(Re)Membering Why I Am Here: (Re)Centering My Own Black-Brilliance as Spirit-Healing Praxis

• In Event: (Re)Centering Our Blackness and Ourselves: Black Women's Research as Responsibility to Our Spirits

Abstract

Objectives
Systemic antiblackness—just as white supremacy—is a root of the racism tree (Ohito, 2019); it deeply informs our values, which are the foundation of the ethics that shape the our thoughts that later become or determine our actions (Orejel, 2023). Within the educational context, systemic antiblackness manifests in the everyday, anti-Black discourses, and communicative and performative acts (Ohito, 2019) of educators, administrators, and institutions. Consequently, when the specificity of antiblackness (Dumas, 2016), as system and structure, goes unaddressed, any Black Scholar and Black Educator is predisposed to anti-Black racism, as (violent) human experience, within any institution. This includes, but is not limited to schooling experiences that are miseducational (Woodson, [1933]2010), diseducational (Shujaa, 1998), dehumanizing (Warren et. al, 2022; Howell et. al, 2019; Love, 2019; Baker-Bell, 2019), soul-wound inflicting (Emdin, 2021), spirit-murdering (Love, 2019), and violent (Johnson et. al, 2018). Given the above, this study explores the impact that systemic antiblackness, anti-Black racism, and white supremacy has had on my journey as a Black woman doctoral student in a medium-sized state university.

Theory
I theorize a Black-Brilliance Praxis framework that addresses the specificity of (anti)blackness in education, by synthesizes Endarkened Feminist Epistemologies (Dillard, 2000), BlackCrit Theory in education (Dumas and ross, 2016), and Healing Methodologies of the Spirit (Dillard & Bell, 2011). My Black-Brilliance Praxis framework serves as a theoretical and analytical tool for understanding the tensions within the internal, spiritual work I needed to do to affirm my own humanity, and it illuminates the ways institutions can begin the internal heart-work needed to dismantle the anti-Black systems, structures, and practices that reify systemic antiblackness and uphold white supremacy within academia.

Methods and Data
Using nkwaethnography (Dillard & Bell, 2011), I draw from my own student work, reflections, survey responses, and other media/electronic communications to examine the ways in which my own Blackness, and that of the other Black women within my program, were (un)affirmed, (un)policed, and (un)welcomed. Moreover, I use the above data points to underscore how I endeavored to (re)imagine and (re)humanize my own Blackness in order to heal my spirit from the traumatic effects of anti-Black racism.

Findings and Significance
Expanding upon Dumas and ross’ (2016) argument that educational discourse needs to address the specificity of antiblackness, I carry on and build upon the tradition, by demonstrating and asserting that until institutions understand and then address the systemic element of antiblackness— i.e., the historical, educational, and ideological impact of antiblackness on their systems, structures, and policies— Black Scholars will continue to be (re)imagined as the problem, and schools will remain the most prominent site of Black suffering (Love, 2019; Dumas, 2016). Furthermore, without addressing the human element—i.e., the cultural impact of antiblackness via the intrapersonal and interpersonal values, ethics, beliefs, and actions (Orejel, 2023) rooted in anti-Blackness—efforts to (re)imagine Blackness in education, by mitigating anti-Black racism, creating humanizing places and spaces for Black Scholars and Educators, and increasing academic achievement will remain insufficient.

Author

• Kiese Vita, California State University - East Bay