The Black kitchen table agreement: the power of silence during the era of Trump

Abstract

The Black kitchen table has long served as a meeting place for Black families to discuss, debate, and critique issues related to the Black struggle. In particular, it was common for Black kitchen table conversations to talk about the nuances of navigating systems of legalized segregation and oppression, as well – and more recently – navigating the landscape of contemporary education reform. However since the creation of social media, the traditionally private kitchen table conversations, have become an open-source for all to read. Black families have persistently lived a process of rewriting the prewritten narrative of their own lives and the lives of their children. Moreover, Black parents who now find themselves fighting for their children’s educational opportunity in a land of market reform, now have to navigate the binary of competing Black ideologies on charter schools in plain view of outsiders. In this short manuscript, I discuss the two prevailing perspectives of education reform in the Black community, the contemporary and historical roots of free-market, neoliberal, education reform, and conclude with arguing for the need to have a more defined and exclusive place for our kitchen table conversations.

Keywords:

• Black families
• education reform
• neoliberalism
• educating Black children
• interest convergence

Notes

1. In 1899 W.E.B. DuBois stated in his first footnote of The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study, ‘I shall throughout this study use the term “Negro” to designate all persons of Negro Descent, although the appellation is to some extent illogical. I shall, moreover, capitalize the word, because I believe that eight million Americans are entitled to a capital letter (p. 1).’ In that same vain, I too shall from this point on capitalize Black, as it is representative of a cultural, lifestyle, reality, and ideology of my people – so for that reason, we are entitled to a capital letter. In contrast, conventions of writing, specific to APA formatting, would claim that if I capitalize the first letter of Black, then the same modification should be applied to white, when referring to those of the white race. However, I consciously lower-case this letter in response to the inherent dominance of white-skinned privilege in the United States and in academic writing.