Anti-Blackness: Its Uses and Misuses in Education Research

• In Event: Movement in Black Education Studies: Futures for the Field

Abstract

Words and concepts, in academic scholarship, have the ability to express meaning and experience just as they can distort and refract them. As Charles Mills (1997) explained, “The lack of appropriate concepts can hinder learning, interfere with memory, block inferences, obstruct explanations, and perpetuate problems” (p. 7). “Antiblackness” as a concept, or hermeneutic rather, has become increasingly popular in education research; and this paper is concerned with its uses and misuses in the field. “Antiblackness” is now widely used, rarely defined, and often disconnected from any meaningful intellectual genealogy. Thinking about the realities of black life in education with rigor, love, and integrity, demands that we constantly engage in a process of self-correction, and the revision of research protocols. Therefore, this paper sets out to sharpen our tools of study and strengthen the discourse in black education studies.

This paper provides two major offerings. Part I presents a brief intellectual history of “antiblackness” as a hermeneutic—a concept that invites a distinct lens for analysis, interrogation, and interpretation. This genealogy of thought demonstrates that the word and its general meaning predates its most recent circulation with the surge of scholarship on Afropessimism in Black Studies (Wilderson, 2008, 2010, 2020; Sexton, 2016). Black scholars have used variations of the term (anti-African, anti-Negro, and anti-black) to mean more than simply racism and prejudice against black people. Their conceptualizations sought to name deeply rooted antagonisms between the political economic order and black life and, likewise, between various cultural fields of the modern world and black life. Such conceptualizations are found in classic African American literary texts from the Black Renaissance era (Wright, 1941; Wright 1945), magazines and social science scholarship from the Black Power era (Cook, 1970; Jackson, 1975), scholarship on blackness and religion (Washington, 1984), as well as scholarship from the early 1990s by black theorists (Gordon, 1995).

Part II provides an analysis of how scholars employ “antiblackness” in education research; with the first major use of the concept appearing in 2014 (Bery, 2014). Using variations of key search terms (antiblackness, anti-black, antiblack) in the ERIC and Education Abstracts databases, we located 66 relevant articles. After removing articles that did not explicitly center antiblackness in their theoretical frame or analysis, 52 peer-reviewed articles remained. Manuscripts explored the relationship between antiblackness and higher education, discipline, abelism, mental health, environmental education, classrooms, curriculum, teacher education, STEM education, resistance, LGBTQ identities, and schools more broadly. Scholars overwhelmingly employed antiblackness as synonymous with racism, implying that the term is another way of describing racism or prejudice against black people. We demonstrate why this is a false equivalency that perpetuates historical and social distortions about black education. We make suggestions for using antiblackness, as a frame of interrogation, in more ethical ways. Scholars must account for the political economic particularities of blackness and antiblackness in the modern world, the intellectual history and ongoing conceptualization of antiblackness, and how antiblackness has functioned as a world-structuring logic that informs race and racism(s), but is not reducible to them.

Authors

• Kihana Miraya Ross, Northwestern University

• Jarvis R. Givens, Harvard University