From Morning to Mourning: A Meditation on Possibility in Black Education

ABSTRACT

This article insists on a reframe of mourning, away from a period of sadness or weeping alone, to a vision of its merits for discovering and unlocking possibility in Black Education. For example, mourning might be understood as involuntarily surrendered time necessary to properly grieve, concede, and embrace Black people’s subject position in the US sociopolitical context. Turning towards mourning, the dark moments that urge it and the dark(er) moments that it may produce, is argued as a launch pad to more fully understanding the depth and reach of Black people’s possibility. To make such an argument the author contemplates how mourning, and subsequent meditations on possibility, might have informed the activism of leaders in the Black radical tradition who urgently insisted that Black people’s human dignity be recognized and properly acknowledged. The article concludes with discussion of the significance of possibility to advance equity and excellence in education.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. “The Movement for Black Lives is an ecosystem of individuals and organizations creating a shared vision and policy agenda to win rights, recognition, and resources for Black people.” To learn more, go to https://m4bl.org/.

2. This language was used by Shange (2019) to resist masculinist language such as “seminal” to describe something as noteworthy or significant. She introduces a more feminist-inspired term, “ovaric” (p. 95) to make an observation of a text she cites essential to her thinking and analysis in the book Progressive Dystopia.

3. This was vague language used by the courts following the Brown decision to urge compliance with the ruling.

4. The digital text where I found this book did not have page numbers.

5. Pan Africanist philosophy centers on urging greater unity among ethnic groups and indigenous persons of African descent. Stokley Carmichael, a prominent civil rights activist cited for first using the language of “Black Power,” eventually moved to Africa, changed his name to Kwame Ture, and emphasized pan Africanism.

6. A similar argument can be made about the hazards of being Black or living while Black in other parts of the world, but I am giving explicit attention to the US as the argument for this article.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Ford Foundation [RC109703].

Notes on contributors

Chezare A. Warren

Dr. Chezare A. Warren is Associate Professor of Equity & Inclusion in Education Policy at Vanderbilt University. He has about a decade of practitioner experience as an urban educator, and is author of Centering Possibility in Black Education (Teachers College Press, 2021).