The Gallery Walk: Centering a Black Sense of Place to Promote Racial Justice

• In Event: Critical Racial Topographies: Methodological Tools and Key Concepts for Research and Practice in Education

Abstract

Purpose:
This paper examines how an attention to Black geography and a Black sense of place (McKittrick 2011) can extend racial spaces analysis and strengthen school-based racial equity efforts.

Theoretical Frame:
Racial spaces analysis (Author 2016, 2020) is a dialogic form of inquiry that uses critical race theory (CRT) to examine how “residential location and community are carried and placed on racial identity” (Calmore 1995, 1235) and how, subsequently, spaces become racialized in ways that justify disinvestment. Black geography offers useful analyses of the role of antiblackness in that process. For instance, in spaces with a lot of Black people, discourses of safety are used as “a form of carceral power over the population” (Shabazz 2015, 66). Relatedly, antiblack carceral progressivism (Shange 2019) relies on the same discourses to “cannibalize” efforts intended to promote racial equity for purposes of surveillance and containment. Exacerbating these dynamics is when Blackness as an idealized concept is used to serve capitalism and white investment at the expense of Black people in the community (Summers 2019).

Black geography also offers tools to respond to antiblackness. Particularly useful is McKittrick’s (2011) Black of place, a set of understandings that are critically informed by—but also not limited by—Black experiences of racial oppression and displacement and that “hold in them useful anti-colonial practices and narratives” (950). These practices illustrate how Black communities have continued to innovatively produce spaces of possibility.

Setting and Methodology:
For ten years I have conducted racial spaces analysis with the equity team at City Elementary, a school in a historically Black neighborhood in the southeast. For example, we have examined how whiteness as property (Harris, 1993) influences normally racial literate teachers to enact—even in mixed-race, mixed-ability-level groups—pedagogical practices that divest educational resources from students of color and invest them in white students. This analysis has been useful in helping teachers disrupt those practices.

Data Sources and Analysis:
This paper focuses on one recent team initiative: a series of gallery-walk activities designed to help teachers more effectively implement the school’s antiracist curriculum. Each classroom was required to create quarterly hallway displays on their progress with that curriculum. The walks involved teachers traveling through the school to learn about, analyze, and respond to those displays. Analyzing this activity from the perspective of a Black sense of place shows how centering the critical racial knowledge of Black staff can help produce, even within racialized spaces, topographies of possibility, accomplishment, and joy for Black students and staff.

Significance:
In the broader community, narratives of City are dominated by reductive educational discourses (e.g., the achievement gap discourse [Carey, 2014]) and by racist discourses about the Black neighborhood, staff, and students. A Black sense of place offers a counternarrative by the community that includes detail about the topography—the ground level features—of the school. By centering those counternarratives, racial spaces analysis can be used in schools like City to not only disrupt dominant racist narratives but also promote more racially just spatial school spaces.

Author

• Benjamin Blaisdell, East Carolina University