Where the Repetition Fades: Black Feminist Lessons From Everyday Engagements

• In Event: Beyond Epiphanies: Critique of Whiteness in Teacher Education and Society by Women of Color

Abstract

Objectives
Queue up Brittany Howard’s song “History Repeats” and see what happens. A diffractive and relational approach hums while rereading critical whiteness studies (CWS) through black feminist thought (BFT). In this conceptual paper, we draw on BFT to discuss immunity with impunity to rethink the pedagogy of white privilege and the production of whiteness as its object of knowledge. We disrupt traditional practices of biocentric disciplinary knowing toward radical (un)disciplinary possibilities.

Perspectives
Central to this paper is (re)framing whiteness as a racial discourse to focus on staying vigilant in (re)producing analyses (Applebaum, 2016; Leonardo, 2009). With critiques of whiteness as entrypoints and co-conspiring with BFT, we illuminate the elusiveness of white immunity to refuse history’s repetition and to undo immunity with impunity. Nolan Cabrera’s (2017) work on the concept of white immunity addresses the systemic nature of racism and provides a lens into the formation of whiteness, which affords white people to historically and contemporaneously experience a “social inoculation to the disparate treatment that was structured for people of color” (p. 84). From such perspectives, and through decolonial and anticolonial work, we learn to practice, think, and be differently. This work is not perfect nor is it possible to finish. Where the repetition fades into the future, we offer our engagements with BFT to demonstrate pedagogies with/out colonial, biocentric categories.

Modes of Inquiry
Howard’s “History Repeats” bursts open with a drum roll and electric guitar for a blues-rock-funk melodic wave of sense-making. Floating through the sound and repetition of lyrics invites a pause (Patel, 2016). During an intentional thinking-writing-jam session, we listened to the tune while reading the lyrics in an attempt to create methodological openings, to consider an otherwise praxis through a sonic altering of space and time, to refuse history that repeats or another round of doom of objecthood and otherness.

Scholarly Significance
We turn to BFT because it seeks radical possibilities where there is often foreclosure. BFT teaches us that blackness is not limited to the categories of otherness and objecthood, or the category itself, or the (over)reliance on a logic that can only reproduce difference with separability (Silva, 2007, 2016). BFT also teaches us to notice the binary framing so that our thinking might escape, even briefly, the deference to biocentric disciplinary determinations (McKittrick, 2021).

Connection to Conference Theme
There is a different way of doing/undoing. Lessons from BFT remind us to question how global forces structure educational opportunity and the purpose of education in general. From such an analytical stance, we also hold in contention the ways CWS’s production of whiteness contributes to the production of educational equity as a disciplinary object with implications for teaching, learning, and teacher education. We ask, how can we rethink student learning despite inadequate and often hostile environments and systems? Our task points to ways of being answerable to schools and communities with methodologies and pedagogies of the future.

Authors

• Cee Carter, University of Massachusetts - Amherst

• Korina Jocson, University of Massachusetts - Amherst