Making Us Matter Workbook: Combating Anti-Blackness and White Supremacy: And Other Conversations About Racism in Schools

The Making Us Matter Workbook was designed to inspire communities to initiate and organize a small Clapback Collective that is well-informed and has developed a collective strategy to deal with racism and anti-Blackness in the culture and curriculum of their educational institutions. The author aims to help students and educators develop understanding, utilize tools, and employ strategies needed to effectively combat anti-blackness and racial injustice in their schools. This multi-media resource serves as both syllabus and workbook by providing structure, source material, exercises, discussion questions, and vocabulary needed to turn this knowledge into a comprehensive and collective plan toward educational liberation

“Bad Taste in Movies”: HACKing Films as a Site of Praxis for Black Embodiment

During a time of racial unrest and a hyperfocus on inclusion and representation, three Black scholars from different time zones met on Zoom to discuss recent movies. Initially, our conversation revolved around the role of the representation of Black people in film and contentious arguments about the quality of Marvel’s Black Panther. We shifted toward a more analytical trend when we began to interrogate how the world of cinema has attempted to take progressive steps regarding representation, such as moving away from obvious racialized tropes. Essentially, we concluded that the industry has yet to address its deeper and prevailing flaws when it comes to its perception of Blackness. While much of the previous research on film unpacks the tropes and stereotypes that work as limiting factors, our work seeks to understand how Black characterizations in film serve as sites of praxis, whereby audiences learn how to read and understand Blackness. Using frameworks based on Black critical race theory, critical media studies, and critical race theory, as well as aligning that with our focus group study, we have conceptualized the humanizing approaches to cinematic knowledge (HACK). Our findings suggest that HACK will serve as a tool and mechanism to disrupt the patterns in film that act as a generational stagnation in the way we view the Black community on and off the screen

The Cypher: “We\u27ve Been Inside These Systems”

In this track, Black Educology Mixtape Producers Ant, Dre, and Eghosa sit around a virtual roundtable to discuss what has brought us to create a second volume of BE. Our conversation moves and meanders as we refrain and chorus each other\u27s thoughts and experiences. We talk about systems. A lot. The systems of thought, systems of oppression, the systems of education that have led us to seek others to join in an ongoing and creative discussion that centerers Black experiences in formal and informal educational settings. In editing our cypher, we have done our best to preserve our spoken language as much as possible and suggest that your read the text ourloud

The Cypher

The Black Educology Mixtape is a collective of Black people working to amplify and empower Black educational voices. Black Educology goes beyond the scope of academia to recognize the movers and shakers of emancipatory movements. We imagine this mixtape as a vehicle toward revolution. To that extent, this album informs, confers, and collaborates with educational voices across the Black diaspora. Our scope and sequence focuses on the past, present, and future of Black education, which has been historically and systemically caught in the underbelly of western education. Black Educology is an open-access mixtape that moves beyond academic articles to feature various art forms and voices that are typically muted. Though traditional mixtapes only include songs, we highlight text, audio, images, transcripts, and lyrics. The main tenets of Black Educology’s educational vision are rooted in critical race theory, with a focus on counter-storytelling, Black critical theory, Afro-pessimism, and Black educational epistemology. Our work is grounded in creating mixtapes that are both revolutionary and emancipatory in the name of love, study, struggle, and refusal

FROM CREAMY CRACK TO LOCS: THE OPPRESSION AND LIBERATION OF BLACK WOMEN EDUCATORS THROUGH BLACK HAIR IDENTITY

This study investigated the experiences of seven Black women educators by exploring how they navigate the complex intersections of Black hair identity and the institution of education through collective healing circles. It aims to add dimension to the conversations around intersectionality by including hair and education as they are both vital to the way Black women’s worlds are animated. By foregrounding hair as a pivotal component of Black women’s intersectional identities, I aim to uncover how it impacts both pedagogy and praxis. Rooted in critical race theory, Black feminist thought, BlackCrit, and critical pedagogy, this work challenges conventional research paradigms by centering healing and restoration and challenging the dearth of literature on the pedagogies of Black women educators. The findings of this study explore the way Black women process messages around their identity through hair and race, how they rescript trauma through what I call post-traumatic hair subversion, and how they express liberation by remembering their past, their pain, and their power in a way that is restorative, healing, and reflective of who they are as educators. Ultimately, this study aims to celebrate and highlight the artillery Black women use to positively affect the lives of their students while thriving, healing, and subverting within the apparatus of education