Engaging Stakeholders in Refusing Systemic Violence Against Black Children

• In Event: Expanding the Use of Critical Race Theory in Mathematics Education Research for the Public Good

Abstract

Recent research on mathematics education for Black learners has contributed strong empirical evidence and robust theoretical framings showing that mathematics learning and participation can be characterized as racialized and gendered forms of experience; that is, as experiences in which the socially and politically constructed meanings for race and gender emerge as highly salient in intrapersonal and interpersonal contexts. The emergence of this work supports a more explicit sociopolitical framing of mathematics learning and participation that highlights issues of power, race, and identity, and moves beyond perspectives which have historically been content with characterizing mathematics learning and participation as cognitive and cultural activities.

We extend these racialized and gendered characterizations to show that mathematics learning and participation among Black learners can also be characterized by various forms of systemic violence–physical, symbolic, epistemological–that these students must negotiate in the contexts of their mathematical experiences. Given our specific concerns with the violence that is levied against Black children’s bodies and minds, we first draw on recent theorizations of BlackCrit to surface antiblackness and the logic of the white racial imaginary that rationalizes and normalizes violence in the mathematical experiences of Black learners. Like Dumas and ross (2016), we see BlackCrit as theorizing within, and in response to, critical race theory (CRT) which has been increasingly employed in educational research, including mathematics education. In the paper, we explore each form of systemic violence, in turn, highlighting theoretical considerations and pragmatic consequences.

Beyond surfacing the violence rooted in and brought to life in antiblackness, we share some thoughts about the potential for a Black Liberatory Mathematics (BLM) education that would allow Black learners to flourish in their humanity. Conceptualizing the seeds of a BLM education requires one to engage radical imagination and Black liberatory fantasy of a new and different mathematics education in recognition of the fact that liberatory mathematics education for Black learners cannot exist within the current educational system, where white supremacy and antiblackness are foundational.

In our view, liberation does not entail inviting Black learners to participate in anti-Black spaces that are made incrementally less dehumanizing as a result of reform or white benevolence. In offering some thoughts on a BLM education, we move beyond the present discourses and logics of mainstream mathematics education reforms that emphasize college and career readiness, increased participation in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), and the commodification of Black bodies in service to maintaining U.S. international competitiveness and national security. We see BLM education as a form of Black life-making, in response to perpetual social death associated with antiblackness and systemic violence.

Authors

• Roxanne Moore, Washington State University

• Danny B. Martin, University of Illinois at Chicago

• Paula Groves Price, Washington State University