Schools, Ethnography, Antiblackness, and Refusal

• In Event: Abolitionist Methodologies

Abstract

As Sarah Haley (2018) states, “Abolitionist struggle has taken place over a myriad of terrains that exceed the nineteenth-century battlefield”. Yet despite the role of education in the abolition struggle, abolitionist scholarship, research, and thought emerge in academic fields peripheral to that of Education (DuBois, 1998; Gilmore, 2007; Hartman, 2010; Sharpe 2016). Stemming from Black and African American studies, abolition is most narrowly defined as the end of slavery. However, abolition is a keyword that raises a complex set of questions about the convergence of personhood to property, and the shifts in relations of power that “constitute freedom’s beginning and captivity’s end” (Haley 2018, p.9). Thus, as a framework, abolition generates theorizations about subjectivity, racial capitalism, social and physical violence, imprisonment and refusal while maintaining at its core an interrogation of the liberal nation-state and vigilance to whether, and when, slavery actually ended. Therefore, as institutions of the state and social transmitters of “democratic values,” schools are imperative and serve as terrains to create and interrogate notions and practices of abolition.

In this ethnographic paper, I consider the abolitionist practices of Darla, the only black girl– and black student– in a junior US History class, at a primarily Latinx high school in an agro-industrial city in California. Through an analysis of Darla’s engagement in a Civil Rights history lesson, I uncover how Darla’s refusal to push against her classmates' antiblack rhetoric demands an abolitionist methodology to be adequately recognized and understood against the backdrop of liberal progressiveness. Drawing from the work of Black and Indigenous Women scholars (Reese 2019; Sharpe 2016, 2018; Shange 2019; Simpson 2014), I think of refusal not as a limitation, but rather as a practice that lets us know when we’ve reached “enough” (Simpson, 2014). Furthermore, I argue that practices of refusal demand that researchers stay attuned to the ways communities “refuse to continue on this way” (McGranahan 2016, p. 320). As such, and like Reese (2019), in this paper I want to think through the methodological demands of refusal as a practice of abolition: how does centering refusal as fundamental to ethnography shift our own professional and personal engagements with, and responsibilities to community members, youth and schools? How does thinking with refusal as an affirmation of youth’s sovereignty, rather than reducing it to deficiency and idleness, change our ethnographic practices - both as participant observers and as writers? And lastly, what are the pedagogical demands of refusal as a means to learn how to see other arrangements of the possible (Hartman 2019, p.302)?

Author

• Andrea Vazquez, University of California - Santa Cruz