The Black Teacher Tapes: Thinking through Fugitivity to Counter Curricular Violence

Abstract

Education has always been attached to the "American Dream," an abstract concept built from the ashes of conquest and capitalism. The dream is one of property and privacy, money and power, the ability to live a life free from obstacles. However, the american dream isn't complete without an antagonist. For a long time the antagonist has been Black women, men, and children. Our backs have been stood on so that others can dream, neglecting our need to live a life just as prosperous as those "protagonists." The colonizers achieved this mission through chains and later anti-literacy laws––knowing that education is power. Not unrecognized by those ancestors who were enslaved, learning to read and write became key to their freedom. Sneaking glances of books on the shelves of plantation houses, tracing letters into the palms of young children, Black education in America was born in the shadows of the cotton fields. Fugitives became teachers as they slowly carved out spaces for our ontologies and epistemologies to exist, creating our American Dream. This dissertation is an exploration of a fugitive praxis with/in american schooling facilities, asking: how do Black educators use aspects of fugitivity during moments of curricular violence? Fugitivity–is the process and pathway a scholar or educator takes to refuse, subvert, and emancipate hegemonic systems created by a western colonial and capitalist regime that has subjected Black people through racial systems of oppression. Channeling how Black people have learned from the moment our ancestors walked through the door of no return to desegregation and beyond, fugitivity is employed to counter curricular violence–the moment in american public school classrooms that ostracize and demonize Black students and teachers through either micro or macro aggressions––continues to be a mechanism for the american dream. Because of this, the necessity for fugitivity, fugitive teachers and students, is as important as it was on the plantations. To gain a better understanding of this sinewy praxis, The Black Teacher Tapes was established (patent pending). This is a series of filmed interviews with Black teachers asking them about their experiences with fugitivity. The goal is to highlight insights from educators in our schools to understand which areas of the classroom (be it physical space, syllabi, projects, or informal instruction) benefit most from fugitive practices. Documenting Black educators' work is important to the construction of an education system that supports and nurtures Black and other marginalized students. Alongside The Black Teacher Tapes, forms of Black storywork is used to analyze the data collected from the interviews. What will appear in this dissertation is a queer Black love story that explores the moments of fugitivity: refusal, subversion, and liberation.