Losing an Arm: Schooling as a Site of Black Suffering

• In Event: 61.039 - Researching School Segregation: Critical Race Theory, Qualitative Methodologies, and the Question of Making a Difference

Abstract

Objective and Data Sources
Drawing on data from an historical-ethnographic study of the cultural politics of school desegregation in Seattle, WA (USA), the author explores suffering as a recurring theme in the narratives of four black leaders, educators and activists involved in the struggle for black educational opportunity in that city during the post-Civil Rights Era. As these black subjects reflect on the historical trajectory of racial desegregation policies and practices, they offer us a unique view of the confluence of racial melancholia, a heavy, deeply-felt awareness of the history and persistence of racial disregard and subjugation, and school malaise, a form of what Pierre Bourdieu (1999) has called la petite misère, or ordinary suffering.

Theoretical Framework
Bourdieu is interested in schooling as a site of la petite misère in which poor and working-class students suffer a kind of malaise resulting from a growing consciousness that what they are promised as educational opportunity is unlikely to lead to greater social or educational mobility. For the participants in this study, desegregation and subsequent racial equity policies have become sites of a specific form of school malaise, in which the possibility of educational access and opportunity seems increasingly (and even intentionally) elusive, even as the hegemonic and seemingly undeniable “common sense” is that schooling is the sure pathway to improved life chances, not only for individual black subjects, but for the black collective (the “race”) as a whole. This suffering in schools converges with, and is exacerbated by a persistent racial melancholia, which can be understood as a rational response of people of color to the conflicts created by assimilation, racialization and various forms of dehumanization, a healthy means of mourning racial misrecognition and disregard (Eng & Han, 2000; Tillet, 2012).

Results & Scholarly Significance
The author’s analysis of these narratives highlights how these school and community leaders reflect on the meaning of black suffering in schools, what they understand as the source of that suffering, and how they imagine that suffering might be alleviated. The author concludes that there is no way to research school desegregation without taking into account how black children, families, educators, and activists suffered as a result of these policies. In fact, our work needs to be imbued with an epistemology of mourning: How do subjects understand their own loss? In what ways might they still be grasping to articulate it? How do we as researchers know this loss in our bodies and express it in our words? Following from this, it becomes important for us to create research designs that allow space for participants to reflect on and reveal their own suffering, in ways that are safe, and in ways that allow them to remain the protagonists of their own narratives, survivors rather than damaged victims (Tuck, 2009).

Author

• Michael J. Dumas, University of California - Berkeley