Killing Joy: Teacher Education in the Wake

• In Event: 79.020 - Division G Vice-Presidential Session: Educational Research in the Wake: Becoming "Undisciplined" Post-Truth, Post-Trump

Abstract

When we draw attention to racism and its ongoing and multiple effects on the lives of children, we kill joy (Ahmed, 2014). We kill the joy that imagines and celebrates that racism is a thing of the past. Or if it is not passed, it is certainly not the central organization of society. When we are dissatisfied with interventions or solutions that do not sufficiently address racism and its effects, we might be accused of being unreasonable or perpetually dissatisfied. When we refuse what does not address the ongoing and persistent effects of antiblackness, we can become isolated. When we want to be specific about how racism differently works across bodies, we might be accused of pessimism. In the field of education, pessimism is often regarded with exasperation, because education is generally concerned with countering pessimism and avoiding despair to be hopeful. Sharpe’s In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (2016) disabuses us of the kind of hope that ignores how Black life has always been contested. Sharpe does this by mapping antiblackness across time—from slavery to the present. This extraordinary work prompts (or maybe, requires) a reimagining and expansion of the parameters for thinking racial justice and provides a meaningful engagement with how racism works across bodies and time. Sharpe emphasizes the continued relevance of transatlantic slavery, particularly how Blackness is imagined and reimagined in predictable and persistent ways. This expands the possibility for imagining teaching, scholarship, and research that resists and challenges the logics of white supremacy.

The consequences of Sharpe’s work on education research are overwhelming. In my own work teaching white women becoming teachers, Sharpe’s text has articulated how the enslavement of Black people and children remains relevant. This relevance continues to determine who has access to the category of human (Wynter, 2003). This is evident in historical, but also present, sociopolitical events, policies, and norms. We need look no further than our current treatment of migrant families and children, police shootings of children and the debate on providing healthcare for children from wealth-poor families. This is to say nothing of global events that have devalued and denied children humanity. There has never been a time when all children have mattered.

In this paper, I “think with” (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012) Sharpe’s theory of the wake, considered alongside Wynter’s discussion of the category of human, to consider the consequences for race education for preservice and inservice teachers. This is no small task. Sharpe’s work undermines and challenges the taken-for-granted in education prompting an acknowledgement that schools, like all of our institutions are always already entangled in antiblackness and the denial of humanity to some, at the direct benefit of others. Beginning here in our research inquiry and teaching has clear consequences and disallows a thinking of racism as isolated, exceptional, unintentional, and rare. If we are to imagine that our work in education, our work of ethically killing joy, is of any consequence we must differently engage racism.

Author

• Asilia K Franklin-Phipps, The City University of New York