Abstract
Keywords
Introduction
“Black slavery enriched the country’s creative possibilities. For in that construction of [B]lackness —Excerpt from Toni Morrison’s
Everybody be playin’ in the dark. Morrison’s (1992) indictment of literary whiteness is instructive for examining how education researchers conceive of Blackness and its relationship to humanity in contemporary studies of Black life. Morrison concedes, “the ways in which artists—and the society that bred them—transferred internal conflicts to a ‘blank darkness,’ to conveniently bound and violently silenced [B]lack bodies, is a major theme in American literature” (p. 39). The “blank darkness” Morrison describes—a canvas where one writes out, materializes, or makes known the anxieties, fears, and contradictions of “man”—was a mode through which to negate the possibilities of a Black humanity, and indeed, reify the “proper” social order, which situates the white subject as superior. She insists that the notion of (hu)man that helped to establish
Morrison’s theorizing of “the dark” inspires our curiosity about contemporary education researchers’ sensemaking of Black life in their work amid so much widely broadcast Black death during and immediately following Barack Obama’s presidency. Obama’s personhood—a Black man occupying the White House—is at once a metaphor for America’s racial progress and a steady reminder that his state-conferred authority does not undo histories of racism and racial violence in the United States. Trayvon Martin’s untimely passing in February 2012 and the acquittal of his murderer in July 2013 spurned a global uprising popularly known as the movement for Black Lives. 2 Obama declared in a press conference following news of Trayvon’s death, “When I think about this boy, I think about my own kids. . . . You know, if I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.” The execution of Michael Brown by Ferguson, MO police in 2014, and the high-profile 2020 murders of Breonna Taylor (Louisville, KY) and George Floyd (Minneapolis, MN) among many others, reinforce the urgent need to understand the conditions that sustain anti-Black racism in the United States despite eight years of a Black president. As such, this series of high-profile Black deaths between 2012–2022 mark a turning point in critical studies of Black life in education. At the same time countless viral videos of wanton violence acted out upon Black flesh were being widely circulated, education researchers like Dumas (2014, 2016) began leveraging theories of anti-Blackness to particularize the field’s understanding of Black pain and suffering.
Notwithstanding growing volumes of education research employing anti-Blackness or BlackCrit to specify failures of American education to adequately meet the needs of Black youth since 2012, uniform scholarly understanding of humanity + Blackness remain elusive. Each term may be broadly understood as a social construct, which in turn renders their meanings, utility, and application porous and unbordered. Both “humanity” and “Blackness” make appearance in the extant academic literature—across disciplines and fields—side by side with varying implications for teaching, learning, and the many processes and institutions that enclose Black students’ formal education in the United States. And while there is some necessity for definitional imprecision to avoid standardizing the use of either term, this paper is a product of our concern over the consequences such imprecision may have for rigorously documenting the
There is an inexhaustible list of reports, peer-reviewed articles, books, and chapters that refer to the Black, Blackness, humanity and its derivatives (i.e., human
Centering “Black Life” in Education Research
It is in and against the revelation of Black suffering in education that scholars call for a more expansive focus on Black
Our own epistemological and axiological grounding as coauthors further compelled us to study the relationship of Blackness + humanity, and in doing so, advance critical discussions of Black life in this paper that move beyond a totalizing frame of Black suffering. For example, we are thinking with the abovementioned scholarship about how an education researcher’s conception of “the human” might be birthed from examination of the
Contemplations of Black humanity in education are not new, however. The classic volume
Studies of Black Life in Education in the Era of Black Lives Matter (BLM)
Building upon the rich scholarly tradition of 20th- and early 21st-century Black education research, this review of the literature specifically examines education research published during the time that Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi began building the global social movement now known as #BlackLivesMatter.
4
The language of “life” following “Black” in “Black life” (or Black
In response to the world’s routine observation of anti-Black racial violence, an increasing number of modern education researchers think with Black studies perspectives. Scholars who include Hartman (2007, 2022), Frank Wilderson (2010), and Christina Sharpe (2016), for example, have become essential contributors to education researchers’ understanding of the enduring impacts of chattel slavery on the trajectory of Black life in the United States. Their work has been leveraged in contemporary education research to illuminate the particularities of Black suffering and its enduring significance for determining Black students’ well-being (e.g., Coles, 2019, 2020; Givens & Ison, 2023; C. D.Gordon, 2023; Grant et al., 2021; Jenkins, 2021, 2022; Mathis, 2023; Neal-Stanley, 2023; Okello et al., 2021; Robinson & Bell, 2023; ross & Givens, 2023; C. A. Warren et al., 2022). There is much consensus in this scholarship that chattel slavery continues to have long-term consequences on American life. Such revelation renders Black suffering a permanent condition of American schooling. And despite waves of structural change in America toward racial justice (e.g., Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act), there is a modern-day research imperative that scholars continue pursuing novel research approaches that probe the enigma of Black (in)humanity and Black (de)humanization.
The historical record would reflect that American advancements on the issue of race are not enough to undo persistent racial harm perpetrated against those racialized as Black. For every win in favor of Black people, there is parallel white racial backlash ( C.Anderson, 2016; Love, 2023). Indeed, Joseph (2022) describes “reconstruction” as both radical change in favor of racially oppressed peoples
Contemporary studies of Black life in education, then, are likely improved when we take greater care to discern the meaning and significance of Black + humanity in both the present historical moment and the sociopolitical contexts in which such study takes place. Without trying, we’ve all inherited settler colonial understandings of humanity (Fanon, 1963; Wynter, 2003). Failure to question the mental models or frames of reference foundational to the researcher’s epistemologies of Blackness undermines the quality and usefulness of their research in the modern world (Sharpe, 2016; C. L.Warren, 2018; Wright, 2015). Moreover, observing the relationship of “the Black” to notions of humanity is an invitation to think and write against compulsions to confine discussions of Black life to death and disposability alone. An orientation to the study of Black life that inadvertently, and perhaps unintentionally, essentializes discourse of Black people’s education experiences to rehearsals of racial trauma is incomplete. Such an orientation dismembers the legacy of Black struggle, the ethos of love for Black kin, and the dreams of a not-yet-realized freedom (Kelley, 2018). Robust scholarly examinations of Black life in education rightfully incorporate a range of projects that detail manifestations of Black suffering, interventions to undo that suffering, and everything in between. Finally, there is a growing cadre of scholars calling for and working to establish more sophisticated research toolkits for use in Black Education research (e.g., Akom, 2011; J. S.Clark & Brooms, 2021; Daramola, 2024; Edwards et al., 2016; Okello & Duran, 2021). Discerning the function and advantages of such tools—intellectual, pedagogical, political—enable “Black study” (Harney & Moten, 2013) in all its fugitive forms.
Portraitizing the Study of Black Life: A Theoretical Invitation
This paper, in part, responds to deafening pronouncements of American schools as sites of Black pain and suffering. While essential knowledge, this tagline can fuel widely accepted nihilistic discourses of Black life when oft repeated without context, analysis, or elaboration. Furthermore, such discourses avert our gaze from Black “aliveness” (see Quashie, 2021), or at minimum, distract us in ways that potentially weaken earnest efforts to interrupt the mundane experience of Black suffering characteristic of American education. Black people
On Blackness
I am said to bear the pernicious mark of dark skin. My darkness is a signifier of negative values grounded within a racist, social, and historical matrix that predates my existential emergence. The meaning of my Blackness is not intrinsic to my natural pigment; it has become a value-laden “given,” an object presumed untouched and unmediated by various contingent discursive practices, history, time, and context. (Yancy, 2017, p. 19) Blackness is not the pathogen in the afropessimist imagination and it is a wonder how one could read it so even as it is no wonder at all. No, [B]lackness is not the pathogen in afro-pessimism, the world is. Not the earth, but the world, and maybe even the whole possibility of and desire for a world. This is not to say that [B]lackness is the cure, either. It is and it isn’t. (Sexton, 2011, pp. 31–32)
Before Blackness was used to signify Black people, it was already a stand-in descriptor of all things bad and pathological. Such conceptions bind the subject to structures of capture and containment. Hrabovsky (2013) demonstrates that terms like night, darkness, and Blackness denote “a place of death, negation and the afterlife” (p. 68). This invention of Blackness as a despised thing was the basis for creating a universal narrative that one could use to rationalize comprehending Black life as separate from or outside the bounds of humanity. Such convention forms the ideological basis for African enslavement (Hrabovsky, 2013). As Sexton (2010) notes, “Slaves are paradigmatically [B]lack. And because [B]lackness serves as the basis of enslavement in the logic of a transnational political and legal culture, it permanently destabilizes the position of any nominally free [B]lack population” (p. 36). Under the weight of such a paradigm, because of their Blackness, the Black subject, whether faced with real enslavement or symbolic/ideological or psychic enslavement, becomes a site of control, punishment, and conquest.
Hence, to understand Blackness is to understand its relationality to the world around it. As noted in the first epigraph of this section, (the darkness of) Blackness signifies a negative value that has been imposed upon itself by external events, warped by various histories, times, and contexts. As Yancy (2017) notes, “Within the dialectical logic of whiteness, Blackness must be antithesis” (p. 38). Likewise, Farley’s (2022) conception of white-over-Black represents the construction of race/s and the marking of Blackness specifically as a site oriented to dispossession, necessary to ensure its permanent association with absence and whiteness’s permanent association with abundance. It is through this relation that Blackness is positioned as always ripe for violence and its justifications. This understanding of Blackness as an entity on its own, known aside from its relevance to the social construction of race, anchors analyses of the ideas, arguments, and research aims of papers included in this literature review.
Furthermore, discussions of Blackness are not simply articulated as a visible marker of skin color but more precisely “as a sociopolitical relationship and political ontology” (Mapedzahama & Kwansah-Aidoo, 2017, p. 2). That is, Blackness can be conceived as an opposition to whiteness and all non-Blackness. Over the course of US modernity, Blackness has come to define whiteness and, at the same time, be inferiorized by whiteness (Mapedzahama & Kwansah-Aidoo, 2017; C. A.Warren & Wood, 2023). This research suggests that studies of Black life in education require specific attention to the ways Blackness has been warped by white conceptions of humanness. The measure of Black experience should not and cannot be benchmarked to the experiences of white people or accurately documented if such a study relies on white (settler) research norms, values, and logic. A core component of any justice project aiming to undo Black suffering, then, might necessitate working to discover how such sociopolitical perversions of humanness are birthed in and through Black personhood and as lived experience.
Finally, engaging Blackness structurally and systemically as disposable through various acts of violence fuels
There are no fictive worlds Black people can inhabit where their Blackness does not matter. This being the case, our interest in education researchers’ associations of Blackness to humanity centers on our curiosity about how the Black subject is imagined, described, and examined in contemporary studies of Black life in education. The matter of one’s Blackness has significant consequences on teaching and learning outcomes and the social conditions that reify or refuse the original aims of the American education project. Interpretation of education researchers’ conceptions of Black humanity broadens not only what we know about Black folks’ lived education experience in the
On Humanity . . .
The notion of humanity and its relationship to inhumanity is one of the organizing threads of the settler colonial project (see Paris, 2019; Tuck and Yang, 2012, 2014). The boundaries of humanity, that is, the template for who qualifies as human and under what conditions, are bounded by colonialism since it hinges on the systematic degradation and dehumanization of Black people. It is derived from a particular epistemology by dominant groups and circulated as natural. Black scholars have interrogated accepted notions of “the Human” and the knowledge systems that legitimize and maintain them ( Z. I.Jackson, 2020; McKittrick, 2015; C. L.Warren, 2018). This work unveils the inherent anti-Black logic that upholds such knowledge systems and the implications of such perspectives on Black peoples’ lived (education) experiences.
For instance, L. R.Gordon (2022), Hartman (2022), Patterson (2018), Sharpe (2016), and Wynter (2001, 2003) have written extensively to disrupt the foundations of the hegemonic mode of the human. Their writing aims to challenge the terms under which such hegemony acquires its authority. For example, in
Likewise, Black historians have charted the development of the human and the implications of that development for Black people in slavery’s afterlives. Rinaldo Walcott (2014) notes, What it means to be Human is continually defined against Black people and Blackness. The very basic terms of social Human engagement are shaped by anti-Black logics so deeply embedded in various normativities that they resist intelligibility as modes of thought and yet we must attempt to think them. . . . This global anti-Black condition produced in the post-Columbus era, still and again manifests itself in numerous ways that have significantly limited how Black people might lay claim to human-ness and therefore how Black people might impact on what it means to be Human in a post-Columbus world. (p. 93)
The varied ways that Black intellectual thinkers have persistently questioned notions of (Black) humanity demonstrates an “epistemic disobedience” (McKittrick, 2015) and a politics of refusal. In particular, the scholarly tradition of Afropessimism demonstrates how white Western constructions of the human fundamentally exclude Black people (Wilderson, 2020). Afropessimism argues that the structural antagonism between Blackness and humanness is enduring without an expected end. Such antagonisms platform (normative) construction of the human in the popular imagination.
As such, violence is the centripetal touchstone that organizes categories of human and nonhuman. The fact that dehumanization is a process forged through the routinized violence of slavery is captured by Douglass (2016) when he declared: “You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man.” Chattel slavery, conquest, and colonial expansion are the historical pretexts that structure the terms of humanness
Finally, an organizing project of Black studies is to critique and displace the anti-Black assumptive logics that underwrite Western conceptions of humanity—that is, conceptualizations that perpetually exclude Black people through a process of dehumanization. In education, Black people’s dehumanization has been well-documented. Much of this work tends to not go far enough, however, to deconstruct the body politics of colonial knowledge. In
A Note of Summation
Contemporary perspectives on the study of Black life in education that include Black refusal (Martin et al., 2019; Sojoyner, 2017; Stovall, 2023), Black resistance (Grinage, 2019; Haynes et al., 2019; Tanksley, 2024), Black joy (Tichavakunda, 2021, 2022; Worsley & Roby, 2021), and Black speculation and imagination (Coles, 2023; Tolliver, 2021; Thomas, 2019), for instance, generate brilliant new insights that deepen the Black Education knowledge base. This work provides the field with tools to elucidate the multidimensionality of Black life in naturally occurring contexts. Still, the underlying logics of race in the United States that justify the white domination–Black subordination dialectic are indeterminable, in part, because normative conceptions of humanity are a “property” of whiteness ( C. I.Harris, 1993). Such conceptions are essential to safeguarding the white supremacist nation-state (Bell, 1992; Mills, 1997). As a result, the meanings of humanity + Blackness—and their relevance to providing a high-quality, equitable education experience for Black youth and beyond—remain in tension.
The full implications for
Methods
The focus of this systematic review is preK–16 education research in the United States. The inquiry is guided by one overarching research question: (1)
Search Parameters, Inclusion/Exclusion Schemata, and Analysis
Our review focused on an extensive search of peer-reviewed education research journals indexed in the most prominent search engines for education-related research (e.g., ERIC, JSTOR, PROQUEST). These are the journals where researchers trained in education who have appointments in an education school or department are most likely to publish. These colleagues are also responsible for the professional preparation of education practitioners (e.g., teachers, school leaders, school counselors, etc.) and policymakers. Their research substantially influences the knowledge used to resolve contemporary education dilemmas, making these journals the best site to probe the status of the field’s ideas relative to our research questions. Scholars who take up questions of “the Black,” Blackness, and humanity
We identified peer-reviewed empirical, theoretical/conceptual, literature reviews/meta-analyses published in Q1 education research journals based on the Scimago Journal Ranking System (SJR, 2023). 7 Q1 journals are gatekeepers of knowledge for the field of education and will likely have the broadest reach in terms of idea dissemination, and therefore, knowledge generation. Certainly, there are pieces not published in a Q1 journal that have had a significant impact on the field. It was our decision, however, to bound our search by locating articles published in the journals with the greatest likelihood for reference, citation, and circulation in the field. These are the journals that tend to overdetermine the direction education research will take and the shape of discourse within it. We omitted dissertations, proceedings, teaching case studies, book chapters, reports, conference talks, and keynote addresses from the review. Each search yielded multiple lists that we organized using Zotero. Narrowing down the articles for inclusion in our final analytic sample occurred across three phases.
Phase 1: The Initial Search
In the first stage (November to December 2022), we searched combinations of “Black,” “Blackness,” “African American,” “being,” “life,” “live,” “human,” “humanness,” and “humanity” in the title, abstract, descriptor, and body of the article published between 2012–2022. The year 2012 was chosen because it corresponds with the murder of Trayvon Martin and the inauguration of the global #BlackLivesMatter movement. This search yielded 802 results. We then modified our search in two important ways: (1) we used Boolean search operators (i.e., AND, OR, and NOT) to identify articles more aligned with the intentions of our study and (2) we combined search term derivatives of each operative term Black and humanity. Race, and consequently (anti)Blackness, have meanings in the United States separate from other places in other parts of the world (see Dei, 2017, 2018), hence our focus on American education. While we described in the previous section how we’re thinking about Black + humanity, we didn’t impose such meanings to filter the literature that emerged from the search. These perspectives simply guided our interpretation of the search’s core findings. After deleting duplicate entries, we identified 226 articles. This set of articles formed our initial analytic sample.
Phase 2: Narrowing the Sample
In Phase 2, the articles were evenly distributed among the three coauthors (November 2022–April 2023). Each article had a “primary” and “secondary” reader. The primary was responsible for closely scanning the article to identify its central argument and determine if the author(s) made
Final Analytic Sample
Phase 3: Coding Procedure and Analysis of Articles
In this phase (April 2023–August 2023), our team reviewed the final analytic sample (
We separately reviewed the papers and populated the coding spreadsheets. The team then documented emerging patterns in the argument and the structure of that argument, while also noting key insights. During our meetings, we aimed to develop intersubjective reliability about trends in the range of papers reviewed based on the content included in the analysis spreadsheets. These meetings also allowed us to talk about the variety of works we were engaging with, the magnitude of the papers’ objectives, and the meaningfulness of their claims about Black life according to the intellectual perspectives previewed in the “theoretical invitation” section of this paper. Most notably, we continued to convene throughout summer 2023 and early fall 2023 to establish consensus about our interpretation of emerging trends. Once the dominant trends were identified based on papers that
Limitations
Much like other systematic reviews of this nature, ours is not without limitations. The sociopolitical nature of race in the United States has resulted in a variety of approaches, orientations, and paradigms that appear in the academic education research literature. It is possible that we missed sources that should be included in the review, but this work was not meant to be exhaustive. Not much in our final analytic sample, for instance, examined Black life across Afro-Latinx, immigrant, or Caribbean experiences of Black life in the United States. We certainly encourage future work that might focus on intersectional analyses of “the Black” and humanity in the education experience of various subpopulations of the African diaspora in America. We also recognize that “Black” and “Blackness” as a racial identity and/or cultural marker are dynamic categories. Part of our inquiry is to understand how researchers are using and thinking about them in their work
Subjectivity Statement
Our interests in this project are shaped by our time as public school teachers prior to transitioning into the American professoriate. We have individually written about and taught courses related to Blackness and Black people within school and out-of-school contexts. Our motivation for this review is anchored to our collective commitment to exposing the conditions and consequences of Black suffering in education, illuminating Black liberation projects curated by Black people, and
Findings
While the
Organizing Frames and Analytic Modalities That Conceptualize Blackness + Humanity
Truncated visualization of sample papers according to findings category.
The papers listed in Figure 1 are specifically spotlighted in the findings. Overwhelmingly, these papers are theoretical/conceptual versus empirical despite empirical research studies having many more hits in terms of papers that met our inclusion criteria. The spotlighted papers emerge from the full list of articles documented in Table 1. These specific papers
Empirical papers and meta-analyses/literature reviews included in the final analytic sample also tend to be far narrower in scope than papers designated theoretical/conceptual papers. Much of the work being qualitative, there is no expectation for generalizability, whereas scholars writing theoretical/conceptual papers tend to paint with broader strokes so to speak. Hence, the papers we chose to spotlight in this findings section were exceptionally clear about Black + humanity association. These papers also tended to foreground the implication such an association has on (Black/American) education practice, policy, and research. All papers appearing in this review are relevant. They each inform our overall interpretation of these findings and subsequent theorizing. References to reviewed papers listed in Table 1 are cited as appropriate in the findings section.
The four
SettlerCentric-Illustrations
Papers categorized as SettlerCentric-Illustration tend to describe the association of Blackness to humanity by explicitly demonstrating how settler power relations are sustained. These scholars tend to use reflections on/observations of settler colonialism, or white supremacy more broadly, to guide analyses relevant to Black life and the subject of Black suffering (e.g., Scott & Rodriguez, 2015; Span, 2015). Royal and Dodo Seriki (2018), for example, articulate the ways government is designed for the people, by the people, to protect the people. They argue, however, that “the people” is a social category of white settler logic that purposely excludes the possibility of a Black citizenry, which in turn justifies numerous forms of Black suffering. The state is the settler apparatus that structures the trajectory and organization of America’s social institutions like education. According to the authors, “In the United States of America, the state protects its own interests, not Black children” (Royal & Dodo Seriki, 2018, p. 197). They demonstrate how the US government was imagined at a time when Black people were not recognized as human. A republic was established that renders Black people perpetually unprotected by the laws that govern citizens’ rights. They illustrated Black suffering by emphasizing how Black people have been fashioned as a form of state property, even today, retained in America to be exploited without the possibility of full recognition or status as an American citizen.
Researchers also clarify how settler logics work to sustain Black suffering by pointing to the role of binaries to essentialize Black people into a series of anti-Black racist tropes, which is itself a type of settler logic. For instance, Corbin et al. (2018) describe two dehumanizing racial scripts Black women are forced to navigate: the Angry Black Woman and STRONGBLACKWOMAN. They contend, “Very often, what might be considered normal human responses to indignities, such as anger, are suppressed and muted because some Black women use respectability politics, or strength, to resist” (p. 639). As such, the authors demonstrate that Black women are often forced to deny their right to
Similarly, Haynes and Bazner (2019) describe the university as a site of settler colonial occupation. They note the essential role of higher education institutions to preserve and steward America’s racial social order, a project bound up with actively denying Black humanity. Colonial ordering is credited with establishing the poles of whiteness (i.e., humanness) and anti-Blackness (i.e., non-humanness), both of which are needed to maintain white supremacy (Haynes & Bazner, 2019, p. 1149). These scholars conducted a content analysis of 1106 student demands to faculty at universities around the United States and Canada. They find that Black students are fighting to simply “experience humanness.” That is, Black collegians desire respect and the human dignity accorded to every other student. Haynes and Bazner (2019) elucidate this form of Black suffering by describing both the refusal of institutions to fully recognize Black personhood in their response to Black students’ demands, and Black students’ overexposure to mechanisms of white settler domination mobilized in and through manifestations of whiteness. Their work foremost illustrates the stronghold of settler colonial logic by stressing how Black students are too often not allowed to exist—their humanity is actively denied, and their laments for justice are made to seem wholly irrational.
Literature categorized as SettlerCentric-Illustrations further claim that to fully grasp how anti-Blackness shapes learning conditions for Black students, scholars must evaluate the ways “nonhumanness” is routinely tied to constructions of “the Black” (Dumas, 2016, p. 14), and more, the power that follows whiteness (e.g., Bimper, 2017; Carter Andrews et al., 2019; Hannon et al., 2016; A.Harris & Leonardo, 2018; Haynes & Bazner, 2019; Royal & Dodo Seriki, 2018). Such logics reflect Morrison’s (1992) consternation with the many ways conceptions of (hu)man are conscripted to the imagination of “the dark,” which hinges on centering of whiteness as the moral standard for which all should aspire. It is out of this imagination that American institutions came to be and the norms for American life became established. Papers in this category furthermore interrogate whiteness as a vehicle to discern the proliferation of anti-Blackness even if they don’t specifically use this language and, therefore, the conditions of Black suffering (e.g., Monroe, 2013, 2016). These scholars tend to agree that examining whiteness is important to noticing the significant impact settler conceptions of humanity have on determining how one sees those racialized as Black. Such recognitions alone may not lead to public acknowledgment of Black humanity or facilitate the needed strategy to actively refuse Black suffering.
BlackCentric-Illustrations
Papers in the BlackCentric-Illustrations category make minimal to no explicit reference to settler colonial notions of humanity in discussions of Black life, though it may be implied. These scholars tend to talk about Blackness autonomously, in a way that centers Black experience to elucidate contemporary manifestations of Black suffering (e.g., Butler, 2018; L. P.Johnson, 2017; A. N.Woodson, 2017). They may draw heavily on Black studies scholarship like that of Sylvia Wynter (2003), who invites the research community writ large to unshackle ourselves from “genres” of humanity that render the Black body illegible outside of or beyond the colonial gaze. While fewer papers reviewed were categorized BlackCentric-Illustrations, as compared to the other three findings categories, the ones with this designation stand out for their methodological utility. That is, these scholars tend to invite readers to better
Among the most prominent of such papers fitting into this category is Dumas and ross (2016), “Be Real Black for Me.” This groundbreaking piece introduces Black critical theory (hereafter referred to as BlackCrit) as an extension of critical race theory (CRT) in education. “BlackCrit helps to explain precisely how Black bodies become marginalized, disregarded, and disdained, even in their highly visible place within celebratory discourses on race and diversity” (Dumas & ross, 2016, p. 417). Black people are steadily rendered invisible as is expedient to the white supremacist power structure. They claim that such a power structure ceases to exist, however, without Blackness as the “thing” to be disavowed, which makes comprehending its relation to whiteness a necessity to studies of racism in the United States. Dumas and ross (2016) agree with CRT scholars that racism is indeed a permanent feature of American society, in large part because anti-Blackness is indestructible. Dumas and ross (2016) conclude that Blackness exists in tension with the American ideal of multicultural progress. BlackCrit offers that anti-Blackness is not just about racism against Black people but about an inimical relationship between Blackness and the
Furthermore, Dumas and ross (2016) believe that BlackCrit advances a “Black liberatory fantasy” that is available to all persons marked as Black regardless of racial/ethnic designation. This is reminiscent of papers in the final analytic sample that might be designated as BlackCentric. As is true of the Black studies tradition, the commitment to Black freedom or liberation is unequivocal. Dumas and ross (2016) maintain that liberation is only possible when White people, and the power structures that favor them, are named for their “history of racial dominance, rape, mutilation, brutality, and murder” (p. 431). Such naming champions greater accountability for determining the trajectory of white supremacist violence in America that indeed works to retain myriad forms of Black suffering.
Additionally, Love’s (2019) “Black Ratchet Imagination” is another example of a philosophical intervention made possible by BlackCentric-Illustrations–oriented papers. She writes, “The agency and knowledge production of Black queer youth who are resisting, succumbing to, and finding pleasure in hip hop . . .” (pp. 539–540) is essential to recognizing their Black humanity. Love suggests that the notion of humanity is flat when Black youth are excluded from its definition. Her work holds that nothing external to Black youth’s lives can undo their humanity. In other words, young people do not need permission to thrive, even when that thriving refuses mainstream schematics of success and good studenthood. The portrait of Black life that emerges from Love’s (2017) theorizing, like other papers in this review (e.g., Brockenbrough, 2012; B. A.Carter, 2013; Givens, 2019), emphasizes the dynamic ways Black people choose to engage in forms of human production that begin with/in their local knowledge and experience of Blackness, gender, and sexuality. As such, Black humanity is illustrated as complex, messy, and
Bryan (2021) puts forward Black PlayCrit as a mode/project for illustrating Black boys’ play and, therefore, their human beingness. Bryan (2021) offers three tenets that build from Dumas and ross’s (2016) BlackCrit and Curry’s (2017) Black misandry thesis to advance his concept of play-not. He writes, White people’s criminalization and stereotypical perceptions of the ways in which Black boys play is not so much about play itself, but rather about the criminalization and negative perception of the Black (boy) body. In other words, to theorize Black boys’ play, one must first theorize how Black boy bodies are racially epidermalized. (Bryan, 2021, p. 759)
He goes on to elaborate on this form of Black suffering by asserting the many ways that Black boys are not permitted to enjoy the wonder that play invites or to be children for that matter, which in turn elaborates Dumas and Nelson’s (2016) claims of Black boyhood as unfathomable and unimaginable. Bryan (2021) describes how the refusal to accept Black boys’ play is an example of the denial of Black boys’ humanness and boyhood and that “the Black (male) body is not safe in an anti-Black world—not even while playing” (p. 765). Play is an important representation of childhood, and because Black boys’ Blackness renders them inhuman, their play does not register as a human activity.
The theorizing of Blackness in this findings category is reminiscent of Wright’s (2015) assertion in
BlackCentric-Refusals
Papers in this findings category are like papers in the BlackCentric-Illustrations category for their intention to reveal Black ontologies and epistemologies of Blackness in critical analyses of Black life. These works explicitly
For instance, Mustaffa (2017) and other papers included in this findings category (e.g., T. O.Jackson & Flowers, 2017) offer a reading of Black life that explicitly rejects the tendency to constantly reference Blackness as synonymous with death and dying. He maintains that Black folks are the epitome of
A focus on ontologies, epistemologies, and axiologies of Black students’ K–12 and higher education experience was a prominent unit of analysis of papers in this category. Like Mustaffa, Zirkel and Johnson (2016) examine how and why Blackness is always tied to damage. They see Black-human relationship as grounded in Black consciousness and positive identifications with being Black. Normative categories of humanity hinge on dehumanizing the Black subject, thus, conceptions of the Black human must rely on actively affirming/nurturing the Black subject. Zirkel and Johnson (2016) take a pro-Black stance grounded in a strong, positive Black racial identity [that] rests on two foundations: (a) a strong and positive identification with being Black combined with (b) a racial consciousness of the historical, social, and cultural context of being Black in the United States, including a critical consciousness about race and racism. (p. 302)
Their project aims to expand conceptions of what counts as Black while also focusing on ways to leverage Black racial identity. In their view, Blackness will never live up to white standards, and to embrace a decidedly Black racial identity necessitates rejecting any expectation that Black folks strive to achieve such a norm.
Papers in this category further emphasize that frameworks of humanity projected onto Black people are bound up with forms of human connection that both recognize anti-Black racist tropes and refuse their influence on education policy and practice decisions. C. A. Warren et al. (2022) claim that “positive, or ‘good,’ relationships [with Black boys] are marked by a high frequency of interactions with educators whose words and behavior oppose dominant anti-Black racist messages or tropes of Black boys” (p. 133). That is, these boys perceived that they were largely understood by adult educators to be deviant, troubled, and up to no good. Such baseline assumptions made it hard to
Finally, several of the papers that could be categorized as BlackCentric-Refusals urge dissent of Black suffering in the pedagogical and/or the curricular dimension of education policy and practice. Snaza (2019) reminds us that “the particular conception of the human as the telos of educational praxis for most schools can only come into being through the logics of the imperialist, (settler) colonialist state” (p. 130). Snaza takes on Sylvia Wynter’s “pedagogical view of the human” to assert that educators must “reorient curriculum studies towards educational praxes explicitly pitched ‘against’ the settler state” (p. 130) and its capture of human energy, creativity, and collective world-making. Being BlackCentric in this case also means analysis of settler colonialism that centers the knowledge production of Black scholars to drive analyses (e.g., Brown & Crutchfield, 2017; Smith et al., 2021). As such, Snaza (2019) argues that Wynterian thought, when read with and against the university syllabus, conceptualizes education as primarily a question of the politics of being human (as praxis). He writes, If humans have rights protected by nation simply by virtue of being recognized as “human,” then racialized and gendered practices of dehumanization function precisely to justify and enable white and male supremacist social formations without calling into question their official commitment to universal humanism. (Snaza, 2019, p. 131)
To embrace Blackness is to designate a necessary transformation of the current system of unequal power structures. This point reminds the reader that embracing Blackness also means unsettling what Antonio Gramsci (2011) refers to as “commonsense” or the taken-for-granted hegemonic knowledge we have internalized about what counts as human(e) and what does not.
Likewise, King (2019) theorizes curriculum as a tool of knowledge dissemination that establishes what counts as official knowledge or universal truth. He insists that the lack of historical knowledge about Black people makes way for antiblackness to be perpetuated . . . [because] our historical knowledge is connected to how we see ourselves and come to understand [Black] people . . . what preservice teachers know about Black history [then] can influence how they treat Black children and how they construct knowledge around Blackness . . . History is fluid and socially constructed. (p. 369)
King’s theorizing maintains that helping young people realize the beauty and brilliance of their Blackness is increasingly difficult when they, and their teachers before them, lack historical knowledge of self. This is knowledge purposely withheld or omitted from dominant curriculum paradigms. He invites readers to understand Black humanity by turning the lens on Black people’s lived experiences explicitly and exclusively.
Ohito (2016) extends such theorizing to suggest that BlackCentric epistemological and methodological frames rightfully disturb normative paradigms of humanness. “I aim to communicate the affordances of a Black feminist approach to curriculum theorizing for upsetting the hierarchy that protectively preserves the dominant ‘White, male, Western European, and American’ curricular presence” (p. 438). She maintains that a Black-human association decenters the Western world. A Black feminist view of humanism invites Black folks to divorce ourselves from the desire to be (made) human or to pursue humanity as it presently exists. Accordingly, Ohito (2016) argues there needs to be an untethering from humanness to get to some form of Black humanness. Modernity dictates a humanness that we must all live within, which is predicated on the nonliving/learning humanity of those marked as Black. Like other works that could be read as BlackCentric-Refusals (e.g., Butler, 2018; Curry, 2017), Ohito (2016) concedes that adequately opposing the ongoing settler violence required to sustain the original attachment of Black people to the status of nonhhuman is essential to realizing a true Black human world relation(ality). Commitments to democratic values, such as citizenship, for example, will not get us to this goal.
SettlerCentric-Refusals
Like the intellectual aim of papers categorized as BlackCentric-Refusals, the papers in this findings category compel readers to urgently resist the conditions of Black suffering as it presently exists. Different from the previous findings category, however, they tend to make their argument by foregrounding theorizations of settler colonialism or the institutional structures and settler logic that preserve myriad forms of Black suffering. For instance, Callier’s (2018) article is a response to state-sanctioned deaths of Black queer persons. Discussing matters of citizenship, they explain that Black people are subjected to “preconceived notions of criminality, devaluation, excess sexuality, poverty, and non-normativity” due to the ways the nation-state imagines and positions them structurally as noncitizens (p. 18). Callier further asserts that citizenship is a signal of (settler) humanness, and because of this, quarrels with the possibility that Black folks can ever be understood as citizens. In a move to refuse such conditions, Callier (2018) invites “a call for Black subjectivity . . . [by] aligning [the Black] with the abject,” hereby establishing a “pedagogy of nobody” (pp. 25–26). This would transform subjective Black suffering (e.g., absence of Black personhood) into a way Black folks learn to “care for each other” (Callier, 2018, p. 26). Callier’s line of reasoning is grounded in queer of color critique and Black queer feminisms, both of which encourage an altogether distinct Black human form. The mode of refusal Callier advocates allows greater space for Black folks to focus their energy on self-determination, such that new meanings of Black being may resist normative projections of humanity, which is itself the product of settler colonial logics.
Through their project of SettlerCentric-Refusal, which takes the form of a systematic analysis of Black student loan debt, Mustaffa and Dawson (2021) ground their refusal in disrupting racial capitalism via canceling student loan debt. They explore the way white debt is seen as positive and Black debt is negative, specifically in the context of student loan debt. As they note, “Black debt . . . represents the negative balance sheet that must be worked through just to get to the starting line” (p. 3). In this examination of Black student debt, Mustaffa and Dawson (2021) describe how Black debt is bound with racial capitalism and, therefore, contributes to Black unhumanness. Loans fulfill Black people’s educational desires by demonstrating how their Blackness does not foreclose their humanity despite the conditions of settler colonialism that enclose higher education attainment. Black people are not free, or rather, do not consider themselves free until they go to college. In too many cases, this then requires that they take on mounds of debt. In this regard, Mustaffa and Dawson (2021) theorize indebtedness as a site of Black people’s unfreedom. The Black student debt crisis keeps Black humanity in limbo—as Black folks navigate always owing and not owning. Black people are convinced that taking out loans is a pathway to opportunity or, as the authors say, a means to connect them closer to full personhood. Loans normalize “debthood as personhood” (p. 10). In other words, Black people do not finance degrees to find employment alone but also to be included in the category of people understood as valuable in our society (i.e., the credentialed).
Dancy et al. (2018) similarly argue for disinvestment from white institutions as a precondition for protecting Black life. According to these authors, white institutions are beholden to settler colonial logics, which structurally position Black people and Black bodies as property. They posit, Relegating Black people to labor that models colonial arrangements or reasserts linkages between ownership and humanity perpetuates a system of anti-Blackness, but in some ways, these arrangements can be understood as resultant. One of the defining principles of anti-Blackness is the negation of Black humanity by way of violence . . . White humanity is dependent on its ability to harm Black life. To avoid violence against Black people would place White humanity in question because, in an anti-Black polity, White humanity is predicated on Black inhumanity. (pp. 187–188)
Dancy, Edwards, and Davis demonstrate the urgency that the field notices the fundamental condition/dilemma of Black people’s antagonistic relationship with the settler project known as higher education. They write that white people and whiteness engage primarily in “a transactional relationship to Black flesh” (p. 189). Such a relationship reinforces preexisting frameworks of white domination that justify Black people’s subordinate status. Knowing this, Dancy et al. (2018) claim that “it is necessary to (re)imagine a future that stands outside of the bounds of the social contract, outside of the bounds of settler colonial logics” (p. 189). Such a move would promote Black people’s “radical self-determination,” which in turn “requires both a departure from the White social contract, and . . . creation of Black counterintellectual and economic spaces” (p. 190). Put simply, the major site of refusal necessary to intervene in Black suffering is to abandon settler forms of humanity and reposition our relationship to institutions of higher education based on this realization.
Similarly, other scholars in this findings category build on notions of academic disobedience to describe how we might undo the stronghold of settler logics for overdetermining the possibilities available to Black people. For example, Baszile (2019) situates her article in the foundational assertion that the academic enterprise is itself a colonial project as evidenced by restrictive forms of academic writing. Such forms reinscribe coloniality in narrations of academic knowledge. She explains, writing—as a way of thinking, of narrating and of circulating ideas about the world—plays a central role in colonization, and I would add enslavement and other forms of racial subjection, all of which require the aggressive Europeanization and thus the de-ontologization of non-European peoples, particularly Indigenous and African ascendant. (p. 12)
Traditional academic writing, then, is a limited mode through which to narrate Black life. Her claims about academia necessitate refusing the social and cultural norms of knowledge transmission and the mechanisms used to legitimize knowledge production.
To counter colonial logics that marginalize Black thought and, ultimately, Black life, Baszile (2019) sees “recurricularization” as nonnegotiable for rewriting Black lives into mattering. To
Playing in the Dark? A Discussion
“[C]ultural identities are formed and informed by a nation’s literature, and that what seemed to be on the ‘mind’ of the literature of the United States was the self-conscious but highly —Excerpt from Toni Morrison’s
Play engenders joy, wonder, and imagination. It is a “roomy subject, broad in human experience” (Eberle, 2014, p. 214) that, on its head, seems counter to suffering. According to Morrison (1992), playing in the dark is the activity of making Black bodies the logical exemplar of deviance, criminality, immorality, and corruption. Doing so marks Black life as perpetually inhuman, which in turn establishes the White-passing, White-identified subject as antithesis to “the Black.” While Morrison (1992) was referencing canonical American novels and works of fiction, her metaphor of playing in the dark might as easily be extended to the “mind of the [academic] literature” in American education research. This knowledge enterprise on US soil, otherwise known as the American academy, is itself a product of America’s imagination of “the Black.” Even as the United States is a national project established in and through active denial of Black humanity, so have these logics formed the intellectual foundations of our field as education researchers, which includes tacit acceptance of “the dark” for its utility to construct a normative conception of hu
The four analytic modalities introduced in Table 2 demonstrate both the
Furthermore, each findings category based on combinations of the four analytic modalities makes legible the consequence of Blackness in the public imaginary. The reviewed works featured in this article clarify mechanisms of racial (dis)advantage that structure the field of education and its enduring anti-Black practices and social organization. It could be that empirical papers have a very clear structure that does not readily lend itself to, or always necessitate, rich theorizing of Blackness and humanity relative to education. On the contrary, such theorizing is core to theoretical/conceptual papers, which are more often written to do the work of evidence-based conjecture necessary to discern commonsense issues in new and compelling ways. Everybody be playin’ in the dark even if they don’t intend to do so. They playin’ because they fail to recognize how engaging in such play is American pastime. No individual is immune to the impact of anti-Blackness on our understanding of the social world. Studies of Black life in education, then, may be among the best representations for the critical study of education writ large because the works reviewed illumine the core tensions of the entire field.
The findings described in this review alert readers to the multifaceted
Black Suffering as Landscape
Black suffering is inescapable. It is, like anti-Blackness, a perpetual condition of American life (Jung & Vargas, 2021; Sharpe, 2016; Wilderson, 2010). Our analyses suggest that there is no complete understanding of Black life in education research without parallel consideration of Black suffering in the work’s research questions, problem posing, and inference making. Much of the scholarship reviewed for this paper would agree that schools are “sites of Black pain and suffering” (Dumas, 2014). As is clear from the organizing frame we term as “project,” there is a landscape of Black suffering core to the making of American education. Playing in the dark with respect to education research is a provocation to accept Black reality in all its forms—from the exceptional to the everyday. Such acceptance implies formal recognition of the long-term impacts of chattel slavery (Hartman, 2007; Sharpe, 2016; Span, 2015), and the specter of Black suffering that structures American power.
Black suffering, and its real-time consequence to sustaining Black folks’ dehumanization, should
In his commentary on the adultification of Black boys, Dancy (2014) reminds us, “One reason that Trayvon Martin’s tragic death resonates so powerfully with millions of people of color . . . is that it embeds our social consciousness with the sober reality that America is not the post-racial, colorblind society many claim.” (p. 49). In other words, while Barack Obama’s 2008 election heralding “hope” and “change” seemingly moved us closer to America’s democratic ideal, the
Likewise, Dumas (2016), in his landmark paper published the same year #45 was elected to the US presidency, reiterates this conundrum by offering anti-Blackness as a tool of education policy analysis, In this nation that has ostensibly advanced beyond Black and white, it is the Black that becomes anachronistic, an impediment to the realization of Americans’ national-popular imagination of who “we” want to be. Even as the nation (and indeed, the world) embraces a certain kind of multiculturalism, people strain against
Studies of Black life in education must begin with explorations of the ways this social enterprise strains “against the dark.” Dumas (2016) foregrounds Black death in the contemporary moment (e.g., Trayvon Martin, Mike Brown, Akai Gurley, Marlene Pinnock, and Jordan Davis) to substantiate his own claims of Black suffering’s ubiquity. His theorizing of the dark was intended to compel education researchers to seriously contemplate the interpretive and explanatory affordances of anti-Blackness, as put forward in the Afropessimist literature. Like Dancy (2014), Dumas’s discussion of Black death aims to differentiate the circumstance of having a problem from
Like Morrison (1992), Dumas names the centrality of dark matter to materialize both the source of Black people’s pain and pathways to reducing its harmful effect. The reviewed papers absolutely accomplish both aims, albeit differently and to varying ends. The reviewed works also reveal Black suffering in today’s curriculum, pedagogy, evaluation, assessment, research, and policymaking to enable a deeper understanding of the status of today’s American schoolhouse and, in particular, its peculiar function to undergird and guarantee Black people’s dehumanization. C. G.Woodson (1933) first warned more than 90 years before the publication of this manuscript that American education teaches the Negro what he cannot have—that it is designed to regularly remind them of their subordinate position. To accomplish such an aim, the threat of death and destitution has long been levied to discourage Black people’s pursuit of classical knowledge, literacy, and expectation for an upgrade in social status.
Today, the looming contradictions of Black humanity are generative for debate and interrogation. Studying the conditions of Black life in education undoubtedly expands the critical knowledge of race and justice writ large and its possibility in a “nice field” like education. Said differently, not grappling with “cultural disregard for and disgust with Blackness” (Dumas, 2016, p. 12) disadvantages robust analyses of any education (dis)parity. Researchers whose scholarship is included in this review would likely agree with Dumas (2016) that the field ought to lean into, rather than attempt to turn away from, the antagonistic relationship of Blackness to humanity. He urges us to notice how Black folks continue to be rendered the “blank darkness” upon which modes of humanity are articulated. It seems that comprehending Black suffering as a landscape of education research is itself shorthand for playing in the dark. Such play establishes the precondition for more incisive examinations of Black life, which indeed also works to sharpen our understanding of “American life.”
Studies of Black Life in Education Research and the Self
Scholarship probing the education experience of Black people is indeed always a racial project. Much like Ladson-Billings and Tate (1995), in the piece heralded as introducing critical race theory to education, authors of the papers featured in this review tended to make evident the ways their own personhood was implicated in their work. One’s personal relationship to their research goes beyond the perfunctory positionality statement (Boveda & Annamma, 2023). The bombastic discourse of postracialism during Obama’s presidency made many Americans feel as if the barbarism of (anti-Black) racism was in our rearview.
For many
We, along with many of you encountering this piece who lived through the birth of #BlackLivesMatter (BLM), bore witness to the urgent demand of this contemporary Black freedom movement. The movement, like the Black Power Movement decades before it, advances questions of Black dignity for consideration in the public square. Since anti-Blackness is endemic, we might come to understand the work of Black education to be the site for actively asserting Black humanity. How do social science researchers and those invested in making sense of the education apparatus in the United States leverage our work in service of Black liberation? Put differently, what is
The rise of BLM in the decade of interest to this review evidences the conundrum of racial progress in America amid cycles of anti-Black racism that corroborate claims about the impossibility of Black humanity. The BLM era also invites new questions and new modes of analysis for consideration by education researchers. Interrogating the meanings of Blackness and its relationship to humanity necessitates interrogating our own beliefs about the world, our place in it, the ideas that constitute our values, and their association with the research project—whatever that project may be. The organizing frames and subsequent analytic modalities provide a structure through which to scaffold one’s intellectual pursuits. Furthermore, the urgency of this work requires that we refuse neutrality and objectivity as standards for rigorous scientific inquiry of any kind, but especially scholarship aiming to understand the conditions of Black life in education. Our findings suggest that such work is never neutral or objective regardless of one’s attempt at reliability, transferability, and trustworthiness.
The Unfinished Work of (Black) Education Research
Analyses of Black humanity require more intellectual care and concern than what has generally been acknowledged in disciplined education study. This is, in part, a consequence of education researchers’ failure to
We felt it necessary to engage with Q1 journals in this review, in part, to take these journals to task for their complicity in muddying discussions of Black humanity in the field. Our hope is that this study’s findings and discussion urge interesting new directions that build on and elaborate the rich legacy of existing scholarship. As the review demonstrates, Black humanity invites us to consider the intricate linkages of “the dark” to relations of power, rights, privilege, and whiteness—all of which have implications for the education of all children. Our research should not merely be responsive to the condition of Black suffering but, through analyses of Black humanity, proactively define and assess its status to achieve any possibility of be(com)ing justice-oriented or equity-centered. And while the work is ongoing, it benefits from the lessons learned from Black education past.
Before widescale attempts at structural transformations in formal education systems or establishing university-recognized programs in Black life and history, there were Black educators surreptitiously appealing to the mind and humanity of Black children. In
There is a burden for education researchers to be similarly disobedient and, in doing so, to set the pace for studies of Black life, regardless of discipline. How we approach such work should be diffuse—variable along the lines of argument, research design, interest, and intention. This systematic review of literature elucidates multiple pathways for articulating the associations of Blackness to humanity one might take, but the work is necessarily incomplete. As America changes to accommodate growing racial division, so must our understanding of Black life in any attempts to close gaps in racialized outcomes. There is a duty of the field of education—the base for all knowledge production—to construct and theorize new possibilities for discerning and creating the conditions of freedom in Black expression and Black personhood. The future of American education depends on it.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank De’Ja Wood and Carla Wellborn for their generous support for this work.
Notes
Authors
CHEZARE A. WARREN, PhD, is associate professor of equity & inclusion in education policy at Vanderbilt University, affiliated faculty in African American and diaspora studies, and principal investigator/convener of 
) His research interests center on understanding the conditions that facilitate Black student’s well-being in P–16 education. Author of two books, including
JUSTIN A. COLES, PhD, is an associate professor of social justice education in the Department of Student Development at the University of Massachusetts Amherst College of Education. Dr. Coles also serves as the director of arts, culture, and political engagement at the Center of Racial Justice and Youth Engaged Research. His research agenda converges at the intersections of critical race studies, urban (teacher) education, language & literacy, and Black studies. Former coeditor of
DEMARCUS A. JENKINS, PhD, is an assistant professor in the School of Social Policy and Practice with a secondary appointment in the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. Broadly, his program of research centers on important policy- and practice-relevant issues concerning Black and other vulnerable populations in relation to education, housing, and criminal/juvenile justice. His work has been published in top peer-reviewed journals, including