From Cooper and Woodson to Schools Today: Black Lives Matter and American Schools

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

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is twofold: the explicate the forms of curriculum while underscoring one of the themes of this panel: everything is always already a form of curriculum. In short, this paper critically considers the indelible images of contemporary lynchings that are entangled with what scholars like Du Bois (1926) referred to as a “choking away” of onto-epistemologies through white educational ideologies. Through this process, it becomes clear that schooling provides a form of ontological death that is mirrored in the physical murders of Black people across community contexts. In short, because schooling normalizes the dehumanization of all bodies outside of the white cis-hetero patriarchy, racist police officers and white extremists have sanctioned inflicting physical pain on Black people and in Black communities. This brings to the fore the following questions: What does it mean for a child to be metaphorically lynched or choked through the schoolroom, as scholars like Du Bois (1926) and Woodson (1933) have described? As such, how does the everyday choking away (Du Bois, 1926) of a child’s way of being and knowing contribute to larger sociocultural violence against people of color?
Curriculum scholars have asked similar questions across traditions, specifically thinking about what counts as knowledge and whose knowledge is of most worth (Grant et al., 2015; Malewski, 2009; Pinar, 2004; Spencer, 1860; Watkins, 2001). An attention to curriculum studies is important because systemic oppressions in schools are enacted and maintained across curricular forms. Entangled with broader norms and values, the curricula of schooling can be understood an assemblage that functions as a set of “sociopolitical processes that discipline humanity into full humans, not-quite-humans, and nonhumans” (Weheliye, 2014, p. 4). In short, curricular entanglements in schools facilitate dehumanization, eventually teaching students, educators, and administrators across identities that Black lives, voices, and perspectives are inferior (Woodson, 1933). The racialized nature of the curricula is insidious in that it permeates every layer of scale in schools.
This paper uses a two-year sonic ethnographic study to analyze what the author calls “educational necropolitics,” or the everyday ways that minoritized students are onto epistemologically murdered or relegated as the living dead (Mbembe, 2003) in schools. This is significant because the ongoing onslaught of normalized murders and maiming of Black people starts, as scholars like Woodson (1933) and Love (2019) argue, in schools. Using educational necropolitics as a theoretical touchstone, this paper unpacks what the author discusses as the echo chambers of oppression that are prevalent across the United States and considers how schools might function as if Black lives actually mattered in all spaces and places but, especially, in schools.

Author

• Boni Wozolek, Pennsylvania State University - Abington
  Presenting Author