“Black Like Me”: Reframing Blackness for Decolonial Politics

Abstract

From a particular vantage point, as an African-born scholar with a politics to affirm my Black subjectivity and Indigeneity in a diasporic context, my article engages a (re)theorization of Blackness for decolonial politics. Building on existing works of how Black scholars, themselves, have theorized Blackness, and recognizing the fluid, intersecting, and contested nature of this concept, I engage a multidimensional reading of Blackness, in part as a counter to the insidious attempts to delegitimize Black radical/racial politics. The article grounds particular struggles at the curious interface of skin, body, psyche, hegemonies, and politics. The article, in particular, responds to the perceived tensions between race, Blackness, and Indigeneity, offering a way of rereading Blackness differently: (a) to include Africa(ness), as a strategic reinvention of Africanness in diasporic contexts; (b) to reclaim an African Indigeneity in global knowledge production as a way of knowing that speaks to histories, cultures, identities, African spiritual ontologies, and a politics of the African/Black body; (c) to undertake a conscious intellectual shift in reading Black/African diasporic presence on Indigenous peoples Lands from a discursive prism of “colonial settlerhood” and discourses of “complicities in our claims of citizenship” to one of “collective implications” and “differential responsibilities” so as to foster decolonization and, particularly, decolonial solidarities among colonized, oppressed, and Indigenous peoples; (d) to highlight questions of the responsibilities of the Black/African learner in the (Western) academy; and (e) to reread Black(ness) in ways that speaks to the continental African subject who may decry the color descriptor of Black(ness).

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I thank Andrea Vásquez Jiménez, Janelle Brady, and Brandy Jensen (among many others) of the Department of Social Justice Education (SJE) of the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto (OISE/UT) for their assistance during various stages in my work on “Reframing Blackness.” I also acknowledge the research assistance of Yousra Hassan Gendril of the Department of Public Health, University of Edinburgh. For this Butts Freemen Lecture in particular, Andrea Vásquez Jiménez's help was very central, reading through and commenting on earlier drafts of the article. I also acknowledge the reference check work from Suleman Demi and Lwanga Musisi of SJE, OISE/UT. Finally, I thank the American Educational Studies Association (AESA) for the opportunity to present this lecture and for the audience feedback.

Notes

1. The x in Latinx makes it inclusive to gender nonconforming and gender fluid peoples. It moves away from Eurocentric gender binaries (Scharron-Del Rio & Aja, 2015).