“Sapphire’s” Educational Imagination: Black Women’s Activism and the (Un)Gendering of Black Education in the Americas

• In Event: They “Specialize in the Wholly Impossible”: Black Women’s Contributions to Black Education

Abstract

Education, like all aspects of our society, is a profoundly gendered project. Notions of what it means to be an educator, to be educated, or even to be a good student are all often gendered. At the same time, Black feminist theorists have offered us analyses that demonstrate that the emergence and maintenance of normative gender constructs have relied and continue to rely on antiblack exclusions from their formation. Thus, this paper asks: what does it mean for Education to be normatively gendered in the context of an always-already Black subject without access to gender? What happens when we take seriously the aporia that notions of Black (un)gendering offers us in the interstice formed at the junction of Black (and) Education? Thus, in this paper I draw on Spillers’ (1987) concept of (Un)gendering alongside Sharpe’s (2016) notion of annagrammatical blackness to suggest that that the gendered constructs of education when placed in the context of Black education become distinctly complicated by the incongruity between Blackness and normative conceptualizations of gender. As such, Black educational activism is not only a racial response, but inherently a gendered project as well.

To explore this racialized, gendered aspect of Black educational activism, I examine the educational components of contemporary Black women’s community activism in Salvador da Bahia, Brazil alongside the work of Black women’s activism in the Oakland Community School of the 1970s. This project engages in a multimethodological approach grounded in Black study. In the first example, I draw on 12 weeks of ethnography conducted while learning from and working with Black community organizations in the city of Salvador in 2019. In the second example, I analyze issues of the Black Panther Party Newspaper alongside previously collected oral history interviews with Ericka Huggins, former director of the Black Panther Party’s Oakland Community School. While a comparative approach renders each case as a discrete example, a I use relational reading to highlight the ways in which Black women’s struggles across time and space are in direct and indirect conversation with, and learn from, one another. Thus, to think relationally with these cases is to consider the literal and symbolic relations between their shared struggles against antiblackness across the Americas. It is my hope that this paper emphasizes the resonances between these two examples and illuminates the diasporic, transhistorical, foundational, and global character of gendered (anti-)blackness that operate in both general and spatiotemporally-specific ways.

Through my analysis, I argue that the educational strategies, visions, and projects of Black women’s educational activism across the Americas since the 1960s reveal both the limits for Black liberation in education’s current normatively gendered conceptualization as well as the insurgent possibilities for new constructions of gender brought forth by a Black (un)gendering of educational discourse and practice. In the end, I argue that understanding these activists’ ideas for education as not only black empowerment projects, but inherently responses to the gendered logics of normative education, we’re offered a more capacious vision for unsettling the antiblackness of Education in the Americas.

Author

• C. Darius Gordon, University of California - Berkeley