ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the US postwar South, specifically the Sea Islands off the coast of Georgia and South Carolina. It begins with the US political and social context at the time, starting with the Civil War and through Reconstruction. This chapter further develops the connections between anti-Indigeneity and anti-Blackness as manifested through benevolent whiteness and the US imperialist project with a specific focus on the deployment of white women teachers as the ideological arm of anti-Blackness as the counterpart to the more recognizably violent white male military troops. This chapter argues that an understanding of the genealogy of schooling in the United States, and a desire to imagine its decolonial futures, requires a nuanced understanding of the relationships between settler colonialism and anti-Blackness and the roles schools and teachers have played in supporting those structures. It also makes visible in the ruptures and erasures how Black and Indigenous communities have historically and contemporarily created spaces of resistance and solidarity.
