Beginning and Ending With Black Suffering: Against Racial Justice in Education

• In Event: Words We Never Said

Abstract

In this paper, I center the question of Black suffering as a way to engage and refuse the notion of racial justice in education. I offer an explanation of suffering in the Black lived experience of antiblackness—not as the totality of Black lived experience, but as an ever-present condition of Black life and sociality. Using recent incidents of antiblackness in and around schools, I explain how racial justice discourse in education proceeds past/around/on the back of Black suffering, rendering Black suffering invisible or beside the point, and most pointedly, inconsequential. I argue that centering Black suffering as a constant meditation and inspiration for education research and practice leads to clarity about what liberatory imaginations beyond racial justice might and must be.

Because our current racial order necessitates the ongoing suffering of Black beings, there is actually no end to Black suffering in schools or society. As a result, what counts as justice in education in no way promises an end to Black suffering. It may alleviate or mitigate some suffering for some Black students in some educational spaces, but the vast majority of Black children and their families will continue to experience suffering even as educators, policymakers, and the broader public celebrate successes in this or that racial justice initiative.

Within mainstream discourse on racial justice in education, the continuation of Black suffering is non-negotiable. Thus, what counts as rigorous research, what is funded most generously, what is most likely to be rewarded, and what is politically expedient will always be research that leaves space for some, and arguably most, Black people to suffer. Reforms are viewed as effective if they provide incremental improvements in outcomes, or offer interventions to expand opportunities for a few. This is what counts as racial justice in education. Racial justice research in education can never challenge the actual conditions of our suffering, because every court in which we make our justice appeals—the legal system, electoral politics, school-district level policy implementation, or the court of public opinion— is fundamentally against Black emancipation.

Justice scholarship is in part a negotiation with the state and civil society in an attempt to secure (the impossibility of) Black freedom. Because the social world is complicit in and desirous of perpetual anti-Black violence, consideration of Black suffering becomes illegible. With discrimination and disparities being the most prominent frames for the study of racial injustice in education, the study of Black suffering is foreclosed. It is easier to imagine how we might act to quantifiably reduce discrimination and disparities than it is to conjure the end of Black suffering.

I argue that it is possible to commit to combatting racial discrimination and disparities with very little interest in Black freedom, which would necessitate a reordering of an antiblack society. Thus, scholarly and public concern about racial discrimination or racial disparities—without situating these phenomena within the larger condition of Black suffering—obfuscates and even legitimizes the ongoing project of violence against the Black.

Author

• Michael J. Dumas, University of California - Berkeley