Curriculum and the Epiphenomenal Materiality of Racism

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

Abstract

Objective: This paper considers how curriculum studies can expand its approaches to understanding educational practice in general through the use of contemporary new materialist science studies and anti-Blackness theory. It does this by taking up the specific problem of how curriculum studies deals with racism.

Theoretical Framework: This paper draws on contemporary discourses in the academic disciplines that deal with racism as a global phenomenon. It asks what does it mean to raise questions about institutionalized racism in light of unified world dictatorships whose unity is in part achieved through a shared discourse of racism. (i.e. Trump, Putin, Bolsonaro, etc.)?

The paper begins with a concern that the discussions of racism in curriculum studies too often exist within a silo. Although questions about racism are frequently raised, the discussions, regardless of their brilliance, seem to go one of two ways: 1. Doing just what is minimally needed to maintain the security of the institution and/or 2. Becoming such strident exemplars of prevailing ideas about racial equity that they inhibit the possibility of understanding many nuanced modalities through which racism manifests. My concerns focus on what falls within and outside the unit of analysis in discussions about racism in curriculum studies. The paper asks what an analysis of the politics of racism in curriculum studies might look like if it included attention to the material relationships between the physical spaces, social spaces, and institutional structures, where explicitly racist events take place (Barad, 1998)? Also, what happens when we start to interpret these matters through the lenses of epiphenomenal time and the wake (Sharpe, 2016; Wright, 2015)?

Mode of Inquiry And Data Sources: This segment of the symposium will feature an analysis of the video of Rashon Nelson and Dante Robinson, two Black gentlemen racially profiled and detained by Chicago police at Starbucks on April 12, 2018. Engagement with this video snippet and its subsequent viral dissemination presents a window into the way we educate ourselves about institutionalized racism.

Substantial Conclusions and Scholarly Significance: The standard approach to analyzing the racist aspects of this event would focus upon the interaction between individuals in this video. Instead I focus upon addressing the intra-action—the engagements with matter along with generated resonances—which happen in this video (Barad, 1998). Additionally, I incorporate Michelle Wright’s (2015) concept of epiphenomenal time—the engagement of the past, present, and future in the present as a way of imagining alternative narratives, along with unearthing the variety of conditions which suppress some narratives while elevating others. Finally, I undertake an analysis of the wake (Sharpe, 2016) of this event, the reactions and responses to the violence against Black men in this video as they unfold in both the literal and virtual spaces in which Blackness is consumed/incarcerated/feared (Sharpe, 2016).

The paper concludes that this shift in the unit of analysis of racism could enhance our ability to intervene in curricular racism in schools and popular culture, thereby contributing to efforts to resist the contemporary rise in global white supremacy.

Author

• Reagan P. Mitchell, University of North Carolina School of the Arts