Abstract: Defining monuments as "ideological powerhouses," this article argues that the current dismantling of confederate monuments is a dismantling of white supremacy. More than symbolic destruction of representations, theses ?acts of take-down? are concrete, physically manifested interruptions of systemic racism. Drawing on Black radical feminist theory, Kristen Dotson's philosophic work on epistemologies, and current public media analyses, the article uses an activist-philosophy frame to discuss how the current context of the Black Lives Matter movement is shaping contemporary societal demands for racial change. It argues that today's confederate monument topplings, which happen in the public square, constitute anti-racist critical public pedagogies which engage the public(s) in bold interruptions of anti-Black white supremacy and have a vision for change. Anti-racist critical public pedagogies (1) critique the inequities proliferated by relationships of power in the public sphere (especially racial inequities); (2) resist and interrupt these inequities through embodied practices; and (3) offer a vision for equitable racial social change. In the confederate monument protests, anti-racist critical public pedagogies leverage the "collective voice" of protestors as "public power" in public spaces and places to affect sociopolitical change. The article asks, ?What might sustain the activism of this historical moment?? and proposes that to sustain social change, three elements need to be present: Racial Honesty; Culture of Praxis; and Radical Imagination and Love. The discussion does not aim to provide a prescriptive analysis but, rather, to engage with readers in a conversation about the kinds of questions that might keep today's activism fueled and visionary.
Abstract: Background/Context: This article examines a 2011 court case in which an Ohio state court convicted and jailed a poor, single, Black mother of two school-aged children for “stealing an education.” Using a false address, the mother, Kelley Williams-Bolar, enrolled her daughters in a public school district that was more privileged and amply resourced than their home district in order to provide her children a “better education.” The court’s ruling and public opinion on this case (as illustrated through media) serve as the context of this article’s analysis.
Purpose: Employing Judith Butler’s concept of precarity, Jacques Derrida’s theory of justice to come, and Hannah Arendt’s and Walter Benjamin’s ideas about state violence, the article offers a conceptual framework of the precariousness of justice to analyze the implications of this case. Through the precariousness of justice framework, the article examines the ways that racial and class societal inequities manifest themselves through the judge’s juridical determination and journalistic expressions of public opinion. The purpose of this article is to explicate the intimate and structural connections between racism, classism, educational policy, and the U.S. court system. Research Design: As a conceptual analysis, the article theoretically examines the Williams-Bolar court case as a demonstration of the ways in which the juridical apparatus of the state (the court system) and mainstream media (public opinion) divide people by race and class within inequitable societal structures. The article uses the theoretical framework of the precariousness of justice to examine the political implications of the court’s ruling on educational policy regarding school districting.
Conclusions: Findings include that school district enrollment boundaries create borders around people by race and class, and that these educational enrollment borders can lead to people “border-hopping” in an effort to equalize educational access. The court system plays a role in reifying race- and class-based educational boundaries and borders. The concluding analysis situates this case within the context of both state violence and hope.
Abstract: The protest and movement #BlackLivesMatter that began in 2012 has fueled a national will of resistance to State violence and has nourished a sense of humanity that demands the valuing of all Black people. As part of the U.S.'s long history of systemic racism and its histories of local resistance, #BlackLivesMatter (BLM hereafter) has renewed "national attention to the disregard for the lives of young Black men by the established structures of power . . . [and] calls for a deeper humanity." In this nationally visible moment of moral outrage about the disposable treatment of Black people, BLM pushes the grieving of marginalized people of color into the public eye and the nation's historical narrative. BLM's ideological and political intervention is a call to change the existential and sociopolitical conditions for Black lives. The authors argue that, as a movement in history and a public project at this moment in time, BLM reframes for society who matters as a human life. In the first section of the article, their analysis begins with the relationship between precariousness and mattering, arguing that BLM's protests are enacted through contesting the grievability of precarious, lost Black lives, thereby claiming Black lives recognizable as a human life. In the second section, they build on this analysis with a discussion of interpellation, dispossession, and haunting. Their argument here is that the sociopolitical differential distribution of precariousness (vulnerability) is enacted often through geographically-located racial inequality and spatially distributed dispossession of mattering. In the final section they argue that BLM's dimension of consciousness-raising also has an educative message for formal schooling: it cannot operate outside of BLM's national educational undertaking, for schooling too is hailed by BLM to recognize that all lives matter only when all Black lives matter. The authors connect BLM's educational message to schooling through its call to renew an examination of schooling's own racialized conditions of mattering. They suggest a pedagogy of hauntology, constituting an education for grievability, as one way for schooling to respond to this call.