Cupcakes, Antiblackness, and the Production of Racialized Space

• In Event: 21.061 - MTCC Roundtable Session Five
  In Roundtable Session: 21.061-4 - Beyond Permit Patty and Barbecue Becky: Racial Hierarchy and Spatial Justice in Education

Abstract

In this paper, I employ racial spaces analysis (citation withheld) to examine how schools become consequential geographies (Soja 2010, Annamma 2018), spaces where students of color are disproportionately disciplined (Skiba et al. 2011) and restricted from more valued forms of curriculum and instruction (Lleras & Rangel, 2009; Modica, 2015; Tyson, 2011) and that are hostile climates for teachers of color (Kohli, 2018). Racial spaces analysis draws on the work of Calmore (1995) and Mills (1997) to examine how the racialization of space is a process that, over time, conflates race and space and in doing so hides the inherently racist and white supremacist aspects of spatial production. The racialization of space contributes to the white spatial imaginary (Lipsitz, 2011), which “idealizes ‘pure’ and homogeneous spaces, controlled environments, and predictable patterns of design and behavior” (p. 39). These idealized spaces are based in white notions of superiority but the imaginary denies those underlying white supremacist roots. I specifically employ racial spaces analysis to illustrate how racism becomes normalized in schools—i.e. how the control of the bodies and voices of people of color is not an exception to daily school life but rather embedded in the fabric of U.S. public school discourse and practice.
My analysis focuses on City Elementary, a racially integrated school in the southeast where I have been conducting a collaborative study rooted in critical race methodology (Solórzano & Yosso, 2002) for the past 6 years. I share examples of racism from white teachers and parents against people of color and in particular against the Black students, teachers, and principal. One incident in particular—when a white teacher reprimands the Black principal for giving a Black teacher a cupcake—serves as an epiphanic example (Denzin, 2001), as it highlights how the production of racialized school space is rooted in antiblackness. Antiblackness is “an embodied lived experience of social suffering and resistance… in which the Black is a despised thing-in-itself (but not person for herself or himself) in opposition to all that is pure, human(e), and White” (Dumas & ross, 2016, 416-7). I explain how this white teacher—along with other white teachers and parents—operated from what I call an epistemology of antiblackness, where their conceptions of school space were simultaneously rooted in conceptualizations of space as white and of blackness as a symbolic and existential threat to that whiteness.
Racial spaces analysis and critical race methodology follow the call of critical race theory (CRT) for scholarship to be insurgent (Stovall, 2016). Therefore, in addition to analyzing the epistemology of antiblackness, I also explain how these analyses can be used collaboratively with school personnel to pursue greater racial spatial justice, where the rules that govern school space ensure greater freedom of expression for people of color. I share specific examples from City how racial spatial justice was, at times, achieved and the collaborative process that made that possible. In the end, I argue that these school-based examples can serve as models for how to disrupt broader societal attempts at racial spatial control.

Author

• Benjamin Blaisdell, East Carolina University