Fugitive Slave Narrative: “Escaping” Black Fatherhood in Educational Contexts

• In Event: Complicating Black Fatherhood as a Site of Educational Theorizing and Practice

Abstract

Popular discourses on the absence of Black fathers and other adult male role models in the lives of Black children have driven calls for more Black male teachers in American K-12 schools who can serve as surrogate father figures (Author, 2018). The strong emphasis on Black boys as the beneficiaries of adult role models, along with the cultural legacy of pedophilic depictions of queer adult men, has produced a decidedly cisheteronormative construction of the paternal Black male educator (Author, 2018). Consequently, Black fatherhood operates as a controlling image (Collins, 2000) for Black male teachers—one that scribes expectations for how these men perform their roles and poses risks for those who deviate from the script.

Reflecting on a remark from my father that used the fugitivity of enslaved Blacks as a metaphor to characterize our relationship, I consider what becomes possible when Black fatherhood is understood as a subjectivity and/or relationality that one may want to escape. Building on Campt’s (2014) seminal work on fugitivity, Sojoyner (2017) extends conceptualizations of the concept by stating, “Black fugitivity is based on the disavowal of and disengagement from state-governed projects that attempt to adjudicate normative constructions of difference through liberal tropes of freedom and democratic belonging” (p. 516). In this paper, I assert that one perspective on the trope of Black fatherhood in educational contexts is as a state project that attempts to govern adult Black male bodies within schools and arrange youth relationships to those bodies within cisheteronormative, disciplinary strictures. I then explore “escaping” the controlling image of Black fatherhood as one strategy for centering critical perspectives on the nexus of Black masculinity, state power, and pedagogy in racial justice work in K-12 education.

To help bring this analysis to light, I place my father’s fugitivity remark—noting the heteronormative sensibilities, educational aspirations, middle-class anxieties that shaped it—in conversation with my own prior experience as a Black queer male middle and high school teacher and my current standing as a Black queer male scholar. Doing so helps to surface the affects and negotiations of Black fatherhood as a controlling image. By complementing more conventional academic sources in this paper with this autobiographical narrative, I hope to model
a combination of critical scholarly analysis and self-reflective vulnerability—a longstanding trait of women of color feminist scholarship (Moraga & Anzaldúa, 1981)—that can inform how Black male scholars in particular interrogate Black fatherhood as a site and source of educational interventions.

Author

• Ed Brockenbrough, University of Pennsylvania