Black Education’s Implications for non-Black People: A Relational Race Analysis

• In Event: Looking Back, Looking Forward, Imagining Futures: CORIBE’s Black Education Research Agenda -- Impacts 20 Years Later

Abstract

A focus on Black education has many influences or precursors, one of which is Frantz Fanon’s work. As the burgeoning work on the specificities of anti-blackness enjoys broad engagement in education, the humanities and social sciences, Fanon’s insights experience increased attention one hundred years after his birth. In tandem, as the U.S. witnesses the intensification of anti-Asian racism, a conversation between Fanon’s analysis of anti-blackness in his two most influential books, Black Skin, Whites Masks and The Wretched of the Earth, reminds us that Asian racialization is both relational (HoSang, 2022) and triangulated (Kim, 2022). In the first, HoSang’s relational race analysis emphasizes that any group’s racial history must be taken relationally with other groups, such that anti-Asian hate does not exist in a vacuum or autonomously but is coordinated with and constitutive of anti-blackness. Moreover, in the second, Kim’s triangulation theory explains Asian Americans’ racialization as located within the interstices of a group’s history, who is neither Black nor white, and must navigate the particular anxieties of this triangulation process. In this presentation, I will attempt to discern the relationship between anti-blackness and anti-Asian racism.

Author

• Zeus Leonardo, University of California - Berkeley