(Re)Teaching Trayvon Martin: Critical Pedagogy for Racial Justice and Human Freedom

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

The proposed symposium discusses the historical, social, and cultural context surrounding the murder of African American teenager, Trayvon Martin. Each panelist examines the role that race/racism played in shaping education, media, and legal discourse surrounding the teenager’s murder as well as the eventual acquittal of his adult assailant and murderer. Authors explore how the white corporate patriarchal media elite, coupled with the middle class dominated educational and legal systems interact as interlocking systems of oppression that form a matrix of domination over the Black body. Together, panelists imagine how critical education, grounded in youth's raced, classed, and gendered realities, might teach how to expose, resist, and transform racial violence in schools and society in general.

Sub Unit

• SIG-Paulo Freire, Critical Pedagogy, and Emancipation

Chair

• David O. Stovall, University of Illinois at Chicago

Papers

• What If We All Wore Hoodies? Teacher Silencing of Black Male Voices - Christopher B. Knaus, University of Washington - Tacoma

• Criminalization of Black Boys: Education, Legal, and Media Gangsterism - Bettina L. Love, University of Georgia

• Silencing Race: Racial Identity Politics, Racism, and White Hegemony - Pierre W. Orelus, New Mexico State University

• America’s Most Wanted: Africans in Postracial America - Kamau Rashid, National Louis University

• Walking While Black: The Overt Criminalization of the Black Body—A Case for Intersectional Pedagogies - Venus E. Evans-Winters, Illinois State University; Jennifer R. Esposito, Georgia State University

Discussant

• Geneva Gay, University of Washington