Curricular Racism as a Posthuman Agent

• In Event: Moscone Center North Roundtable Session 10
  In Roundtable Session: Posthumanist Theory in the Service of Antiracist Curriculum Studies Scholarship

Abstract

Objective: Institutionalized racism is resilient. It adapts to our analytic and political interventions (Alexander, 2012; Wright, 2015). It moves around them like water, at times co-opting the rhetoric of anti-racist resistance and the subjectivities of researchers who seek to analyze its operation. This adaptability suggests that racism is a protean phenomenon composed of ontologically diverse phenomena like property values, curricula, differences in the quality of school facilities, signifiers of status associated with the school demographics, and student-teacher interactions. Regarded in this way, curricular racism is understood as capable of shifting its medium of expression and adapting to our efforts to eliminate it. The project of curricular analysis becomes, not identifying the single most salient source of racist curricular messages, but instead it requires an evolving response that informs equally adaptable anti-racist curricula.

Theoretical Framework: This study draws on two intersecting literatures: 1) contemporary Black studies literature—specifically critical race theory, the sociology of race, and anti-Blackness theory—for their understanding of the way racism adapts to legal and political interventions (Alexander, 2012; Bell, 1992; Sharpe, 2013; Wynter, 2001); 2) posthumanist philosophy—specifically new materialist philosophy of science, contemporary indigenous philosophy (Deloria, 1999; Marker, 2018; Tuck & McKensie, 2015; Watts, 2010), and pragmatic semiotics (Kohn, 2013; Peirce, 1992, Short, 2007)—for their development of conceptions of non-human agency.

Mode of Inquiry: This paper is a reflection on the theoretical and methodological challenges that arose in a 10-year study of the hidden curricular messages conveyed by the racial resegregation of a public school system. It reflects on the way the impact of the segregation could not be accounted for using any one theoretical framework and how the adoption of each theoretical framework constituted the political subjectivity of the authors and readers in specific and limited ways.

Data Sources: The paper draws illustrative examples from the ten-year school segregation study to support its claims. This study has been recently published as a book. This paper, however, focuses on theoretical and analytical issues not covered in the book.

Substantial Conclusions: Conceptualizing racism as a posthuman agent is found to have powerful applications to the study of curricular racism in schools. These include: 1. providing a framework that supports opportunistic use of theory in the study of the hidden curriculum of racism in schools; 2. providing an ontological rationale for using more specific formulations of racial oppressions such as white supremacy or anti-blackness instead of the generic term “racism”; and 3. identifying specific implications for teacher education curricula arising from the racial realism and afro-pessimism found in critical race theory and anti-blackness studies.

Scholarly Significance: Framing racism as an agent, and racist curricula as a component of the agential activity of that racism, transforms our approach to the study of curricular racism in a way that sidesteps unnecessary divisiveness between different theoretical treatments of racism and curricula. This paper inventories the implications of this theoretical framing of curricular racism for research methodologies, teacher preparation, and the place of curriculum theory in broader anti-racist social movements.

Author

• Jerry L. Rosiek, University of Oregon