Fugitive Black Space in Education: (Anti)Blackness in the Afterlife of School Segregation

• In Event: 25.035 - Underground, Outer Space, and on the Move: Fugitive Possibilities in Black Education

Abstract

While Black students have made undeniable advancements in education, numerous scholars have demonstrated the myriad ways Black students are continually racialized, dehumanized, and hypersexualized. In recent years, scholars have articulated an increasing sensibility that Black students experience schooling as anti-Black and have began to explore the utility in conceptualizing antiblackness as endemic to and central to the Black schooling experience (Dumas, 2016; Dumas & ross, 2016).

While admittedly ambitious, in this paper I want to introduce two paradigm shifts in the way we conceive of Black education, and conceptualize what it means to be a Black student in U.S. public schools. The first is what I am calling the afterlife of school segregation. Similar to the critical race theory tenet that posits racism is normal within society (Delgado, 1995), or the BlackCrit framing that suggests antiblackness is endemic to how we make sense of human life (Dumas & ross, 2016), the afterlife of school segregation is a more specific rendering of Hartman’s (2007) afterlife of slavery, and centers the ways in which despite the end of legal segregation of schooling, Black students remain systematically dehumanized and positioned as uneducable. Without diminishing the significance of Brown and the end of a mandate that very explicitly caste Black students as inferior and forbade their access to the material resources white students received, this paper considers what the end of formal segregation has meant for Black students who remain (as Black folks did after emancipation), a subjugated group.

The second is what I am calling Black educational fugitive space, which has grown out of my own experiences as a Black girl (and woman) in U.S. public schools and university, and in my own praxis as a teacher of Black children and as a researcher with Black students, educators, and families. I have seen it constructed in exclusively Black places (all Black classrooms for example), in hostile takeovers, where we make space ours regardless of racial non-exclusivity, and in the proverbial Black head nod. Without boxing Black space, for our purposes here, I want to offer Black educational fugitive space as the ways Black students and educators enact educational fugitivity through the social production of Black space in the margin. I want to propose Black educational fugitive space manifests as both departure and refuge from the gratuitous violence of the afterlife of school segregation, and spawns the possibilities for rebirth and resistance. Black educational fugitive space is born, created, and in direct response to the rampant antiblackness in the larger world, and in U.S. public schools; although often temporary, it may serve as makeshift land, and provide makeshift citizenship to people whose humanity is consistently made impossible on the outside. This paper is an invitation to continue the collective conversation around what it means to conceptualize an educational project for Black students in particular – about what it means to consider the ways we may produce and reproduce spaces that engage the reality of antiblackness and the “possibilities of redress” Hartman, 1997, pg. 72).

Author

• kihana miraya ross, Northwestern University