“Negroes Plan to Kill All Whites”

This chapter, which covers the first three decades of the twentieth century, begins with an account of the life and career of W. E. B. Du Bois, the most influential Black intellectual and social scientist of that period. A classic insider/outsider in American society, Du Bois earned a Harvard PhD in sociology and wrote a pioneering study of systemic racism in The Philadelphia Negro. He was also an outspoken activist in the Socialist Party and NAACP. Du Bois’s work placed him at the forefront of struggles against racism, especially in northern cities into which 1.5 million southern Blacks moved in the Great Migration, lured by the prospect of steady, well-paid factory jobs. These Black migrants, however, were outnumbered two to one by southern White migrants to those cities, who forced Blacks into ghettos with rundown, overcrowded housing and inferior schools. Tensions between the races intensified after World War I, sparking the “Red Summer” of 1919, with major race riots—instigated by Whites—in Washington, D.C., and Chicago, leaving dozens dead and thousand with burned-out homes. The bloodshed culminated that fall with the massacre of some two hundred Black tenant farmers and their families in the town of Elaine, Arkansas, followed two years later by another massacre, in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The decade of the 1920s offered northern Blacks little respite from the racism that kept them from escaping poverty.

The Limits of Justice-Informed Research and Teaching in the Presence of Antiblackness and Black Suffering: Surplus of Transformation or (Un)Just Traumatic Returns?

In this conceptual article, I examine the turn of justice-oriented research and teaching from transformative to traumatic and its relationship to antiblackness. I consider the affordances and limits of research and teaching that makes antiblackness visible while simultaneously citing potentially traumatizing portraits of Black suffering. Drawing from critical multicultural education and social justice scholarship, alongside Black intellectual thought in literary studies, visual studies, Eastern philosophy, and participatory and ethnographic research, I ask whether and how researchers should engage justice-informed research and teaching. I offer insights to consider when seeking either to capture antiblack injustice or to share it as curriculum.

Tacit curriculum of Black intellectual ineptitude: Black girls' perspectives on Texas school desegregation implementation in the 1970s

PurposeThis paper uses former Black girl students' experiential knowledge as a lens to examine Black students' experiences with formal and informal curriculum; it looks to the 1970s during Waco Independent School District's desegregation implementation process.Design/methodology/approachGuided by critical race theory, I used historical and oral history methods to address the question: In newly desegregated schools, what does Black females' experiential knowledge of the academic and social curriculum reveal about Black students' experiences within school desegregation implementation process? Specifically, I drew on oral history interviews with former Black girl students, local newspapers, school board minutes, legal correspondence, memoranda, yearbooks, and brochures.FindingsBlack girls' holistic perspectives, which characterized Black students' experiences more generally, indicate Waco Independent School District's implementation of school desegregation promoted a tacit curriculum of Black intellectual ineptitude.OriginalityMy main contribution is the concept of tacit curriculum, which I identified through the lens of former Black girl students, whose experiences spoke to Black students' experiences more widely. It also offers Black females' firsthand perspectives of the school desegregation implementation process in Texas, a perspective, a process, and a place heretofore underexamined in history of education scholarship.

Sam C. Nolutshungu: Race, Reform, Resistance and the Black Consciousness Movement

This paper excavates and historically contextualizes the political theory of a largely neglected thinker within South African black intellectual history, Sam C. Nolutshungu. It seeks to rectify the current imbalance in South African intellectual history which largely neglects or effaces the contribution of black thinkers in the colonial or Apartheid period notwithstanding significant black contributions in theorizing racial submission, domination, reform and popular resistance in the context of state oppression. In this paper I argue that two such areas of inquiry are present in Nolutshungu’s overall position on political reform. The first is with regards to his intervention in the race- class debates which dominated political and intellectual discussions during the late Apartheid period. Here, Nolutshungu, argues that political domination could not be reformed with simple concessions as a result of its racially exclusionary nature. Thus Nolutshungu argued that race rather than class was the fundamental source of domination. The second is the theoretical evaluation of the social and political significance of the Black Consciousness Movement as an important symbol of resistance and racial solidarity. The link between these two aspects of his thought, I argue are not insignificant and should be carefully considered. Nolutshungu’s valuable analysis on the route to political reform is strengthened by his evaluation of the role of the Black Consciousness Movement, which for Nolutshungu was an instance of how resistance was mobilized along racial rather than class lines. Moreover, the Black Consciousness Movement not only prioritized the question of race as a primary factor in its mode of resistance but served to illustrate how and why meaningful change in South Africa was contingent on the abolition of racial oppression and the overturning of the institutions of Apartheid. Finally, I argue that there is a contextual urgency in undertaking projects that seek to establish the importance of black intellectual ideas and reclaiming these ideas in order to give content and meaning to contested contemporary debates on justice, legitimacy, liberty, equality and land rights in South Africa. While the discourse of the negotiated settlement and reconciliation sparks intense debate often resulting in greater forms of racial polarisation, historical rumination and reflection offers a powerful and enduring opportunity for collective inquiry.

Identity Lost and Regained: A Postcolonial Analysis of Don Shirley’s Dilemma in Green Book

Images of black men in movies have been depicted negatively as brutal rioters or silly clowns at large for centuries, consolidating the stereotype that black man is inferior and subordinate compared with the white. Green Book, an Oscar-winning movie in 2019, subverts the traditional images of black men and white men, successfully portraying a well-educated black intellectual and a vulgar white driver. The present study aims to decode its success in characterizing positive images of black men, and reveal the psychological activity and identity dilemma of the hero, Don Shirley. Based on Fanon’s psychoanalysis and Bhabha’s hybridity theory, this paper probes into the following questions: Firstly, what kind of psychological trauma did the black hero suffer due to his black identity? Secondly, what leads to the hybrid identity of Don Shirley? The result shows that the black hero experienced the psychological trauma of inferiority complex and delusion of becoming white. He first mistook himself as a white man, then he lost his identity and finally regained a hybrid identity. Hybrid identity is attributed to cultural assimilation and otherness, which is a common phenomenon under the backdrop of colonialism. By an in-depth analysis of Don Shirley’s identity dilemma, this paper hopes to shed light on racial discrimination from the perspective of post-colonialism.

Critical Perspectives on Curriculum and Pedagogy

Throughout the history of the United States there has been a long trajectory of dialogue within the field of education around curriculum and pedagogy. Scholars have centered questions such as: What is curriculum? What knowledge should count as curriculum? Who gets to decide? Who does not? And, in turn, what is the pedagogical process of organizing knowledge, subject matter, and skills into curriculum? While many scholars have worked on various approaches to curriculum, the work of Black intellectual scholar Anna Julia Cooper serves as an important point of departure that highlights how curriculum and pedagogy have long been immersed in broader sociopolitical issues such as citizenship, democracy, culture, race, and gender. Starting from the late 19th century, Cooper took up curricular and pedagogical questions such as: What is the purpose of education? What is the role of the educator? And what is the purpose of being student-centered? These are important questions that pull together various traditions and fields of work in education that offer different approaches to curriculum. For instance, the question of whether it’s best to center classical subjects versus striving for efficiency in the development of curriculum has been a debated issue. Across such historical debates, the work of mainstream education scholars such as John Dewey, Ralph Tyler, and Hilda Taba have long been recognized; however, voices from scholars of color, such as Cooper, have been left out or overlooked. Thus, the contributions of Black intellectual scholars such as Cooper, Carter G. Woodson, and other critical scholars of color are brought to the forefront to provide deeper knowledge about the development of curriculum and pedagogy. The work of marginalized scholars is also connected with reconceptualist efforts in curriculum studies to consider current conceptual framings of schooling, curriculum, and pedagogy. Finally, critical theories of curriculum and pedagogy are further unpacked through research conducted with and alongside communities of color. This scholarship includes culturally responsive pedagogy, funds of knowledge, hip-hop pedagogy, reality pedagogy, critically compassionate intellectualism, barrio pedagogy, youth participatory action research (YPAR), and feminist of color pedagogies.