The Archive as Racial & Gender Curriculum: Reading and Writing Black Other-Mothering Through and Beyond the Archive

• In Event: Archives as Resistance: Understanding Archive as Curriculum and Decolonial Praxis

Abstract

Overview
This paper examines the experiences of Black women educators (teachers and para educators) through archival material, oral histories with former Black Panther Party educators, and my own mother. Grounding my mother’s story within the work of scholar Nick Juravitch (2015, 2017, 2019), I highlighted her connection to the larger paraprofessionals of the time. This paper examines three projects: 1) the work of women in Black power and the resistance to Black Panther women’s leadership in education (Author, 2020). 2) The use of Black women paraprofessionals in recruitment and additional labor in classrooms with false promises of career advancement. My mother’s reintroduction to her own sense of self-determination through her time as a paraprofessional. These counternarratives push against the silences of Black women’s voices as embodied curriculum, curriculum theorists, and living archives, thus repositioning the archive as a counter-institution for liberatory praxis.

Purpose: The key purpose of this piece is to examine how knowing, reading and highlighting the presence of Black women into the archives is essential for Black feminist historical work. Drawing on the methods work of Black feminist historians (Alameen-Shavers, 2016; Farmer, 2018; Spencer, 2008), this paper traces lesser explored stories of Black women educators in the Black Power era.

Theoretical Framework: Drawing from Black feminist historical discourse, especially the work of Robyn Spencer (2008, 2017), Daina Ramey Berry and Kali Nichole Gross (2020), and Ashley Farmer (2017, 2018), this piece explores the challenges of writing Black women’s intersectional history in education. In a critique of “archiving while Black,” (Farmer, 2018), I trace my own work with writing about Black women educators in the Black Power era. Challenging the capitalistic nature of paywalls, carceral logics of surveillance, restrictions, and structures in traditional archival spaces, and disproportionate gaps in archive collections surrounding Black women, this work examines the practices of reading against the grain and looking for Black women in the archival silences.

Methods/Data Source: This paper draws heavily from my archival research on Black Panther women educators and Oakland Black women paraprofessionals. It also draws from my oral histories with Black women educators from the 1970s and 1980s.

Findings: This piece explores the careful work of reading carefully through and around the archive and interweaving multiple sources from a variety of spaces to find the invisibilized narratives of Black women as educators and curriculum theorists.

Significance: This work is important to the fields history of education and history more broadly as it repositions the ubiquitous labor of Black women in the 1960s-1980s. It also highlights the practices of historical research as reshaping our notions of curriculum during the Black Power era. By critiquing the traditional archive and forcing it into conversation with less institutionalized knowledges, I argue for the process of expanding the archive as a racial and gender text, and for reshaping the archive as a site of critical inquiry and (re)membering.

Author

• Robert P. Robinson, CUNY - John Jay College of Criminal Justice