Chronicity and Black Miseducation: Resisting Ahistorical Framings of Black Schooling

• In Event: Millennium Hotel Roundtable Session 3
  In Roundtable Session: Settler Colonial Amnesia and the Technologies of Erasure: Recapitulation, Chronicity, Recognition, and Reparations

Abstract

Drawing from black education historians (Anderson, 1988; Ladson-Billings, 2006; Siddle-Walker, 2005; Watkins, 2011) I argue the need for more holistic frameworks to address the educational dispossession and its consequences for black youth. Using chronicity (Gutierrez & Stone, 2000) as a framework to examine current manifestations of historical patterns affords researchers, educators, and administrators the depth necessary to truly confront educational debt. I argue that modern crisis narratives of black education (Author, 2017; McCarty, 2012) are ahistorical and thus do not provide a basis for which to address the educational conditions that plague black communities. The purpose of the paper is to demonstrate how the merging of synchronic (current snapshot) and diachronic (historical patterns) analyses are necessary to resist the historical erasure of black mis-education in favor of its continuation.

The paper uses chronicity as a theoretical framework to map the education of black people across four historical epochs. From the slavery statutes of the nineteenth century forbidding any formal education, to post-Reconstruction when mis-education was codified in legislation, to the post-Brown v. Board era when technologies were developed to maintain racialized school hierarchies in the face of desegregation, black youth have always faced precarious educational circumstances.

I construct a diachronic analysis of black education to provide explanatory power to the contemporary synchronic analyses, which often situate black education as being in a temporal moment of crisis. Diachronic analyses are historical in nature and seek to identify particular patterns that manifest in current phenomena (Giddens, 1979). The paper explores the precarity of black education amidst structural white supremacy and resists ahistorical renderings of black education as existing in a crisis. Rather, the author suggests that by definition, black education is a continuous struggle.

Taking a historical approach, this paper does the following: 1) explores how the discourse of crisis in the education of black youth obfuscates deeper questions about the root causes of racialized education disparity; 2) buttresses the “education debt” argument by tracing the accumulation of inequity across four major epochs of black education, and; 3) draws from African American educational historians and scholars to rearticulate a vision for educational self-determination for people of African descent in the U.S. education system. The intent of the paper is to challenge progressive educators and those who have deep commitments to racial and educational justice to re-evaluate the ahistorical discourse of crisis in black education, which perpetuates the erasure of collective black struggle for liberatory education.

Author

• Brian Lozenski, Macalester College