In the wake of anti-Blackness and Being: A provocation for do-gooders inscribed in whiteness

Abstract

Curriculum studies, like nearly all education scholarship, are predicated on Black suffering and death. Inspired by Christina Sharpe’s treatise In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, we will engage with the difficult questions of what it means to be curriculum theorists inculcated into whiteness and settlement. Pivoting Cheryl Harris’s renowned assertion that whiteness is property, we consider that whiteness may instead possess us. We draw upon Black and Indigenous brilliance to call for the death of whiteness, proposing that this act is necessary and the only way scholars and educators inscribed in whiteness can possibly imagine playing any positive role in liberation struggles. People are dying, and we either continue being part of the systems that delight in killing, or we take seriously the reordering of our own Being. We do so while being answerable to and in relation with Black studies. To initiate this ontological destruction, we write from the position of the s + cyborg in order to dissociate ourselves from our embodied whiteness. We invite white readers to join us as ghosts in the machine that short-circuit the currents of the wake. To this end, we provoke readers with a prescriptive curriculum towards killing whiteness. While whiteness is under destruction, we call for a turn towards speculative imaginings and futurisms that could envision a curriculum, a way of Being after whiteness.

Keywords:

• Black studies
• indigenous studies
• curriculum studies
• relationality

Authors’ note

Without the care-full guidance and encouragement of our mentor/advisor Esther Ohito, this manuscript would not have been possible. We also want to thank the five anonymous reviewers, whose generative feedback helped us clarify the arguments throughout.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 White and whiteness are not capitalized throughout this piece (except if authors quoted have done so). Black is capitalized. See Dumas (2016). We have capitalized Blackness and anti-Blackness (see the call for papers for this special issue).

2 Whiteness here includes those phenotypically coded as white, and those who have been inculcated into the power structures and beliefs that sustain white supremacy and the violence of anti-Blackness.

3 We invoke a death and destruction that is unrecognizable to whiteness. When we write, “can you bring about your own destruction when all you know is the destruction of others?” we mean a different kind of death and destruction–one that whiteness cannot delight in or escape from. The death and destruction of whiteness is an ontological reordering, a breaking apart of the liberal humanist self.

4 For example, Jones (2017).

5 Currere, the dominant method of curriculum studies, is a procedural mode of writing that uses autobiography to make meaning of the social and curricular. The method is deeply ensconced in psychoanalysis and is meant as a project of self-actualization. We contend that any method with foundations so deeply rooted in anti-Blackness (Stoute, 2017) and sexism (Hoagland, 2007) as is psychoanalysis should be immediately rejected. Even trying to reform currere toward critical race and feminist thought still uses whiteness as a reference point (“who am I as a non-white woman?” Baszile, 2015, p. 119). Further, centering the “self” as something to be actualized not only retreats from the social (Berlant, 2011) and enlivens colonization (Mundt, 2019; Wynter, 2003) but also is antithetical to the collective and relational nature of Black feminist (e.g., Cooper, 1893/2007; King, 2019) and Indigenous thought (e.g., L. B. Simpson, 2007, 2017; Smith et al., 2019). Besides, as Sharpe asserted, we need new methods.

6 Residence time refers to what Sharpe (2016) described as the amount of time (millions of years) that the sodium from blood—and other components from human bodies—will remain in the oceans.

7 Pseudonyms used for their protection.

8 This idea was reinforced after viewing the recent roundtable between Goldstein et al. (2020), particularly starting at about 1:05:02.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sean D. Hernández Adkins

Sean and Lucía are doctoral students at the School of Education at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a place of inescapable anti-Blackness that–out of love–must be destroyed. To that end, Sean and Lucía have initiated their s+cyborg mutiny by helping to curate a stolen, fugitive space in Peabody Hall, known as The Hub, where their co-conspirators embody the Raíces Collective (@LatinxHub). Together they write and fight toward Black life and Indigenous futures.