Black Grief as the Nexus Toward the Beyond: Toward Truth Telling on the Trauma That Is School

• In Event: Healing Racialized Trauma: Grief and Love as a Praxis for Racial Justice

Abstract

As Black people, our everyday existence invites us to remember that anti-blackness is the foundation of modern civilization and has metastasized throughout every construction of civil society (Sharpe, 2016). For centuries, we have looked to schools and integration within them as a vital aspect of our self-determination (Givens, 2021; Woodson, 1998). Our personal experiences, as well as educational theory on black schooling, unveils them as harmful reproductive enclosures and extensions of the plantation. (Dumas, 2014; Ladson-Billings, 1998; Love, 2019; Somé, 1999; Wun; 2016). Schools are sites of trauma.

As a result, this paper first mourns our beliefs in schooling and the conflating of our humanization with matriculation in schools. The paper then seeks to highlight the inextricable link between our social death and the function of schools (Patterson, 1982). It calls witness to the social reproduction of Black trauma and death that schools rely upon for national order (Wilderson, 2003). This paper seeks to lay to rest the schooling project, engaging Christina Sharpe’s (2016) mournful meditation on the Wake to exhume how even critical education work can reinforce the very projects it seeks to fight against.

This paper concludes by holding ceremonial space for prospective and veteran educators across the K-20 continuum to re-conceptualize their curricular posture and join us in a final farewell to schooling. From Shujaa (1993), we distinguish schooling from education and propose an Apocalyptic Educational framework (Marie & Watson, 2020) – a meditation, a posture, an epistemological stance rooted in African ancestral ways of knowing (Ani, 1994; Fu- Kiau, 2014) to help us make sense of our loss and usher us into new ways of existing and being beyond the afterlife of schooling.

Author

• Tiffani Marie, San Jose State University