Rural Black Educational Futures: A Curricular Question and Intervention

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

Abstract

Almost a year ago, congress passed the Inflation Reduction Act, one of the most progressive climate change bills in history. However as Green New Deal author Rhiana Gunn-Wright writes in Our Green Transition May Leave Black People Behind, we should take seriously how race and place determines who benefits from clean energy economies. Considering this and the long history of environmental racism, this paper explores historical and contemporary ecological questions at the intersections of race, racism, and education.

History has revealed how rural and small town Black people are subject both to organized abandonment, state-corporate forms of disinvestment and pollution, caused by extractive industries including nuclear and oil. According to Fleishchman and Franklin (2017), Black people are four times more likely to die from exposure to pollution than their white counterparts. From toxic air to the likelihood of cancer, there is less known about the educational impacts this history has had and is having on Black youth and children. To this end, this paper asks how can curriculum reform take up local ecological questions and environmental racism and how could this invigorate the idea of clean energy economics in working class rural Black communities?

This critical narrative study engages in Black community knowledge and spatial struggle to help Black youth remap their understanding of ecological oppression. It brings together–Black ecologies (Hare, 1970), plantation futures (McKittrick, (2013), Black towns (Slocum, 2019), and Black curriculum orientations (Watkins, 1993)–to theorize the narratives of ecological violence and to develop an approach to curriculum that is informed by rural Black struggle. Since 2014, oral histories and community documents have been collected from a rural Black community in the Midwest. From this living archive, two ecological struggles were confronted by rural Black organizing. The first, a fight against local politics that segregated access to city water, which resulted in clean water for more Black residents. The second, Black community organizing that took on the corporate politics of Waste Management Inc. in order to close a landfill in their community. These examples of rural Black ecological struggle were found to be both absent from the historical imagination of its residents and the official history presented by the township and its school districts.

The author contends that the absence of this knowledge is related to the ideas that environmental justice is only a white or urban question, and that Black folk are disconnected to the right of property and knowledge of land use. To this end, the author proposes that creating critical place-based and participatory action activities with these stories and experiences alongside local history can not only offer Black students an opportunity to see themselves as agents of change but also help propel future careers and community involvement that attend to contemporary ecological issues, such as the violence of landfill gas. Overall, this paper contributes to critical approaches that function to recover and address how we study and design place-based curriculum for marginal geographic locations.

Author

• Ezekiel Joubert, California State University - Los Angeles