Rupturing the Black-White Binary

• In Event: Confronting the Assault on Critical Race Theory: Lessons Across Generations

Abstract

It may be unfathomable for readers to visualize a world where blackness is fully perceived aside from the tacit messages of disdain transmitted across our lifetime. These anti-Black racial logics are contrary to generations of evidence heralding the value and prominence of Black people to the making of American life. Such bleak recognitions, however, are a starting point for the longer project of “freedom dreaming,” (Kelley, 2022) not an ending. To imagine blackness differently may mean unraveling how and why its conception has been coterminous with death and dying.

Elsewhere, redacted (2021) offers mourning as a site to “behold the full weight and breadth of possibility that [only] blackness affords.” The language of mourning, and the substantial body of scholarship theorizing it (Canham, 2021; McIvor, 2016; Rankine, 2015; Rodriguez, 2016), provide critical considerations of blackness that extend far beyond grief and lament. This paper builds on such theorizing to emphasize the imperative for cultivating holistic views of blackness that include both its appropriateness as a superlative representation of possibility and the enduring consequence essentialized social constructions of blackness has had on helping to preserve white dominance. That said, the “binary” language in Black-White binary discourse is reductive, and as such, is potentially antagonistic to the project of racial solidarity needed to divine racial justice. Such language reads as exclusionary of non-Black people of color who are indeed impacted by the “global political system” that is white supremacy (Mills, 1997), and the structural racism that establishes and preserves this system.

Building from calls by critical race scholars to specify understanding of racial suffering (e.g., LatCrit, TribalCrit, BlackCrit, etc.), this paper argues that we clarify the Black-White binary to actually be pointing towards Black-White relations. By doing so, education researchers might be better situated to resist superficial intellectual treatments of racism. The “relations” intellectual frame substantially enhances critical race education research analyses by turning attention towards the function of racial groupings to sustain white dominance, and indeed, the racial logics that preserve power structures in perpetual favor of individuals racialized as white.

Put differently, comprehending the political function of blackness to catalyze production of whiteness is essential to better discerning how hierarchies of racial power are (re)produced, thus sustaining all forms of assault and harm experienced by racial and ethnically diverse peoples. The talk concludes with a call to expand how one thinks about “the Black,” such that popular conceptions of blackness–in the literature and elsewhere–not be reduced to its dominant social construction in the public imaginary as disdainful and disposable. The authors offer “mourning” as a heuristic for both lamenting the enduring consequence(s) of white supremacy, as well as for discerning possibility for an emancipated future in higher education and beyond.

Authors

• Chezare A. Warren, Vanderbilt University

• De'Ja Wood, Vanderbilt University