Letter to Pauli

• In Event: Black Lives Matter in U.S. Schools: Race, Education, and Resistance

Abstract

Situated in Black feminist praxis, this paper uses the work of Pauli Murray to think with and how Murray’s work is critical to re-considering questions of time, Black diasporas, queerness, and race as it is related to the Black Lives Matter movements and education. It is important to note that here I conceptualize education broadly, specifically attending to scholars across African American intellectual traditions while including the work of indigenous scholars. Before I discuss Pauli Murray, I will situate Black feminist praxis. I continue with Michelle Wright’s text The Physics of Blackness (2015). From this work, I attend specifically to her discussion on epiphenomenal time to think about how Enlightenment constructions of time are problematic yet essential to understanding how some narratives become privileged, while others are negated. In the case of the discourse I am engaging, time is important to considering institutional epistemic violence. I then return the idea of rigid time and the epistemic violence created for Murray. In continuing this discussion, I situate Murray as an Afro-surrealist and ridiculer who is aligned with the scholarship of Lopéz Lopéz and D. Scot Miller. Lopéz Lopéz’s necessity of ridicule along with Miller’s resistance of Afro-surrealism’s “quiet servitude” provide a backdrop to consider Murray as both an ancestral entity while simultaneously situating her as a figure who was touched by ancestral entities (Miller, 2012). The penultimate section is a timeline of Murray’s life. Afterward, I conclude with a letter to the ancestor, Pauli Murray. It is important to commune with ancestors, and in this letter, I ask for advice in addition to sharing how I came to meeting her through text. The letter is composed from a series of ancestral multilogical ethos. As I will discuss, I denote the discourse as multilogical in respect to conceptualization of epiphenomenal time and Afro-surrealism. The collective consideration discussions embodies epiphenomenal time and Afro-surrealism’s ancestral to futuristic in the present.
This kind of non-linear approach is important because, as Michille Wright (2015) reminds us, the Black Diasporic narrative suffers from a toxic linearity and rigidity. Wright (2015) critiques rigid spacetime narrative constructions. She proposes the epiphenomenal engagement with time as a way for engaging varieties of inquiries as well as getting open to the nonacknowledged gaps in Black Diasporic narratives. The acknowledgment of these gaps in which voices shifted from, as Sharpe (2016) would frame it, the “wake.” The purpose of this is to take a necessary step back to process the dynamics of event versus tension in regard to historic narrative constructions. A defining of event and tension are necessary. An event is something occurring in a particular and interval of time, whereas, tensions are the manifestations of the resonance that caused the event to occur. Thinking through such tensions, this paper argues that while events occur and pass, the resonance is always in play, assuring that another event variation will happen again. Which events, especially for those attending to Black queerness as presented in this paper, are significant in their iterations.

Author

• Reagan P. Mitchell, University of North Carolina School of the Arts
  Presenting Author