Archaeology as Activism, the Black Classroom, and What White Folks Can Do Next
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How we can all celebrate Black joy, and strengthen our teaching in the process...
Dear friends and fam,
Two weeks ago, I wrote about Black joy and why we need to foster it both in our lives and especially in our classrooms (regardless of who our students are).
Last week, as I descended into a crevice of nonstop writing second only to the final weeks before my dissertation was due, bell hooks' writing on the classroom reminded me of the way things used to be... for at least some Black students in a way that can only be considered idealized nostalgia. (I'll be writing about, well, writing in Post-PhD 2.0, so if you want to follow this project as it evolves, subscribe to Post-PhD 2.0) ((shameless plug)).
Before you read this quote, I want you to suspend everything you know about the history of education, the failed project of desegregation, and deficit thinking around Black communities. hooks writes that prior to desegregation, all of her teachers were Black women who were,
“committed to nurturing intellect so that we could become scholars, thinkings, and cultural workers-- black folks who used our “minds.” We learned early that our devotion to learning, to a life of the mind, was a counter-hegemonic act, a fundamental way to resist every strategy of white racist colonization… Within these segregated schools, black children who were deemed exception, gifted, were given special care. Teachers worked with and for us to ensure that we would fulfill our intellectual destiny and by so doing uplift the race. My teachers were on a mission.” (hooks, Teaching to Transgress, 2)
We tend to think of ourselves as always in progress, evolving towards a stronger, better future. Myself included. Which is why bell hooks' description of her segregated classroom versus her classroom following “desegregation” was so powerful.
In it, hooks destabilizes the notion of time as linear, instead revealing that history is comprised of a thousand intersecting lines, few of which are actually linear. As mind-boggling as it is to fuck with your notion of temporality, there is also profound potential to dig around and imagine a better future.
So what's a white educator to do with this?
This is where I see activism, and in particular educational activism, as part archaeology project. We must unearth different histories, alternative knowledges, and examine them so we can build a better future. In this sense, educational activism is less of an action one can take, and more of a way of being, one that necessitates that we educators (and scholars) humble ourselves before the task at hand and be engaged in a life-long process of un-learning and re-learning different ways to approach knowledge and its dissemination.
I read Teaching to Transgress again when I decided to toss my hat in the ring of urban high school teacher. I had a clear vision of the classroom that I wanted to create, and I also had a wealth of research on adolescent cognition, learning, and self-esteem to confirm that my classroom agenda of Black joy was not just political; it was also the best way to 'optimize' my teaching.
When I started in the fall, I had all the energy of a first-year teacher psyched to be soon getting paid a living wage (wamp wamp, the living wage thing never really happened, but that's a different story entirely). I had a blueprint for my classroom, and to help fill in those plans, I called my students in. I asked them what they hated most about their last literature class. As one student, we'll call them J here, wrote on his questionnaire, "What I hated most about ELA (English Language Arts) is when I feel like I'm paying attention and I'm not learning nothing. And I be forgetting how to spell sometimes."
same, and 2. SAME. I still can't spell gud for the life of me and I'm a writer. smh. English grammar is stupid.
And then I thought about what it meant to teach with a "missionary zeal" for Black freedom, and realized that every single one of my students had much to gain from bell hooks' retrospective look back at her segregated education for their futures. So, I taught them about all-Black schools pre and post segregation, and what had changed. A month later, I asked them to write in their journals about what they had learned about their own education. What J wrote got me thinking about my own white ass.
"I learned that back in the old days, Black kids got taught by Black women and it was better. Now, I look at my classes, and all I see are white head teachers who don't even want to know what I'm interested in or what my people have been through."
In this week's "What White People Can Do Next," Dabiri sets us straight about our conception of whiteness.
Which brings me to this week’s installment of “What White People Can Do Next”:
(for a description of this project and the first part, read the August 3, 2021 newsletter: What White People Can Do Next: Part 1)
Emma Dabiri points out what we have known all along-- that a lot of the present “antiracist” conversations tend to be ahistorical and lacking in a critical analysis of whiteness. As she says, “the more you state and claim your “whiteness” without doing any further work to unpack what that means, the more you become fixed to that articulation of self, the more you become wedded to whiteness. Some of the most racist societies have been ones with pronounced “white identities” that coexist vis-a-vis racialized others.
What Dabiri is getting at here is what J meant when he said none of his white teachers were interested in him/his Blackness. Teachers spend so much time preparing for class, planning out class to the f-ing minute, and then big-picture semester-long syllabi, it's easy to forget that in order to teach, we have to learn. And sometimes that lesson is simply asking your students to tell you about who they are, where they come from, and what gets them excited to learn.
But, in order to do that, we white educators have to shrug off our egos and look at things from a different perspective entirely.
Reparation Opportunities for the Melanin Deficient:
Unpack what James Baldwin describes as “all Europeans have a deadly temptation to feel a sense of biological superiority” means to you, on a personal level (Baldwin and Margaret Mead, A Rap on Race (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1971). Here is a great article about their conversation from brainpickings.org. And here is an audio file of their conversation from 1971, "A Rap on Race."
How did that show up in your upbringing?
How has your conception of whiteness changed in the past year?
Anything that makes you feel frustrated or angry, sit with it. Work through it. That’s where the healing begins.