Getting Killed by Getting Along: The Strangulation of (Black) Suffering in Elementary Education

• In Event: 42.064 - Race Theory and Educational Research: The Power of "Representations"

Abstract

Pollyannaish attachments to elementary education regularly slip through the cracks of public critique and comprehension, irrespective of acclaimed education researchers’ protests of US schooling conditions beneath militaristic, carceral, and corporate ascendancy (Giroux, 2013, 2016; Anyon, 1997; Apple, 2013; McLaren, 2005). “Positive attitudes” and “getting along” “with peace and justice for all” construct elementary schools as a protected paradise that is both colorful and colorblind. Nevertheless, this educational innocence is stained by sociocultural sepsis. Routine police murders and detainment of the bodies of black boys denied of childhoods or of their fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, cuts deeply into the shape of elementary classrooms and student achievement (e.g., hooks, 2004; Noguera, 1995; Conchas & Vigil, 2012; Duncan-Andrade, 2009). While it is no secret that there is widespread failure to provide public education to black youth in the US (Stroup & Robins, 1972; Kunjufu, 1985; Sewell, 1997), the confrontation of black suffering within and beyond the classroom remains taboo at the elementary level. Seeking to decrypt elementary education’s gaping response to blatant brutality against black bodies, this paper considers three illustrations from teacher autoethnography in metropolitan Detroit. The methodological approach heeds Frantz Fanon’s (1963) understanding that decoloniality involves not only contesting physical bondages, but captivities of the psyche. The evidence finds an atmosphere of violence permeates the elementary classroom, putatively neutral principles preserving anti-blackness in elementary consciousness. Merged with Saidiya Hartman’s (1997) caution against reinforcing “the spectacular character of black suffering,” this paper “raids for fragments upon which other narratives can be spun.” As follows, these classroom readings draw from less facile scenes of horror, discerning the violence of black suffering in the everyday routines of elementary education, not bounded by the “most heinous and grotesque examples” cuffed to black bodies (Hartman, 1997). Reading alongside black scholarly critique (Weheliye, 2014; Sexton, 2011; Hartman & Wilderson, 2003) and striving to make room for a more responsive elementary education across perilous colonial topography, the author refuses elementary education complacency muddling or muffling black suffering.

Author

• Ellen Lin, University of California - Berkeley