Revisiting the Social Role of Radical Imagination Amidst Widespread Democratic Erosion

• In Event: Transformative Dynamics: Reimagining Evidence, Organizational Agency and Societal Change

Abstract

The Economist Intelligence Unit downgraded the United States from a full to a flawed democracy in 2021 (Williamson, 2023). In the U.S., as in many other countries today, one principal indicator of that shift is the increasing willingness among a share of elected leaders to deny election outcomes and to reduce access to the ballot for selected groups while also publicly appealing to racist and other prejudices to scapegoat specific groups as supposed architects of the despoiling of the country. In the United States those targeted have included immigrants and refugees and minorities of various stripes including Blacks, Hispanics and Muslims as well as, increasingly, Jews (Richardson, 2023). We examine an ongoing case that can help to illuminate how those beset by these forms of oppression maintain their dignity and hope for the future despite that injustice. For us, that case is the repurposing of one of the many Black schools that existed across the southern United States during the period of active racial segregation prior to the early 1960s. Those institutions were sites for Black Americans not only of possibility, community and comity, but also of disciplined excellence (ASALH, 2023). With desegregation, many such schools were incorporated into existing previously Whites-only educational systems, while many more were abandoned. A share of the latter today are targets of efforts led by Black Americans to reimagine them to honor the vital roles they played during segregation while also serving their current communities in new ways. For us, these initiatives raise two interrelated questions. First, how the nonprofit groups undertaking such projects today describe the legacy of the schools whose aims they are reimagining and second, how their advocates are imagining paths forward amidst reinvigorated headwinds of racism and social oppression. We root our analysis in one historically significant case, the Calfee Training School, in Pulaski, Virginia, which served that community’s African American population from 1894-1966 (Calfee, 2023). We plan to interview the executive director and a sample of board members of the renamed Calfee Community & Cultural Center concerning our central questions and to locate our effort theoretically in the literature of Black surrealism and radical imagination (Kelley,2022), Paulo Freire’s conception of hope (Freire, 2014) and Maxine Greene’s contention that praxis can “exist within the imagination, within the capacity to look at things as if they could be otherwise” (Greene, 2007). That is we are interested in analyzing how this group is sustaining what Stockdale has labeled “intrinsic faith” (2021) amidst a fresh wave of discrimination as they have sought to conceive new ways of using a historically emancipatory space to serve their community. We aim to identify the strategies our case group has embraced to imagine things otherwise. In turn, we contend that doing so can inform other civil society groups seeking to confront renewed oppression predicated on alterity, whether in the U.S. or other nations now also experiencing democratic erosion.

References

Association for the Study of African American Life and History, (ASALH), “Black History Themes: Black Resistance,” https://asalh.org/black-history-themes/, Accessed October 15, 2023.
Calfee Community & Cultural Center, “History,” https://calfeeccc.org/our-history, Accessed October 17, 2023.
Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of Hope, Bloomsbury Press, 1996/2014.
Greene, Maxine. “Imagination and the Healing Arts,” 2007, https://maxinegreene.org/uploads/library/imagination_ha.pdf, Accessed October 16, 2023.
Kelley, Robin D. G. Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, Boston: Beacon Press, 2002/2022.
Richardson, Heather Cox. Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America. New York: Viking/Random House Press, 2023.
Stockdale, Katie. Hope Under Oppression. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021.
Williamson, Vanessa. “Understanding Democratic Decline in the United States,” Brookings Brief, October 17, 2023, Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/understanding-democratic-decline-in-the-united-states/?utm_campaign=Governance%20Studies&utm_medium=email&utm_content=278930679&utm_source=hs_email, Accessed October 17, 2023.

Authors

• Max Stephenson, Virginia Tech

• Neda Moayerian, Virginia Polytechnic Institute

• Brad Stephens, Virginia Tech School of Public and International Affairs