the specific caveat perhaps most pertinent to those aspiring to confront the EER establishment, ie., ourselves: that is, the awareness that critique is not equivalent to change. Curry [7] makes clear that critique can in fact foreclose action, by preserving the institutions (and intellectual traditions) that reward the critical project; this project of critique, and the career-building it facilities, we think, are precisely the seconduniversity's manifestations of engineering education research. When I imagine that as a doubter I somehow stand outside the second university, outside of the STEM establishment in its educational and workforce expressions, I mistake the nature of my life circumstances, my day-to-day security.…”

“…There are few "outsides" for the tenured academic, and in particular, wherever I, the cis-gendered, abled, white, U.S.-born tenured academic go, I am inside. As Curry demonstrates, for Black persons there is only incongruity [7]; ie, there is no "inside" in U.S. society and its institutions. We need to be careful about the claims of solidarity we offer to marginalized communities, and any promises to make something different.…”

“…Grande [5] theorizes the academy as "an arm of the settler state" (p. 48, emphasis in original) in order to make space for collaborations and collusions between abolitionist and decolonial theorizations of the academy stemming from Black radicalism and critical Indigenous studies geared toward a refusal of the university. Harney and Moten [6] discuss professionalism, the reproduction of professions, as the critical approach of the university, positioning the work of the critical academic as a site of professional negligence around the structures they/we uphold through critique; this is perhaps one form of the self-consoling integrationism of a neoliberal polity that Curry points to [7].…”