Who will make America great again? ‘Black people, of course…’

Abstract

The author reflects on the relevance of her intellectual journey through the Black consciousness movement in the 1960s to her pedagogy teaching from a Black Studies theoretical perspective on liberating knowledge. This pedagogical approach aims to fortify education students’ consciousness regarding a systemic understanding of how racism and domination work. The argument is that this approach is especially needed given the current regime. Using the 1968 poem by Amiri Baraka that asked: ‘Who Will Survive America?’ the author illustrates content and pedagogy that can respond to the presidential campaign slogan understood as ‘making America white again.’

Keywords:

• Black Studies pedagogy
• epistemological ignorance
• critical consciousness
• liberating knowledge

Notes

1. The argument is that this approach is especially needed given the current regime. The use of term ‘regime’ is intentional, consistent with the widely used ‘regime theory’ framework in political science, and to illustrate what scholars have identified as the changing nature of the US Government, including the president’s placement of family members and white nationalist extremists in senior position of influence and lawsuits challenging apparent violations of the constitutional emoluments clause (Blades, 2017; Davis & Tumulty, 2017; Gordon, 2017; Stone, 1989).