"Education Is a White Woman's World": The Politics of Race, Gender, and Geography in a Black Pedagogical Space

• In Event: Against Mundane White Supremacy: Revealing the Affective, Relational, and Spatial Dynamics of Everyday Racism

Abstract

“Education is their home…Education is a white woman’s world; oh yeah, a white, middle-class woman’s world.” Steve’s tone is discernibly matter-of-fact as he proclaims this. Skin the color of peanut butter, legs akimbo, the tall Black man leans back to slouch in an old wooden chair that is bearing his lithe, muscular body. The chair squeaks in protest. Its sharp squeal is absorbed by the cacophony of graduate students buzzing, busily talking and laughing while waltzing up and down the narrow hallway joining Steve’s office to the rest of the aging building. So begins this paper.

Overview and Significance: In this paper, I think through the politics of gender, geography, pedagogy, and education for the purpose of Black liberation. Using curated interview and observation data from a multiyear study, I position an anti-racist pedagogue as a cartographer who employs method, content, style and technique to map freedom routes away from schooling, a Dumasian “site of Black suffering.” I paint a portrait that foregrounds sights, sounds, and feelings present in Black affective networks, two of which constellated in the hypermasculine Black male pedagogue’s classroom. Black affective networks are racialized, affective, embodied assemblages oriented around Black thought systems across a spectrum of scales. All in all, I argue that Black spaces not implicitly or explicitly cisheteronormatized, but rather, intentionally constructed as queer—created for the comfort of Black people who embody sexes, genders, and gender performances marginalized in dominant culture(s)—can be a refusal to indulge the ontological, epistemological, and existential project of whiteness. Moreover, Black spaces that animate a queer vision are places where truly radical possibilities for Black liberation can be found, and where the complexities and costs of intra-racial diversity and inclusion become visible, palpable, and calculable.

Theoretical Framework and Methodology: I wrote this paper in response to recent calls from Black geographers for scholarship that attends to the “aesthetics of Black people and cultures, which are often rendered un-geographic, or without spatial significance” (see Southern Cultures’ Call for Papers on Black Geographies). Specifically, I scrutinize the “physical gathering of Black people” and other things in order to explore how “creativity, improvisation, joy, and the possibility for liberated ways of living” animate the pedagogical space.

Methods and Data: I employed a blend of portraiture (Lawrence-Lightfoot & Davis, 1997) and “textual accumulation as a methodological practice” (McKittrick, 2022) to paint a picture of the pedagogue and the pedagogical space central to the paper. I used a thematic approach to analyze the data corpus, which consisted of interview transcripts, observation notes, and an assortment of documents (Nowell et al., 2017).

Conclusion: Ultimately, I contend that Black (pedagogical) spaces that animate a queer vision are places where the complexities of intra-racial diversity become visible, palpable, and calculable. Ergo, this is where truly radical possibilities for liberation appear to take root.

Author

• Esther O. Ohito, Rutgers University
  Presenting Author