Freedom Dreaming Through the Fathers of Ft. Washington: Troubling the Invisibility of Overabundance

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

Abstract

In the Tar Baby African folktale, Br’er Rabbit was a seminal trickster figure known for outfoxing potential enemies and escaping to the refuge of his communal home where threats from the outside world ceased to exist—the briar patch (Gates and Tater, 2012). Whether bound on transatlantic vessels trafficking human cargo, enslaved in colonial death camps, or Jim Crowed into segregated spaces via de jure policies, the Black family and community has served as a briar patch where Black folks have gathered to reimagine their existence beyond the projection of a white-controlled scholastic regime of truth (Wynter, 1997). Despite scholarship that has well documented how Black male fathers have been present within the briar patch (Webber, 1978; Young, 2001), particularly in relation to education (Anderson & Moss, 1991; Fairclough, 2009), a discourse of pathologically defunct Black men has dominated the public imagination from the early 1900s well into the twenty-first century (author removed). Within this century-long totalizing trope, Black male fathers have been cast as being so chronically absent that they have become mythologized (author removed). The Brown decision, however, did not eradicate all vestiges of the traditional briar patch.

Drawing on Michael Dawson’s (1994) notion of Black counterpublics and Robin D.G. Kelley’s (2022) conceptualization of freedom dreaming, I analyze my experiences growing up in the wealthiest predominantly Black community in the nation during the 1990s/2000s—Prince George’s County, Maryland (i.e., my briar patch)—where there was an abundance of Black male fathers. Beyond serving as a counter to the dominant narrative of Black men functioning as chronically absent abdicators of duty to their families and communities, the fathers of Ft. Washington illuminates a space that does not exist in the public imagination—a locale with an abundance of Black male fathers. While existing within a shared Black counterpublic (i.e., P.G. County), these fathers are complex, multi-dimensional figures enacting an array of freedom dreaming pedagogies. The following question guided this paper: How do Black male fathers conceptualize and enact an array of freedom dreaming pedagogies within a Black counterpublic where they are numerically abundant?

Author

• Daniel J. Thomas, Texas A&M University