Conceptualizing Black Space in Education

• In Event: Black Schools, Black Teachers: Understanding a Legacy of Black Educators and Black Educational Practice

Abstract

Immediately following the not-guilty verdict in the case of the murder of Trayvon Martin, the African American community’s pain erupted across the country. Demands for “Justice for Trayvon” saturated the streets and petitions circulated in social media networks. African American men, women, children, activists, scholars, celebrities and even the president of the United States commented on the meaning of this verdict for the Black community. The dialogue that emerged mourned Black life as unvalued, unprotected, and resurfaced a discussion of “the problem of the colorline” (Du Bois, 1904).
For educational scholars, the Zimmerman verdict may be understood as a call to reacknowledge the racialization of the Black educational experience, and resituate the narratives of the “achievement gap” and the “discipline gap” in the context of racial domination. Following the verdict, many African Americans began to question whether Black people could ever achieve justice in a white supremacist society. As education scholars, we also ask whether there is anything we can do to achieve educational justice in the current public school system. This reframing allows for an understanding of the historical legacy of resistance in Black education and how we can support contemporary forms of resistance.
This conceptual paper situates the current Black educational “crisis” in the historical context of the incessant struggle against racial domination and understands the project of integration as a failure. While historically segregated African American schools suffered from racialized economic policies that rendered them materially inferior, the human relationships between teachers and students (Siddle Walker, 1996) and the mutual project of racial struggle (hooks, 1994), created an educational environment that supported the personal and academic growth of Black students. Although the notion of all Black educational spaces are often shunned as a step backwards or as a desire to resegregate, this paper takes the position that as policies aimed at mitigating the Black educational crisis have proved largely ineffective, our research efforts must (re)examine what has worked for Black students and heed lessons from successful Black institutions, educators and students.
The core of this paper explores “Black Space” as a form of resistance in a white supremacist society and offers a theoretical framework for conceptualizing and defining Black Space it in its historical, political, spatial and metaphysical forms. The paper examines both historical and contemporary instantiations of Black Space in the educational context, including Black educational spaces pre-integration, to understand what these spaces signify for Black students and educators beyond notions of academic success and racial uplift. Further, this paper explores shared elements of Black Spaces resurfacing in response to the Black educational crisis. Tracing the trajectory of the exclusion of the Black body from modernity (Foucault, 1979), personhood (Mills, 1997), and citizenship, this framework explores the ways Black Space functions as an actual space, as transformative resistance (Giroux, 2001) and as counter ideology, to allow Black students and educators to reimagine themselves as human – where space becomes homeland and the bond of a shared historical and contemporary experience, become citizenship.

Author

• Kihana Miraya Ross, University of California - Berkeley