Making Black Lives Matter: Black Women's Activism and the Afterlife of Slavery

• In Event: Run Dat Back: Situating the Race for Theory and Antiblackness in Education Through Black Women Theorizing

Abstract

Objectives
Historically, Black women have served as vanguards in the fight to humanize Black victims of racial terrorism. An archetypal example is found in the aftermath of the death of Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old Black boy lynched in 1955 by a mob of white men. Emmett’s mother Mamie Till-Mobley decided on an open casket funeral for her son. Moten (2003) considered Till-Mobley’s decision to “restage death and rehearse mo(ur)nin(g)” as an insistence on her son’s subjectivity as well as the “unapproachable futurity of justice” (p. 199). Rodriguez (2016) described “Black mothers’ public and purposeful responses to state-sponsored racial violence against their children” as resistance to white supremacy (p. 66).
In this paper, we extend the work of Moten, Rodriguez, and curriculum theorists including Brown & Brown (2010) and Baszile (2016) to examine how Black women as teachers, mothers and othermothers persist in public and purposeful responses to racial terrorism through curricular activism. We are particularly interested in Black women teachers and teacher educators’ decision making following the executions of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Freddie Gray, and George Floyd. Our objective is to organize firsthand experiences and anecdotes using the guiding construct of the afterlife of slavery.

Perspective/Theoretical Framework
The afterlife of slavery describes the ways that the ideas used to justify Black chattel enslavement are still considered valid points of structural reference today (Hartman, 2009). Hartman described the afterlife of slavery as the “still-unfolding narrative of [Black] captivity, dispossession, and domination” that is “largely unspoken and unrecognized” due to the “sheer denial of black sentience” (p. 51). Though chattel enslavement legally ended in the mid-nineteenth century, these ideas emerge and reemerge in conversations about schools and schooling (Dumas, 2014). We argue that the afterlife of slavery extends to how curricula is conceived, implemented and interpreted, specifically as it relates to the treatment (or non-treatment) of victims of racialized terror. In this context, Black women’s curricular activism is necessarily invisible and in many instances, considered illogical.

Methods/Modes of Inquiry/Data Sources
This is a conceptual paper.

Arguments/Conclusion/Significance
Introducing the afterlife of slavery as a conceptual framework helps us analyze this contemporary moment, as it helps us come to understand whose stories are centered and whose stories of being the victims of racial violence are left in the margins of both national conscience and curriculum.


References
Baszile, D. T. (2006). Rage in the interests of black self: Curriculum theorizing as dangerous
knowledge. JCT, 22(1), 89.

Brown, A. L., & Brown, K. D. (2010). Strange fruit indeed: Interrogating contemporary textbook
representations of racial violence toward African Americans. Teachers College Record, 112(1), 31-67.

Dumas, M. J. (2014). ‘Losing an arm’: Schooling as a site of black suffering. Race Ethnicity and
Education, 17(1), 1-29.

Hartman, S. (2008). Lose your mother: A journey along the Atlantic slave route. Macmillan.

Moten, F. (2003). In the break: The aesthetics of the black radical tradition. U of Minnesota
Press.

Rodriguez, C. (2016). Mothering while black: Feminist thought on maternal loss, mourning and
agency in the African diaspora. Transforming Anthropology, 24(1), 61-69.

Authors

• Kristen Duncan, Clemson University

• Ashley N. Woodson, Albion College