Rewriting African Epistemology/Wisdom Into Morally Engaged Collaborative Community-Based Research

• In Event: Reimagining Collaborative Research Ethics: Epistemic Authority, African Wisdom, Indigenous Knowledge Systems, and Gray Zones

Abstract

Expanding the argument advanced in the 2014 AERA Presidential Address, the authors contrasts ethical issues in the “grey zone” of collaborative community-based / participatory action (CBR/PAR) with the moral ethos of indigenous African thought / wisdom and African-centered epistemology that inform the Black intellectual tradition. For example, the Zulu (South African) philosophy/praxis of “Ubuntu” (human-ness)—“I am because we are”—and key words in the Songhoy language of West Africa (Ir-Koy / God, Bonkoyno /Chief, Koyramarga / Village) illustrate relevant ethical principles and the moral ethos of this African knowledge / being human paradigm.

By demonstrating indigenous African epistemology and wisdom that continue to inform the lives of African Americans, this paper will offer alternatives to ethical conflicts and moral contradictions in the inherent coloniality of community-based research when the exclusion and marginalization of the Black intellectual tradition /African epistemological paradigm belies its putative universality. This is so, for example, regarding John Dewey’s and Paulo Freire’s thought and practice that are recognized as foundational in community-based and (critical) participatory/ action research. In keeping with the 2016 AERA annual meeting theme, the paper will highlight lessons to be learned from certain limitations of Dewey’s contributions in the “progressive era” with regard to culture, race, and white supremacy racism, as well as the neglect of Freire’s collaboration with the African revolutionary independence movement documented in the Letters to Guinea-Bissau.

While the presence and participation of both Black and White educators and historians shaped the “progressive” era, public memory of it has been shaped by the scholarship of the dominant group––mostly White university men, albeit from different perspectives—within a singular epistemological outlook. Most accounts of this era, even by revisionist education historians, omit the scholarly work and leadership of Black educators and contemporaries of Dewey––omissions that mirror the same racial disconnections exhibited by the White progressives about whom they wrote. Notwithstanding that progressive White educators and activists (Counts, Dewey, Kilpatrick, Addams) mentioned segregation, intolerance, educational inequalities, and the denial of rights and privileges to people of color as incompatible with democracy, their adherence to whiteness––to assumed dominance––trumped acknowledging African American scholarship and learning from African American educators and leaders who worked to end systemic forms of white supremacy in general and educational inequalities in particular. Well-known progressives like Dewey were clear about preferring a cautious and gradualist approach to ending racial inequalities and typically failed to consider the knowledge, experiences, insights, and actions of Black people, let alone the scholarship and agency of Black educators (e.g., Bethune, Burroughs, Cooper, DuBois, Layne, Woodson, etc.). In their published work, it was as if Black people only existed to exemplify an egalitarian nadir, and Black scholars and educators didn’t exist at all, even when they worked in the same organizations or on the same social issues. On the other hand, African thought / wisdom are relevant to the ethical and moral quandaries of CBR / PAR that are the focus of this symposium.

Authors

• Joyce E. King, Georgia State University

• Hassimi Maiga, The Academy for Diaspora Literacy, Inc.,