Meditating Gunrunner Speaking, Part I: A Black Male Journey Teaching in South Korea

Abstract

In this article, I offer my own decolonizing counterstory of teaching as a Black American man in a teacher education program in South Korea, to purport how I was both a colonizer and the colonized, inside and outside of the classroom and the curriculum (Asher, 2010; Baszile, 2008, 2009, 2010). To further complicate matters, my Black male body did not fit the Eurocentric manuscript of who teaches in South Korea, rendering me a problem (Du Bois, 1903/1969), and also placing a particular high value on Eurocentric epistemologies (Mignolo, 2011a). To decolonize my Black teaching experiences in South Korea, I rely on Baszile's (2010) critical race currere to perform a reading of my radical Black subjectivity in exile, while also tending to the public/private autobiographical racialization in an East Asian context. Thus, it leads me to raise the following questions: (1) What does it mean to teach while Black and male in South Korea? (2) How does one's Black man's story decolonize the narrative of who teaches abroad? To address these ontological/epistemological questions that Baszile addresses in her work, I begin with three vignettes (named meditations). The first meditation finds me strolling through a Korean neighborhood on my way to a coffee shop. The second meditation finds a cohort of Korean pre-service teachers and me in a coffee shop discussing Korean education and Black violence in America. The third meditation follows me home after my incident in the coffee shop. Ultimately, to decolonize ourselves as teachers and learners, I propose as many curriculum studies scholars do, that we must continue to offer counterdiscourses (Asher, 2010) to our racialization and colonization. Herein lies the importance of my meditations.

Notes

¹I use the term decolonize considering Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang's piece Decolonization is not a Metaphor. I mention in this piece that my parents were incarcerated. My mother for 5 years. And, my father for 18 years. On June 18, 2016 my father arrived home from prison. Considering my upbringing under mass incarceration and the prison industrial complex, Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang's argument that prison abolitionist must consider how indigenous land is colonized by prisons and how mostly Black and Brown bodies are subject to incarceration is needed to develop my thinking of decolonization as a long-term process toward liberation. Furthermore, decolonization of the land, of the people, and of the animals is linked to decarceration of the land, the people, and the animals.

²I am thinking here of Fanon's vulnerability, emotionality, and his dedication to talking through his pain of being a Black man under the white man's gaze and fantasy. Cheryl Matias (2015) text, White Skin, Black Friend: A Fanonian Application to Theorize Racial Fetish in Teacher Education, explores the deep emotions that people of color have as when they are fetishized by White people and White systems.

³I am using the term settler colonialism considering the work of Eve Tuck and Ruben A. Gaztambide-Fernandez (2013). Their article “Curriculum, replacement, and settler futurity defines settler colonialism” “is the specific formation of colonialism in which the colonizer comes to stay, making himself the sovereign, and the arbiter of citizenship, civility, and knowing” (p. 73) Tuck and Gaztambide-Fernandez's sentiments are anticipated by Frantz Fanon's work on decolonization in his 1963 text Wretched of the Earth.