Blackness as Stationary: Afro-Pessimism and the Fight to Reimagine Possession of Educational Spaces

• In Event: The Future Is Black: Afro-Pessimism, Fugitivity, and Radical Hope in Education

Abstract

As part of her visiting address at the University of Wisconsin during April 2017, on the heels of numerous cases of racialized acts of violence against Black students throughout U.S. campuses, scholar Shanara Reid-Brinkley explored the dialogical role of activism as a means of synthesizing knowledge across racial lines. The social location of Blackness renders Black people, even implicating Black graduate students studying Black epistemologies, vulnerable and immaterial subjects to the exploitation and genocide they've historically endured, Reid-Brinkley argues. This paradox reflects an extrication of Blackness as expertise on Black lives, that thrusts the brutal and baroque machinations of apartheid into post-modernity. Reid-Brinkley underscores the instant de-legitimation exerienced by Black youth whose experiences in educational spaces commandeered by white(racist) permanence represents "contested cultural property and the racial designation of bodies in dispute" (Sexton, 2008, p. 104). Educational spaces in the industrialized west represent a synecdochical relationship with advancement of white colonial conquest since the Indigenous Boarding schools. As Black and Brown scholars we are embattled by a responsilbility to perpetuate the very systems of inequity and erasure that employ us. Afropessimism attempts to confront this existential contradiction dragooning Black students and faculty across white dominated spaces in education. According to Frank Wilderson (2017)," the slave experiences their 'slaveness' ontologically, as a 'being for the captor,' not as an oppressed subject, who experiences exploitation and alienation, but as an object of accumulation and fungibility (exchangeability)" (p. 8). Put in other terms, Fred Moten (2014) describes "Blackness is not the property of Black people" (p. 30). The impossibility and "social death" (p. 31) of Blackness commensurate with the Afropessimist canon of Wilderson and Hartman demands that educational spaces begin to implicate Blackness beyond the anthropocene , but rather a maternity of Blackness (Spillers, 2003) that conceptualizes sovereignty of space as political strapped to Black futurity. This chapter intends to explore the relationship between quotidian practices in urban school curricula and leadership within higher education order to move passed a concept of Blackness that tactfully "nibbles around the political like beavers building a damn" (p. 36). Finally, the author will propose a new model for school leadership that attempts to redress the "definitive break between slavery and freedom" by drawing upon Afropessimism and its contemporary frameworks as vanguard to overcome the degradation of Blackness as oppositional to whiteness. But rather, Blackness as a necessary component to dismantling the current liberal strata of colorblind rhetoric and involuntary servitude of respectability. The author argues that freedom without a direct confrontation of the afterlife of slavery and the intransigence of white liberalism fundamental to the edifice of school leadership, will only further hamstrung the attainment of Black humanization.

Author

• Arash Daneshzadeh, University of San Francisco