Fugitive Learning: An Inquiry in Black Scholastic Life

• In Event: 25.035 - Underground, Outer Space, and on the Move: Fugitive Possibilities in Black Education

Abstract

As an enslaved boy in Virginia during the early 19th century, James Fisher routinely carried a book on his head, concealed under a hat (Blassingame, 1977, p. 465). Mandy Jones recalled how other enslaved people on her Mississippi plantation stole away at night to climb into a pit in the ground, “an some niggah dat had some learning would have a school” (Williams, 2007, p. 28). Tessie McGee, a Black teacher in Louisiana during the 1930s, secretly read to her students from “Carter G. Woodson’s book on the Negro,” which she kept hidden underneath her desk (Givens, forthcoming).

Drawing from a repertoire of historical scenarios, such as those above, this paper offers a meditation on the kinds of learning that happens for Black people below ground—under a hat, under the earth, under the desk—as sites for thinking about and cultivating Black freedom dreams (Kelley, 2003). The significance of these scenarios, here, have less to do with what was learned (content wise), and more to do with the act of going underground/outside to seek a new human vision for black psychic and social life (acts of refusal/negation). A critical Black memory and epistemology has always been cultivated in underground spaces. This was a learning that insisted on Black humanity and was, therefore, necessarily disruptive of dominant ethics of schooling and terms of knowledge. This underground consciousness is the lifeline of Black sociality and politics. Building from this historiography of subversive Black pedagogy, this essay considers fugitive learning as a necessary mode of Black social life in a world that is distinctly antiblack, lest we become the thing that required our abjection to begin with.

Ultimately, this paper asserts that there is an interiority to Black scholastic life that merits its own naming. It harbors a tradition of fugitive learning: secret and subtle forms of educational resistance that have long shaped experiences of African American teachers and students. This praxis of education has been secret and apart from dominant modes of learning in the American school, even as it often took place within its confinement. Fugitive learning extends from what Zora Neale Hurston (1935) referred to as the “featherbed resistance” of Black life, what Kevin Young (2012) has termed “the shadow book,” the hidden parts of the mind often veiled or partitioned off from the world of power; a strategic and partial translucence employed by Black people. That’s to say, fugitive learning has been a quintessential posture in the history of African American teaching and learning.

Author

• Jarvis Ray Givens, Harvard University