Critical Race and Black Feminist Analyses of U.S. Schooling and Decolonizing Alternatives

• In Event: Counter Points and Counter Stories: The Long Struggle of Resistance

Abstract

This conceptual paper examines U.S. schooling as a site of the systematic devaluation, extraction, and erasure of the intellectual, cultural, emotional, and political labor of Black women educators. This work contends that dominant schooling practices are intentionally crafted through white supremacist, capitalist, and patriarchal logics to contain Black life and reproduce racialized hierarchies. This paper first analyzes the ideological and material structures of U.S. schooling through gendered racial capitalism and Black feminist thought and then turns to decolonized African diaspora alternatives, particularly those grounded in abolition, to examine how Black women educators disrupt dominant paradigms and enact liberatory educational visions. In a political moment marked by anti-Black censorship and state-sanctioned repression, this paper calls for decolonized, African diaspora alternatives that reject the commodification of Black knowledge and instead reimagine education as a site of historical consciousness, spiritual care, and collective liberation.

Author

• Bisola A. Wald, University of Minnesota