A Thousand Deaths: Current Events and Racial Reproductions of the Dead and Dying (Poster 8)

• In Event: Toward a Stranger and More Posthuman Social Studies

Abstract

In recent years, there has been a cultural explosion of work (literature, film, digital media, art, and non-fiction) that deal with the nuances of racial violence in the United States. None of this is perfect, but a lot of it sits with the complexity of race and racism—historically and presently. This work does not often enough influence the conversations in K-12 classrooms. When one moves from the art exhibit, the theater, the poetry reading, the conceptual hip-hop album to the school, it can be jarring how the complexities of race and racism are so different, engaged with, and considered despite the curricular relevance. Social studies is a subject that is well-positioned to engage with the issues of race and racism (Brown, 2011) as it entangles with politics, social issues, and history. When race and racism is central to the curricular content, it is too often approached in a way that does not facilitate a thinking otherwise but reproduces our same scripts about race and racism. Such assumptions and precarious understandings of race and racism provides a shaky foundation for how the violent spectacle of racial events like George Floyd’s murder can be observed and known by both students and teachers. When events like George Floyd’s killing (and many others) enter the visual and discursive scene and require attention, people who have not developed a complex understanding of race and racism fit such extraordinary displays of violence into the frames they already hold—frames that re-assert particular understandings of what it means to be human (Wynter, 2003).

Author

• Asilia K. Franklin-Phipps, SUNY - College at New Paltz
  Presenting Author