Pain and Possibility: The Necessity of Mourning in Black Education

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

Abstract

Purpose
This talk argues for the imperative to understand mourning as a pathway towards greater comprehension of possibility in Black education and beyond, and the central role possibility plays in conceiving visions of freedom that advance Black educational transformation.

Narrative
Wearing dark(er) skin is often mistaken as a burden that obscures reading the Black body as full of humanity (Dumas & ross, 2016; Grant, Woodson & Dumas, 2021; Sharpe, 2016). In her analysis of core themes in the work of Afropessimist Frank Wilderson, kihana miraya ross (2021) points out that resistance to the conditions that deny Black people of our humanity is born out of time “...where we allow ourselves to sit with the impossibility of Black life…to move beyond calls to fix it…[and] to understand the fundamental antagonism” that is Black people’s relationship to the U.S. power structure (p. 8-9). ross’ observation is important. One’s blackness does not make Black life impossible. The U.S. sociopolitical context in which Black people live, and its long history of plunder and extraction, is the culprit attempting to generate impossibility for the lives Black folks can lead and the futures Black folks can possess. “Sit[ting] with the impossibility” as ross (2021) urges, is understood here as an invitation to mourn or turn into one’s Black self; to behold the full weight and breadth of possibility that blackness affords. In the case of mourning, one’s blackness should be understood as an asset, not a liability, despite innumerable and unavoidable messages to the contrary.

As important studies naming the conditions and manifestations of antiblackness continue to be produced (e.g., Coles, 2020; Dancy, Edwards, & Davis, 2018; Dumas & ross, 2016; Jenkins, Tichavakunda, & Coles, 2020; Mustaffa, 2017; Shange, 2019), it is equally imperative that contemporary research intended to advance Black educational justice offer innovative theoretical and conceptual treatments of race that build upon Black people’s strengths, and histories of travail towards freedom. The discussion of mourning as a pathway to discovering and unlocking possibility to be discussed is one such attempt to achieve this aim. For the melanated among us, the consequences of being identified as black in the “afterlife of slavery” (Hartman, 2007) can feel like a nighttime of suffering never to be escaped. Our blackness is not the virtue that needs to be escaped, however. It is the schooling conditions that insist upon Black people’s abject pain that we must both flee and subvert (Givens, 2021), and in doing so imagine possibility (and build towards) the educational futures Black people need and desire.

This paper is a scholarly intervention intended to disrupt discourses of hopelessness that too often narrowly foreground “pain and suffering” as the whole of Black children’s past, present, and future schooling experience. By foregrounding the necessity for mourning, I acknowledge the truth of such sufferings. The paper also emphasizes the utility of mourning for learning to notice and engage possibility in education transformation work.

Author

• Chezare A. Warren, Vanderbilt University