Defining Anti-Blackness: What a Systematic Review of Educational Research Literature Reveals

• In Event: Movement in Black Education Studies: Futures for the Field

Abstract

Several Black knowledge traditions have suggested or articulated anti-Blackness as a national and/or global organizer (Du Bois, 1935; Fanon, 1961; Hartman, 1997; Mbembe, 2013; Vargas, 2018; Wilderson, 2010). For instance, The Racial Contract (1997) argues that race is the foundation on which Western society’s sociopolitical organization is built. The perfunctory agreement that establishes expectations for moral agents in a civil society—the social contract—is predicated on an understanding that white is human, and conversely Black people are equivalent to what Mills would describe as “subpersons,” and are therefore excluded from participation in civil society. Mills defines this precursory exclusion as the Racial Contract. For Western society’s social contract to thrive, for whites to be subjects of the contract, Black people must serve as objects of the contract. Drawing upon Afropessimist traditions, Dumas and ross (2016) advocate for critical Black studies focus by highlighting the ways that the imaginations and technologies associated with humanity and life systematically exclude the Black. Building upon this analysis, scholars argue that fundamental to the maintenance of U.S. society and its higher education institutions is an ontoepistemological relationship with the Black body as property (Dancy, Edwards, and Davis, 2018). Each assessment recognizes the antiBlack precondition of Western modernity, an analysis that goes beyond everyday bias, and instead elucidates a structural racial rupture. Mills’ position, along with other scholars of Black thought, piqued our curiosity to investigate assumptions about antiBlackness in education, specifically the usage of the term in research and scholarship.

The term “antiBlackness” has gained increasing traction in academic and popular circles with users drawing from a variety of theoretical traditions to articulate the concept (e.g. Qian et al., 2016; Williams, Burt, Clay, & Bridges, 2019; Williams, Boswell, & Best, 1975). Considering divergent theoretical approaches, our research team endeavored to explore how education scholars are conceptualizing the term. The researchers conducted a systematic review of high-ranking education research journals covering several decades and over 50 articles (to date) to explore the methodological and conceptual study of antiblackness. The authors contend that the term largely functions in education scholarship as a feature rather than analytic with much of this scholarship using critical Black thought to draw reformist conclusions. Sharpe (2016) argues, “For Black academics to produce a legible work in the academy often means adhering to research methods that are drafted in the service of a larger destructive force, thereby doing violence to our own capacities to read, think, and imagine otherwise. Despite knowing otherwise, we are often disciplined into thinking through and along lines that reinscribe our own annihilation” (p. 13). Borrowing from this frame, the authors further suggest that the education research field does violence to Black researcher imagination through assertions of what counts as knowledge and practice. The authors end with a vision for education research that urges deep engagement with critical Black studies toward becoming “undisciplined” (Sharpe, 2016, p. 13), a portal to more rigorous research design and contribution.

Authors

• Elon Dancy, University of Pittsburgh

• Kirsten T. Edwards, Florida International University

• Keon M. McGuire, Arizona State University

• Christopher Wright, University of Pittsburgh

• Jazzkia Jones

• Chetachukwu Uchenna Agwoeme, University of Pittsburgh