“We Are Not Robots”: The Black Heretical Tradition and School Closures

• In Event: Saturday Roundtable Session 3:05 pm
  In Roundtable Session: Refusing the “Magic” of Western Knowledge Systems: Toward Epistemic Justice in Black and Asian American Education (Table 33)

Abstract

Purpose
School closures are a part of the neoliberalism strategy that relies on race and racialization to dispossess and accumulate capital and land. The purpose of this paper is to center the conversation of urban school closures in the global system of racial capitalism using the Black Heretical Tradition (BHT). I explore the processes, problems, and possibilities associated with teaching and learning in the midst of the reality of school closures.

Perspective
Racial capitalism and the Black radical tradition have been used separately in theorizing schooling; however, theorizing using both is crucial to examining school closures. The Black Heretical Tradition challenges scholars along with policy makers and school leaders to understand the impacts of closing a school on an intrapersonal and interpersonal level.

Methods and Data Sources
This paper draws from a larger critical ethnohistorical case study that took place over a two-year timeframe from 2019 to 2021 focused on the Englewood area located in Chicago, where all their traditional public neighborhood high schools either were closed or phased out within the last ten years (Karp, 2018). I approached the data and writing process with the fundamental question, what remains after a school is closed and what survives?

Aligned with oral history and ethnography design (Emerson, Fretz, & Shaw, 1995; Ritchie, 2015), this study generated the following: (1) 31 written reflexive memos on the interviews and internal processing; (2) 5 self-reflexive audio recordings on research process and internal processing; (3) 10 yearbooks, cultural items; and (4) newspaper articles and documentaries.

Results
Although a school might close, the people and their memories remain. According to Nia and some other students and educators, rigor and critical thinking is a must in teaching Black/African American children. Nia shared, I think our children will continue to thrive and I think that’s what’s missing in 2021, is that we don't have enough people who really know that our children are not robots. Legend similarly mentioned the importance of teaching children, especially Black students to think critically and for themselves. Legend discussed his thoughts on this, albeit with great pause:

I just feel. we are… more people are less independent thinkers. And that I feel like that's by design. I feel like that comes from like I say before…the school to prison pipeline. Like we are raised into acting a certain way, doing a certain way, expressing ourselves a certain way, like basically we are robots. Well, what's the TV show? the walking dead?

Similarly to Nia, Legend specifically invoked “robots”, to describe the ways in which Black/African American children are taught to act and express themselves in certain ways that produces fewer independent thinkers.

Scholarly Significance
What would an education system look like if it was a place of truth (s), trust, love, respect, rigor and had abundant money and resources? Over the years, despite having some of these, unfortunately the school was not sustained nor prevented from landing on the chopping block of school closure policy.

Author

• Shakita Thomas Kpetay, Connecticut College