Concepts and Categories in the Praxis of the Black Intellectual Tradition

As Guest Editors of the themed The International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education (QSE) issue titled “Concepts and Categories in the Praxis of the Black Intellectual Tradition,” our aim is for this collection to serve as a beginning syllabus to demonstrate teaching, learning, and education research that is partisan, scholarly, and unapologetically concerned with improving conditions and life outcomes (i.e., present and future) of people of African ancestry. A primary concern is that this themed issue draws attention to a research agenda and knowledge base needed for partisan intellectual work in scholarship, creative expression, community engagement, research, teaching, learning, and transformative social action.

Manning Marable (2000) is credited with coining the term “the [B]lack intellectual tradition.” He defined it as “the critical thought and perspectives of intellectuals of African descent and scholars of [B]lack America, and Africa, and the [B]lack diaspora.” In Black Folk Here and There, St. Clair Drake (1987) identified the Pan-Africanist perspective in Black intellectual thought committed to “liberation activity” as far back as Carter G. Woodson and W.E.B. Du Bois. Troubling the notion of a single origin point, Lewis R. Gordon (2009) has insisted that there are multiple, overlapping Black intellectual traditions that have emerged from diverse, Black-designated groups throughout the world. These intellectual movements, Gordon avers, are comprised of various political thrusts (e.g. Black nationalism, Afrocentric, liberal, radical, conservative), and theoretical/cultural/philosophical contexts (e.g. religion, art, pragmatism, existentialism, feminist). Because so many Black students today do not have the benefit of the collective consciousness and agency afforded by “Black study and Black struggle” (Kelley, 2016) in the Black Intellectual Tradition, we offer this themed issue as a pragmatic epistemic intervention.

Throughout the special issue, you will find diverse representations of the Black Intellectual Tradition. Each of these representations rests upon the brilliance of Black intellectuals who have paved the way and offered critiques including Vincent Harding, Manning Marable, Joyce King, Walter Rodney, Darlene Clark Hine, and Sylvia Wynter, for example. The scholarly contributions in this volume point to a guerilla intellectualism which Rodney (1990) proffered as a twofold understanding among Black scholars of (1) the power imbalance within academic spaces; and (2) their obligation to teach, write, and work within shared contexts of resistance, reclamation, and intellectual liberation for Africana peoples worldwide. Our intellectualism then is not divorced from our spiritual groundings, people in our communities, or our collective quest for freedom and justice.

Black life—the Black vote, Black thought, Black education, Black neighborhoods, Black humanity—is under attack. The war on Black folks is not new. Black people are experiencing an onslaught in an economic and political climate that is forcing us to carry on as if everything is normal while living through a global pandemic, unprecedented inflation, climate disaster, and curriculum censorship. Black intellectualism is no exception, is largely absent, and is often intentionally omitted as a scholarly lens to critique and analyze Black education. Academic institutions have historically relegated Black intellectualism and scholarship to the margins while claiming it is not objective or valid (Carruthers, 1999). Demonizing activist Black scholarship remains as “American as apple pie” (Balaji, 2007; Davies, 2007; DuBois, 2007). We categorically reject these falsehoods and use this special issue as an instructive correction to academic distortions and political repression.

Harding (1974) informs us that “[o]ur ancestors did not wade through rivers of blood so that we might surrender the interpretation of their lives in the hands of others” (p. 10). This special issue stands on the shoulders and sacrifices of our Ancestors and affirms our duty to define our lives. This special issue is indeed special and serves as another dispatch from the “ebony tower” (Marable, 2000) in which we have called upon interdisciplinary Black scholars in education to center the intellectualism and resolve of Black communities and to return what we learn to the community (King, 2017).

Our themed collection proudly aligns with recent scholarship exploring and explicating the multi-dimensionality of the Black Intellectual Tradition and its usefulness in mapping, shaping, reflecting, and preserving the cultural richness and epistemological complexity of Black thought and Black life. Since we began our work on this themed issue, Alridge et al. (2021) have produced an important volume (The Black Intellectual Tradition: African American Thought in the Twentieth Century) that “delineates a distinctive Black intellectual tradition rooted in the understandings and experiences” of people of African ancestry in the United States. Their collection of essays focuses on ideas borne from U.S.-based Black artists, intellectuals, performers, religious leaders, educators, and protest activists. In Black Intellectual Thought in Education, Grant et al. (2016) highlight the academic contributions, cultural projects, and personal lives of Black educational titans Anna Julia Cooper, Carter G. Woodson, and Alain LeRoy Locke. The authors situate their text as a critical counter-narrative to mainstream discourse in education and critical social theory. Blain et al.’s (2018) New Perspectives on the Black Intellectual Tradition is a global examination of four central themes within the Black Intellectual Tradition: Black internationalism; religion and spirituality; racial politics; and struggles for social justice and Black radicalism. Their important volume provides deep insight into how activists and intellectuals connected and intersected key theoretical frameworks across time and space and how the emergent ideas nurtured and shaped Black consciousness and resistance throughout the Black world. In The Black Intellectual Tradition: Reading Freedom in Classical Literature, Angel Adams Parham and Anika Prather (2022) explore the important classical narrative tradition upheld by Black writers, teachers, artists, and intellectuals and woven into a praxis for liberation and equity.

As guest editors of this special themed issue, we are committed to presenting a body of work that illustrates how the Black Intellectual Tradition continues to dynamically inform the thinking and practice of a community of scholars engaged in “race work” in education research that is liberatory and transformative.

In our call for submissions, we asked contributors to consider a duoethnographic methodology when writing about and centering the Black Intellectual Tradition. Norris et al. (2012) define duoethnography as a “collaborative research methodology in which two or more researchers of difference juxtapose their life histories to provide multiple understandings of the world” (p. 9) with several tenets that encourage researchers to “read the word and the world” through a dialogic—verbal and written—exchange (Freire, 1970/1993; Freire & Macedo, 1987). According to Rick Breault (2016), “Duoethnography requires the participants to move alternatively backward via autobiographical reflection, sideways by considering new perspectives on previous understanding, and then forward through some transformation resulting from previous explorations” (p. 782). Duoethnography asks that we re-think what constitutes research and that we give primacy to how the researchers make sense of data. This is especially important for us because, as Sawyer and Norris (2015) contend, our dialogic research functions as an informal curriculum. It is a space in which we learn how to think and act about the topic.

Throughout this special issue, the dialogic dimension of duoethnography illustrates the double aim of the Black Intellectual Tradition. On the one hand, our Black-centered scholarship flourishes from within the halls of academia while our Black intellectualism is also homegrown. Our invitation to include duoethnography afforded contributors the opportunity to offer analyses within an academic framework, while paying homage to teachers,’ elders,’ and community perspectives.

Melanie Acosta and Cleveland Hayes frame exemplary Black teacher pedagogy as a promising approach to abstract and operationalize the praxis of the Black Intellectual Tradition in ways that offer a liberatory vision for Black school children. Their duoethnography outlines the contours of the praxis of Black intellectual traditions (King et al., 2019) by illuminating the ways in which the pedagogy of Black teachers can serve as a model useful for the development of preservice and practicing teachers. The authors highlight the effective practices that good Black teachers daily enact as a collective orchestration of critical thought and action, social critique and social change.

As Black freedom scholars, Tambra Jackson, Gloria Boutte, George Johnson, and Leslie K. Etienne’s writing takes its inspiration from the American Educational Research Association’s (AERA) Commission on Research in Black Education’s (CORIBE) Ten Vital Principles for Black Education and Socialization which places priority on “research validity over ‘inclusion’” [Principle #6 (of 10)[i]; King, 2005, p. 20)]. This quad-ethnography foregrounds the authors’ life purposes and commitments which are centered on mobilizing, activating, and energizing others around African Diasporic scholarship.

Camea Davis and Syreeta McTier’s work is grounded in the Black Intellectual Tradition and explores the means through which Black youth and teachers of Black youth operationalize resistance ideologies to combat hegemonic narratives about Black youth within U.S. urban school spaces. The authors examine the lives and discourses of four Black youth and teacher participants through the theoretical lens of Black free spaces and Sylvia Wynter’s (2003) theory of alterity in order to identify resistance ideologies and how they were evidenced. These authors leverage the call-and-response method of critical poetic inquiry to analyze participants’ responses, generate themes, and produce research poetry as findings. Their findings are disseminated in a call-and-response format that blends the perspectives of Black youth and teachers.

Jonathan Grant argues that understanding how class and space inform the varied experiences of Black people is essential to a more complete understanding of Black life and Black lives. Grant’s analysis is situated within the context of the Black Intellectual Tradition in order to foreground scholars who, for decades, have encouraged this particular analysis. This article is based on thirty-four in-depth interviews and highlights the author’s research on Black placemaking and the racialized and classed experiences of Black Atlantans.

Greg Wiggan, LaGarrett King, Alana D. Murray, ArCasia James-Galloway, and Annette Teasdell’s contribution blends two separate articles that juxtapose re-membered Black pedagogy from antiquity, ancient Kemet, with early twentieth century K-12 Black Social Studies education. The authors use African-centered perspectives to place key issues surrounding standards-based Social Studies instruction within the context of the Black Intellectual Tradition. Twentieth-century Black educators such as Leila Amos Pendleton are located and situated alongside Black thinkers from antiquity such as PtahHotep (c. 2425 BCE—c. 2375 BCE). The authors conclude with a duoethographic discussion highlighting the importance of locating, apprehending, and leveraging recovered Black intellectual history for the continued development of Social Studies education and Black educational excellence.

In many circles, the heritage languages of Black children continue to be corrected, shamed, and silenced while monolingual speakers are rewarded. The article by Susi Long and Kamania Wynter-Hoyte (early childhood teacher educators) analyzes a teacher preparation program that is designed to counter this educational injustice. The authors describe how they draw on the Black Intellectual Tradition in order to assist preservice teachers in identifying, dismantling, and replacing inequitable and inaccurate Eurocratic pedagogies in preschool through third grade (P-3) classrooms.

Ebony O. McGee’s article is based on her research examining Black STEM doctoral students’ perspectives on their career trajectories during the era of former President Donald J. Trump. The author discusses and analyzes findings from participants who were queried about their education history, identity, future career plans, mentoring and support experiences, discrimination, psychosocial well-being, and background demographics. In the glow of a promising irony characteristic of the Black Intellectual Tradition, McGee posits that the elevation of the 45th U.S. President may have unintentionally started a much-needed revolution in STEM for Black doctoral students who are poised to reimagine STEM education as a gateway to liberation and epistemic justice.

Leigh Patel and Adrienne Goss present a three-part article featuring two studies of Black political education, resistance, and the ongoing struggle for educational equity. The first portion of the article is an analysis of race, power, and policy to map the evolution of school discipline reform legislation and advocacy efforts enacted by members of a parent community organization. Using archival and life history interview data, Goss presents a cross-generational examination of the internal political education and external public pedagogies that Black youth engaged in during the 1960s. Their piece closes with a duoethnographic discussion on what the authors deem as contextually salient across both studies in the interest of what readers might consider about education, resistance, and freedom struggles in their own spaces.

The aim of QSE is to enhance the practice and theory of qualitative research in education, with “education” defined in the broadest possible sense, including non-school settings. The journal publishes peer-reviewed empirical research focused on critical issues of racism (including whiteness, white racism, and white supremacy), capitalism and its class structure (including critiques of neoliberalism), gender and gender identity, heterosexism and homophobia, LGBTQI/queer issues, home culture and language biases, immigration, xenophobia, domination, and other issues of oppression and exclusion. Contributions to “Concepts and Categories in the Praxis of the Black Intellectual Tradition” focus on illuminating and documenting the praxis of “grounded intellectual work” (Kelley, 2016) in our time that is committed to liberation activity in Diaspora educational and community contexts. We define intellectual work broadly and inclusive of pedagogical and arts-based inquiry, as well as community-engaged research. Our bold imagination hopes that this special issue will be a springboard for more rigorous partisan research, teaching, and scholarship using a Black intellectual lens.

Duoethnographic statements by the co-editors—all

In this section, the guest co-editors engaged in a duoethnographic exchange highlighting the legacies of Black intellectualism and the responsibility to pass the lantern towards Black intellectual freedom.

Lasana D. Kazembe, PhD, QSE special issue co-editor

I have served on the IUPUI editorial board for QSE during the last four years during which time I have reviewed and made recommendations for scores of manuscripts. As a board, our typical practice for reviewing manuscripts is to first query co-editors for expertise claims; and second to self-select manuscripts that are interesting and/or relevant to one’s scholarly or intellectual journey. Given my background and scholarly interests, I tend to seek out blackness. That is to say, I tend to seek and choose manuscripts that reflect and channel the Black experience in myriad ways. For example, my preferences have favored manuscripts addressing such areas as Black Diasporic consciousness, art and aesthetics, Africana history/culture, Afrofuturism, and far-ranging Black educational discourses.

During my tenure as a co-editor, my fellow co-editors had heard me make frequent references to the Black Intellectual Tradition. I had done so in relationship to the scholarship of critical voices in the field such as Mogobe Ramose, Fred Moten, VèVè Clark, Ama Mazama, and Joyce E. King. My multi-year presence on the QSE editorial board and my consistent reviewing and highlighting of Black/Africana subject matter in my reviews prompted the QSE managing editor to approach me about developing a special issue on the Black Intellectual Tradition.

I am deeply grateful to our reviewers who have undertaken this journey with us. This special issue is a statement of scholarship as much as it is a statement of intellectual genealogy and an affirmation of a social obligation to current and successive generations of Black thinkers, thought-leaders, teachers, scholars, and activists. The intellectual journey undertaken by me, and my esteemed co-editors has served as a living practice text in terms of existential challenges that have ranged in order of magnitude and significance. Through it all (and with invaluable guidance from our grand elder, Dr. Joyce E. King), we have maintained the course as “guerilla intellectuals” and servants to the cause of advancing a critical, high-quality model of scholarly excellence that would please even the ficklest Ancestor. That context and trajectory is what brings me to this work.

Thais M. Council, PhD, QSE special issue co-editor

As a co-editor of this QSE special issue, I feel like Black intellectual royalty. And I do not mean Black royalty as a pompous, overconfident, ceremonious, or elitist projection. I mean, our crown “has already been bought and paid for” (Morrison, 1987, p. 27) through the intellectual “gifts” so abundantly provided to us. Now, all I have to do is wear it. My Black intellectualism is beyond metaphorically grounded in a Black Intellectual Tradition (BIT) praxis. I inherited my work ethic from my grandfather—a landscaper, gardener, and provider—who would be up and working “before day in the morning.” My Black teachers provided a model for study. I graduated having studied the African Diaspora under the tutelage of Carole Boyce Davies, Jafari Allen, Linda Spears-Bunton, Rosemari Mealy, Sam Anderson, and Keshia Abraham who invited me to read such writings as Assata Shakur, Audre Lorde, Harriett Jacobs, and Aimé Césaire. During my terminal studies, Dr. Joyce E. King made it her solemn duty to engage her doctoral students through a rigorous, partisan (read: engaged) praxis.

Upon entering Georgia State University’s Educational Policy Studies doctoral program, like most students, I had no clue what I wanted to expertly study. I was, however, firm in my intention to enact justice with, for, and by Black people. During the journey, I encountered several professors who inconspicuously, and conspicuously, implied that my Blackness was to be boxed and stored for later use, if at all. I surely thought the institution that touts itself as a leader in graduating more Black students in the nation than any other institution, including HBCUs, would not make me obscure my Blackness to accumulate academic authority. I was assigned several doctoral advisors until I took possession of my power and selected my own academic advisor, Dr. Joyce E. King. Before making this decision, I studied Dr. King, read her works, and attended any function she was hosting or engaged with. To take a class with Dr. King is an experience in itself, but to be invited into Dr. King’s African-centered research collaborative, Heritage Knowledge in Action (HeKA), is a golden ticket toward a path of transformative critical consciousness. HeKA functions within Black Intellectual Traditions wherein we did not announce our freedom dreams, goals, and plans but instead listened and learned from our elders and allowed our ancestral callings to lead us towards enacting justice with, for, and by Black people. During these moments, we learned and were validated by Dr. King’s lessons to (1) return what you learn to the source, (2) return to your community with your right mind denouncing any allegations against Blackness formalized western schooling may have spewed, and (3) the community is the curriculum. Hooks (2009) defines a culture of belonging as “a sense of the meaning and vitality of a geographical place” (p. 23). Energized by these teachings, validations, and culture of belonging in a culturally safe space, we excelled. Collectively, HeKA has presented at premier conferences, earned coveted fellowships, published in refereed journals, and answered community calls with confidence. While it was my conceptualization and leadership that served as the genesis of the article, “Pedagogy for Partisanship: Research Training for Black Graduate Students in the Black Intellectual Tradition” (King & Swartz, 2018), I share this not to lay claim to ideas and scholarship in ways that elevate the Eurocentric individuality academia celebrates, but to demonstrate how I/we collectively embody and enact the Black Intellectual Tradition within a structure that deems Blackness—and how it functions—as unimportant and controversial. This sort of academic training cannot be boxed into a syllabus or relegated to a three-credit hour course. It was no wonder that the magic of the Black Intellectual Tradition made its way to QSE and prompted an invitation to commission a special issue.

Manning Marable (2000) contends the Black Intellectual Tradition is corrective, prescriptive, and descriptive. King and Wilson (1990) asserted that the BIT embodies a “soul-freeing substance” that gives Black people a spiritual, cultural grounding from which to do our work while wearing our congenital crowns boldly and unapologetically. Put simply, Black people—across the globe—are brilliant.

Joyce E. King, PhD, QSE, special issue co-editor

I am committed to intellectual “race work” for my people: excavating and uplifting our knowledge making heritage as valid being/knowing, recognizing the blackness I brought with me into the academy is an authoritative “down home” theoretical lens, a Black perspective through which to re-member and interpret liberating Black thought in our everyday life experiences (King & Swartz, 2018). My scholarly Black consciousness was nurtured and fortified in the crucible of the Black Studies movement’s close connection with Black communities (Alkalimat, 2021) and Black student mobilizations in the Black/Pan-African intellectual tradition of “study and struggle” (Kelley, 2016). Thus, the epistemic Black Studies mission that has guided me, advancing autochthonous Black perspectives (Gordon, 1990), as Walter Rodney (1990) urged, is “a more positive orientation than simply reacting to (the distortions of) white scholarship” (p. 114) or vindication in scholarship on Black intellectual history defending Black humanity (Byrd, 2021; Byrd et al., 2022).

My generation read Black critiques of Eurocentric knowledge in the social sciences such as The Death of White Sociology (Ladner, 1973) and Even the Rat Was White (Guthrie, 1976), and we were introduced to perspectives of Black radical intellectual-activists like James (1970), who boldly asserted in his analysis of slavery that “the capacities of men were always leaping out of the confinements of the system” (p. 136). Writing from within her jail cell, Angela Davis (1981) observed “the remarkable capacity of black people for resisting the disorder so violently imposed on their lives” (p. 4). Also, intellectually and emotionally liberating was Mel Watkins’s (1971) critical perspective on Black thought/being in James Brown’s lyrics and performance artistry. He wrote:

The poetry of James Brown pales under the icy lens of ivory-tower objectivity … What his songs characterize is the physical, emotional and down-front nature of black life…For most white and whitenized-black listeners the phenomenon is baffling, even threatening… It reflects the life style of what LeRoi Jones has called the “lowest placement” of American society, the bad niggers, the blackest segment of AfroAmerica…The audience to whom James Brown appeals most—the majority, or grassroots segment of the black community [demeaned as uncivilized]—is antithetical to America’s mainstream society in both lifestyle and point of view… (p. 23) [However] From the rape of black women and mutilation of both black males and females during slavery, through post-Emancipation exploitation and lynchings and onto the casual present-day stirrings of quasi-genocidal tendencies and outright flaunting of “civilized, democratic principles,” even the most “primitive” eye can spot the sham… (p. 26)

Black Studies scholarship that also shaped my orientation includes Clyde Woods’s (2017) conceptualization of the blues as Black working class peoples’ epistemology and theorizing and Sylvia Wynter’s (1984, 2022) prescient episteme-breaking call for re-writing knowledge. Black Studies theorizing acknowledges the agency of those outside the academy (and the West) “to create their own theoretical tools and understanding” (Andrews, 2020, p. 703). Such knowledge/curriculum transformation would necessarily include missing Black women’s historic and contemporary intellectualism and activism in resistance struggles here in the U.S. and elsewhere in the world, particularly the contributions of radical Black women (Blain, 2018; Gilyard, 2017; Johnson, 2022). However, as Charisse Burden-Stelly (2022), notes: “gender analysis is constitutive of—not separate from or an addendum to “radical Blackness” (p. 224). This brief reflection on my Black Studies intellectual and theoretical orientation is intended to connect foundational influences and suggest missing perspectives to further inquiry going forward that can inform and extend this project beyond the “ivory tower” (Alkalimat, 2021; Tella & Motala, 2020).

Onward

As Guest editors, we are committed to presenting a body of work that illustrates how the Black Intellectual Tradition informs the thinking and practice of a community of scholars engaged in “liberation activity,” particularly in Black education. In our estimation, each of the assembled articles responds to our call: to demonstrate teaching, learning and/or research in education that is partisan, scholarly, and unapologetically concerned with improving the life conditions of people of African ancestry.

Our goal for this special issue is that it is instructive, affirming, liberating, and a call to action to boldly and unapologetically create and uphold spaces for Black intellectualism and study—wherever you are.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).