Loving Black People as a Form of Political Resistance

• In Event: The Miseducation of Curriculum: Schooling and #BlackLivesMatter

Abstract

No doubt the emergence and the energy of the Black Lives Matter Movement has stirred up lots of memories for many African Americans. In light of the unjust deaths of Black people at the hands of the police, engagement in the Black Lives Matter Movement has therefore become a very personal act of listening, processing and enacting agency in several forms of resistance to sociocultural norms that have engendered raced and racist values. To this end, this paper uses counternarratives as a form of resistance to sociocultural ideas and ideals of blackness – a narrative on the importance of loving Black people. To love Black people, and not simply blackness, is of vital importance to inciting and working toward revolutionary change. In addition, this paper examines how the field of curriculum studies might think about these counternarratives and a form of curriculum of loving Black people an act and agent of change.
The counternarrative and analysis presented in this paper suggest that what’s ailing Black America is not a lack of self-esteem but rather what is and has always ailed the project of justice in America is a profound lack of love for Black people. A lack so profound and persistent it has the potential to erode, even Black people’s love for Black people, not simply by placing more value on White lives, but also by swallowing up the places and moments where Black people or any marginalized group of people might imagine otherwise (Haymes, 1994; Glaude, 2016). This, as it is argued in this paper, is exactly how the (patho)logic of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy works. It distorts love (Matias & Allen, 2013).
In his new book, Democracy in Black, Eddie Glaude Jr. (2016) makes a similar argument by calling out the “value gap” which he defines as the belief that White people are valued more than others. This idea, he contends, is baked into the very fabric of American democracy. Although this is certainly the case, this paper emphasizes not only on the idea that White people are more valued, but more so on the fact that this value is absolutely dependent on the fact that Black people’s lives are devalued. This point was well argued by Joel Olson (2004) in The Abolition of White Democracy, where he contends that Black people were not simply noncitizens in the Jacksonian era but they were in fact anticitizens—the antithesis to white citizenship, because “they were not merely excluded from the social compact, but they were the Other that simultaneously threatened and consolidated it” (p. 43). So my short answer to the student who asked the question on many people’s minds would simply be: All lives can’t matter if Black lives don’t matter. This paper is resonant with the field of curriculum studies as it delves into how a curriculum of loving Black people might function through counternarratives in our schools and communities.

Author

• Denise M. Taliaferro Baszile, Miami University