“Do This in Remembrance of Me”: (Re)Membering as Liberatory Christian Praxis in Education

• In Event: In Spirit and in Truth: Liberatory Christianity in the Struggle for Racial Justice in Education

Abstract

Racio-spiritual re-membering “acknowledges that racial oppression does not just operate at the material level of systemic disenfranchisement and individual harm, but it seeks to break the very spirits of the racially oppressed” (Lyiscott, 2021, p. 10). It situates our faith in our racial reality and requires a differentiation between a faith that liberates, and one that oppresses. Yet, it is the calling back to mind of Christ’s radical actions to re-member us, or bring us back in fellowship and right standing with God, that serves as the impetus for wholeness and healing. (Re)membering, then, is not just the act of recalling or recollection, but an act of healing (Dillard, 2021). As such, we lift up the role of (re)membering in our labor toward the interwoven goals of racial, educational, and theological justice. Inspired by Jesus’ call to “do this in remembrance of [Him]”, we offer a counternarrative to colonial logics and ideologies, in the past and in the present, that have seduced us into forgetting the transformative and radical message of the Gospel in our work and in our lives.

As a collective of Black and Brown scholars, (re)membering served as a method that took shape through critical collaborative autoethnography (Chang et al. (2016) “a qualitative research method that is simultaneously collaborative, autobiographical, and ethnographic” (p. 17). We purposefully situated the intersections of our racial and spiritual identities as a site of critical inquiry to ask: What does Christianity mean for the ways in which Black and Brown Christians educate and research? What “pedagogies of the spirit” (Dillard, 2000) grounded in Christ and His teaching emerge in our work as we navigate our racialized experiences as Black and Brown Christians in academia?

In our efforts to answer the questions thus posed, we each acknowledged that showing up authentically in academic spaces is an act of bravery, especially for Black and Brown Christian scholars who often face deeply rooted anti-Blackness, anti-Indigeneity, and the devaluation of spirituality as a legitimate way of knowing. Yet, for those of us committed to following Christ, doing things differently in the academy means disrupting the status quo, and normed ways of knowing, doing and being. Indeed, (re)membering our faith and our why served as the grounding force and source of our liberatory praxes. In conclusion, we draw on (re)membering as a liberatory praxis to acknowledge the ways that our Christian faith operates materially and epistemologically. It serves as a mechanism for us to recall Christ’s power in our lives as a way for us to heal in community. To (re)member the role of our faith in our praxes as educators and scholars is to make room for the spirit of our work (Dillard, 2021).

Authors

• Amber Neal-Stanley, Purdue University

• Derron Wallace, Brandeis University

• Brooke Harris Garad, Butler University

• Jasmine Hoskins, Urban Dove