The making of global Black anti-citizen/citizenship: Situating BlackCrit in global citizenship research and theory

ABSTRACT

Our current moment is abundant in examples of global antiblackness whereby racial violence visibly signals the quotidian elimination of Blackness, or the making of Black people into an object or abstract discourse to be terminated. That antiblackness is global is nothing new. In fact, antiblackness has been and continues to be central to the making of Western empire and modernity as we know it. However, until this point, the social studies education discipline has yet to fundamentally advance a critical analytic that captures the specificity of global antiblackness and the invention of Black as non-human and anti-citizen. In this article, we aim to problematize vernacularized conceptualizations of citizenship in social studies education that sidestep the socio-historical significance of anti-Black world systems in the creation of human/non-human and, consequently, citizen/anti-citizen. More specifically, we argue that BlackCrit interlopes antiblackness in the intellectual apprehension of taken-for-granted concepts such as Blackness, globality, citizenship, and racism. In drawing from BlackCrit, we suggest that social studies education, and educational research in general, must reconcile that the world operates on the premise that to be human is to be distant from Blackness and to be citizen is also to be distant from Blackness. Overall, this article serves as a provocation to rethink our philosophies, theories, and paradigms of global citizenship within the domain of anti-citizen and non-human.

KEYWORDS:

• Antiblackness
• anti-citizenship
• BlackCrit
• global citizenship
• social studies education

Notes

1. We provide the names of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery in the United States and the assassination of five Black Colombian youth in Cali, Colombia in August 2020 as examples of antiblackness and Black murder in the year 2020. George Floyd was a 46-year-old Black man that was murdered on May 25th, 2020 in Minneapolis, Minnesota by a White police officer who knelt on his neck for over nine minutes. Breonna Taylor was a Black woman who was killed by gunfire by White plainclothes police officers in her own apartment in Louisville, Kentucky on March 13, 2020. Ahmaud Arbery was a 25-year-old Black man who was murdered by three White men while jogging in Glynn County, Georgia. Five Afro-Columbian teens from the ages of 14 to 19 were found tortured after leaving home to fly kites in Cali, Columbia in August 2020. Even in providing these incidents of Black murder, we acknowledge the incompleteness of this endnote which fails to honor the lives of these individuals and countless Black people whose names we will never know. In offering these anecdotes as examples of transnational anti-Black racism, we do not seek to fetishize racial trauma as can often be the case in academic research. We stand in solidarity with the intersectional movements for Black lives occurring across the globe and believe that no student should leave a social studies classroom with an insufficient understanding of the extents taken to mitigate and exterminate Black life as individuals and collectives seek full personhood.

2. We use anti-citizen to refer to the individual or collective of individuals. Anti-citizenship refers to a state of [non-]belonging, a condition, performance of, or quality/characteristic assigned to the anti-citizen. When appropriate, we use the terms separately, but at other times we group anti-citizen/citizenship together to speak to the broader [sub]genre of political humanism conferred upon Black folk globally.

3. We purposefully use a capital C here to denote actual Constitutions.

4. Necropolitics is a term first introduced by Mbembe (2003) in his article by the same name. Necropolitics refers to modern day subjugation that not only dictates how one lives but also how one must die.