Community-Based Spaces and Black Educational Futurities

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

Abstract

Black youth are a constant focus of educational research in the US; they encounter gratuitous violence in school settings in myriad ways (Dumas, 2014; Dumas & ross, 2016). Further, under the current educational policy context informed by neoliberal values, the academic achievement of Black youth in schools is too often explained as a cultural or individual problem rather than a structural problem caused by centuries of anti-Black violence and a deliberate denial of educational freedom and access to social mobility (Diamond, 2018; Dumas, 2016; Ladson-Billings, 2006). Yet, despite this reality, Black young people, in partnership with adults, have always built community spaces of affirmation, learning, healing, and resistance (Author, 2020; Ginwright, 2007; Givens, 2021; Hunter et al., 2016). Youth work via community-based educational spaces (CBES) (Author, 2018), such as youth programs, non-profit organizations, social movement organizations, and afterschool spaces, offers an excellent possibility for fostering the academic, social, cultural, political, and activist lives of Black youth (Author, 2018; Ginwright, 2007, 2010; Ginwright & Cammarota, 2002; Woodland, 2016) – and are very much rooted in historical traditions of Black educational thought and pedagogy. There is also great precarity—exacerbated by broader sociopolitical forces that lead to the dispossession of Black neighborhoods and Black community organizations. This theoretical paper interrogates the relationship between Black community-based education and the shifting landscapes within Black neighborhoods due to neoliberal education restructuring and the dispossession of Black neighborhoods.

By linking personal and neighborhood-based challenges that youth encounter to macro-level structural inequalities and broader systemic oppression, organizing efforts can lead to long-term social change. Therefore, as we consider the educational futures of Black children and youth, we must include community- in the broadest sense - in our study. We must also understand how the changing landscape of Black neighborhoods shapes their educational possibilities and futures.

Through theories of anti-Blackness in education (Dumas, 2016; Dumas & ross, 2016) and Black placemaking (Hunter et al., 2016), this paper encourages a deeper interrogation of “community” based education by linking the study of Black neighborhoods to Black community-based educational spaces. Unfortunately, in light of Covid-19 and the ongoing dispossession of Black neighborhoods, many community-based organizations engaging Black youth are disappearing from the landscape (Author, forthcoming; Silva, 2019). This paper discusses the consequences of these shifts and what scholars, practitioners, and communities can do to resist.

Author

• Bianca Jontae Baldridge, Harvard University