Black Worldliness: Poetic Knowledge in Education

Abstract

Black Worldliness is an amalgamation of stories and experiences from a Black male charged with teaching white people how to be more racially and culturally conscious. It is a critical and auto-ethnographic project that is deeply informed by the Black Radical Tradition. The manuscript centers around a 2-year research study of equity work in education that is filtered through the lens of Black Radicals and Afro-Surrealism. I spend significant energy trying to demonstrate what an Afro-surrealist would say about the system of public education in the U.S. How would they critique it? How would imagine something different? This work is about spending time and building an intimate knowledge of a system so that, like W.E.B. Dubois informs us, any critique comes from a space of knowing the system inside and out.