The Future of Education: Black Life and Our Classrooms A Moderated Panel Discussion

Abstract

Alejandro Reyes performed transcription and translation for this article. For more information on the LUTA Initiative, the symposium, and a full video of this panel discussion with English and Portuguese subtitles, visit https://lutainitiative.wordpress.com/ (Re)imagining Education in the Face of Anti-Black State Violence This panel started from the premise that our very notions of school and schooling have been built upon foundations of anti-Blackness used as tools for state surveillance, dispossession, and enclosure, which regularly situates schools as sites of Black suffering (Dumas, 2014; Sojoyner, 2016; Vargas, 2018). As such, schools repeatedly fail Black children and their communities despite their promises of a just, fair, and equitable system. Rather than engaging with the school as a neutral site of uncontested material and ideological politics, this panel contended with the (re)production of anti-Black violence enabled by the states' neglect of the educational needs of Black communities as well as the violence that occurs in and through schooling as a state project. The panelists explored the ways that harm is enacted upon Black children and their communities through practices such as school discipline, anti-Black curricula, school tracking, and enforcing normative concepts of learning. Beyond naming schooling as an oftenoverlooked form of state violence, this panel (re)imagines Black educational futurities and the possibilities of their manifestation by sharing proposals for educational spaces and practices that seek restoration and healing in the midst of anti-Black state violence. The panel's discourse relied on an understanding of anti-Blackness as a fundamentally transnational structure. Encouraging us to think beyond the limits of borders, the panelists highlighted the similarities in their educational experiences and desires in order to reveal the global nature of anti-Blackness as it manifests in education. The panel suggested new avenues for how we might understand both the problems and the strategies of resistance to educational structures that are governed by state and nonstate actors that undermine Black life. Namely, if we are to truly escape, refuse, or redress the violence of these structures, we will have to rely on transnational solidarity in both thought and action. Through sharing their own personal experiences in schools and their desires for a better education for Black youth and their communities, the panelists highlighted the urgency of a reconceptualization of Black education. They called attention to the need for schools to be a safe place where Black students-especially Black girls and women-are heard, seen, and empowered. Considering the ways in which societies make illegible or misrecognize Black suffering, joy, and existence, it is essential that we establish educational spaces that affirm Blackness in all its forms. The panelists re-envisioned possibilities for the relationships between teachers and students that center on care (Valenzuela, 1999). They touched on the power...