This first week of February marks Black Lives Matter at School, a national week of action dedicated to organizing for racial justice in education. In this pandemic year, COVID has highlighted and exacerbated existing inequities, negatively impacting the mental and physical health, economic well-being, and access to education of Black, Indigenous, and people of color at higher rates than white Americans. Simultaneously, this summer’s state-sanctioned murders of George Floyd, Elijah McClain, Brionna Taylor, and others, increased the attention and acknowledgment of systems of white supremacy, oppression, and privilege AND the entrenchment of white nationalism and white supremacy within our American institutions. Following are some preliminary thoughts about the role of organized movements such as Black Lives Matter at School as counter-project to neoliberalism. More importantly than anything I write, please click the link above and spend time with the curriculum, demands, and 13 guiding principles. Consider committing to the Year of Purpose and sharing these resources with educators and students in your life.
In her 2018 article “Pasarse PolÍticamente: Interrupting Neoliberal Temporality,” RocÍo Zambrana uses Walter Benjamin’s notion of Entsetzung to explore the interruptive nature of Rebollo-Gil’s pasarse polÍticamente, hopeful acts of “offensive” protest that expose race, gender, and class hierarchies and the ways the debts of capitalism bind subjects and therefore disallow freedom. Entsetzung, subverts “colonial, patriarchal, slow, and punishing” laws and practices through refusal of the institutional logics they conserve, namely open markets of domination. Recognizing “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house (Lorde, 1984, pg 2)”, these acts depose rather than oppose, afform rather than reform. They rip open and expose the guilt-debt nexus, they break the binds that maintain the status quo and they offer means to new collectively built futures. “These protests work within debt history, through the history of debt, in hopes of a new history.” (Zambrana, 2018, pg 111)
#BlackLivesMatter crosses the discursive boundaries of white American racialization. Colin Kapernick’s kneel refuses patriotic appeals. Minneapolis small business owners impacted by fires and virus choose mutual aid over profits, making space for raw Black anger. Indigenous, queer, trans, and Black communities communicate commitments of solidarity and emancipation. Within and through these examples, abolition, self-determination, and liberation emerge.
During the national context of Trump and Trumpism, John Muir Elementary teachers in Seattle commit to wearing Black Lives Matter/We Stand Together t-shirts. Liberate. A white supremacist calls a bomb threat. Protect. This galvanizes the community and inspires city-wide action by Social Equity Educators (SEE) who put forth demands for ethnic studies, restorative practices, and detracking. Liberate. Police murder more unarmed Black men, women, and youth. Protect. Kapernick kneels, high school sports teams kneel, marching bands kneel. Liberate. Seattle Education Association, Seattle NAACP, Seattle Council Parent Teacher Student Association, and others join together in solidarity. Liberate. Black Students Matter. Liberate. Liberal white parents complain. Protect. Pregnant mother Charleena Lyles is murdered in her apartment and dehumanized by the media. Protect. More t-shirts, protests, now guiding principles, national attention, curriculum development, organized movement. Liberate.
Black Lives Matter at School and the larger Black Lives Matter collective serve as interruption and countermovement of neoliberalism. Through collective open source curricular development and organized action the movement refuses commodification of labor and, thus, ownership of leadership and responsibility. Through refusal of individualism and dominance, and recognition that this is a means and not an end, the movement exposes both violent and non-violent opposition as foreclosures of liberatory futures, thus inviting new membership in a collective reimagining of society where humanity, Black humanity specifically, cannot be sold.
Edu-speak 