ABSTRACT

The Future is Black presents Afropessimism as an opportunity to think in provocative and disruptive ways about race, racial equality, multiculturalism, and the pursuit of educational justice. The vision is not a coherent, delimited conversation, but a series of experiences with Afropessimism as a radical analytic situated within critical Black studies. Activists, educators, caregivers, kin, and all those who love Black children are invited to make sense of the contemporary Black condition, including a theorization of Black suffering, Black fugitivity, and Black futurity. These three concepts provide the foundation for the book's inquiry, and contribute to the examination of Black educational opportunity, experience, and outcomes. The book not only explores how schooling becomes complicit in, and serves as, a site of Black material and psychic suffering, but also examines the possibilities of education as a site of fugitivity, of hope, of escape, and as a space within which to imagine an emancipation yet to be realized.

 

 

chapter |3 pages

Concept Field Notes

An Introduction

part I|58 pages

Afropessimism and Fugitivity

chapter 1|9 pages

On Black Education

Anti-blackness, Refusal, and Resistance

chapter 2|6 pages

Afropessimism for Us in Education

In Fugitivity, through Fuckery and with Funk

chapter 3|9 pages

Literate Slave, Fugitive Slave

A Note on the Ethical Dilemma of Black Education

chapter 4|16 pages

On Labor and Property

Historically White Colleges, Black Bodies, and Constructions of (Anti) Humanity

chapter 5|8 pages

Black Space in Education

Fugitive Resistance in the Afterlife of School Segregation

chapter 6|8 pages

Anti-Blackness is Equilibrium

How “Disparity” Logics Pathologize Black Male Bodies and Render Other Black Bodies Invisible

part II|23 pages

Conceptual Considerations

chapter 9|7 pages

Kissing Cousins

Critical Race Theory’s Racial Realism and Afropessimism’s Social Death

part III|39 pages

Research Vignettes

chapter 10|6 pages

Seeking Resistance and Rupture in “The Wake”

Locating Ripples of Hope in the Futures of Black Boys

chapter 11|6 pages

Knowledge and Power

A Case Study on Anti-Blackness within Schooling

chapter 12|6 pages

Debating While Black

Wake Work in Black Youth Politics

chapter 13|10 pages

Making the World Go Dark

The Radical (Im)possibilities of Youth Organizing in the Afterlife of Slavery

chapter 14|9 pages

More than Just Potential

Troubling Success Counternarratives in Mathematics Education Research