"Be Real Black for Me": Imagining BlackCrit in Education

• In Event: Reimagining "the" Colonizing/Colonized Subject: The Next 100 Years

Abstract

Beginning in the mid-1990s, critique of a “Black/White binary” in critical race scholarship inspired a proliferation of “crits” that focus on the experience of specific, non-Black communities, namely, LatCrit, AsianCrit, and TribalCrit. While there was a brief effort to develop BlackCrit, it remains woefully undertheorized, particularly in education scholarship. This paper revisits and attempts to advance BlackCrit as a promising foundation for a robust theory of Blackness and anti-Black racism. In doing so, we draw on a rich legacy of critical scholarship to conceptualize Black (material and psychic) suffering and Black imaginaries in the context of what Frantz Fanon called “the zone of non-being.” We conclude with implications for educational researchers and practitioners, and recommendations for further theoretical work in BlackCrit.

Authors

• Michael J. Dumas, University of California - Berkeley

• kihana miraya ross, University of California - Berkeley