Reconceptualizing Empowerment: Evacuating From the Politics of Black Resilience Neoliberalism

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

Abstract

Overview

Through ethnographic exploration of Black youth participatory action researchers’ political identity development, I was able to identify a politicized discourse engaged by many young people during the early stages of action research that I have termed Black Resilience Neoliberalism (BRN) (Clay, 2018). The scope of this study called for an analysis of youth researchers’ political views at the outset of YPAR, during which time I served as YPAR facilitator and offered very little feedback about the views young people entered with. Throughout these first two weeks, I found many youth researchers expressing views that normalized and/or valorized Black folks and Black communities overcoming or strategically navigating inequities in ways that minimized, decentered, or erased the structural racism itself.

In this paper, I argue that BRN undermines the goal of organizing against state violence and other forms of Black oppression by setting up structural racism as a taken-for-granted constant and valorizing or normalizing the act of enduring or strategically overcoming. To that end, this paper has two goals related to the explication of BRN: 1) trace its connection to public/education policy related to Black youth and 2) to analyze the ways in which its tenets are revealed in Black youth action researchers’ reflections on race/ism, inequality, and social change.

Methods

This study investigates how Black Resilience Neoliberal discourse is operationalized across two contexts: Politicians’ policy justifications and youth participatory action research with Black and Latinx high school youths between 2015 and 2016. Using BRN as a framework for critical discourse analysis, this paper attends to the ways in which this discourse is engaged in policy and in youths’ articulation of their political views at the outset of a 16-month YPAR project facilitated by the author. Ethnographic discourse analysis (Gee, 1999) of the action research setting offers a close contextualized look at how the language of BRN is taken up in everyday use; even in a space that operates under the banner of progressivism.

Findings and Implications

Findings from this study reveal that the pervasive common sense of Black Resilience Neoliberalism angles to frame Black youths’ political views in ways that circumscribe the appraisal of structural racism in Black people’s lives and communities. BRN is manufactured in white supremacy and as a hegemonic discourse ultimately functions to maintain white supremacy. We often conceive of Black empowerment in terms of resiliency demonstrated by ascendant Black folks that have overcome structural racism (e.g., President Obama, Oprah); however this framing embraces the racial structure. As such, BRN is a threat to Black political empowerment. For this reason, it is crucial to evacuate Black political empowerment from BRN discourse and to consider an alternative discourse that champions fugitivity from institutions entangled in structural racism.

Author

• Kevin Lowell Clay, Rutgers University - Newark