“Education is a white woman’s world”: theorizing race, gender, and geography in a liberatory Black pedagogical space

ABSTRACT

In this Black feminist critical inquiry, I theorize the politics of race, gender, and geography in the context of a liberatory Black pedagogical space located in the United States. Using curated interview and observation data, I position an anti-racist pedagogue as a cartographer who employed method, content, style, and technique to map freedom routes away from schooling, a Dumasian site of suffering for Black students. I paint a narrative portrait that foregrounds sights, sounds, and felt tensions emerging from two manifestations of Black affective networks that constellated in the Black male critical pedagogue’s classroom. Ultimately, I call for attention to the construction of liberatory education spaces created to address the comfort and needs of not only racially minoritized learners but also students who embody sexes, genders, and gender performances marginalized in white-dominant culture. Such pedagogical spaces, I argue, can be a refusal to indulge the ontological, epistemological, and existential project of whiteness.

KEYWORDS:

• Black and critical geographies
• liberatory education
• critical pedagogies
• anti-racism
• affect
• gender and gender performance

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. All names are pseudonyms.

2. Here, affect is defined as feeling encompassed by ‘emotion, … and that includes impulses, desires, and feelings’ (Cvetkovitch, 2012, p. 4).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Esther O. Ohito

Esther O. Ohito is an assistant professor of English/literacy education at the Rutgers Graduate School of Education and also a Carnegie African Diaspora Fellow at Maseno University’s School of Education in Kisumu, Kenya. She was formerly an assistant professor of curriculum studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. A creative writer and interdisciplinary scholar, she researches the poetics and aesthetics of Black knowledge and cultural production, the gendered geographies of Black girlhoods, and the gendered pedagogies of Black critical educators.