Black Critical Patriotism as Praxis: Black Male Teacher-Coaches’ Tools of Transformation

• In Event: Building Emancipatory Spaces: Black Educators and Transformative Pedagogies in Social Studies Education

Abstract

While conservative and liberal notions of patriotism have oscillated between authoritarian and democratic ideologies, neither of these white-normative constructs have tended to the specificity of how Black folks have utilized critical patriotism to reclaim personhood. I challenge conservative, assimilationist approaches that attempt to sanitize the specificity of Black folks' use of schools to implement projects of revisionist ontology. Drawing on Busey & Walker’s (2017) theory of Black critical patriotism and Robin D.G. Kelley’s (2022) notion of freedom dreams, the purpose of this phenomenological study was to explore how Black male teacher-coaches utilize physical, political, and intellectual resistance as forms of critical patriotism to secure the personhood of Black boys and create ripples in time for dreaming of liberatory futures.

Author

• Daniel J. Thomas, Texas A&M University