Critical Pedagogy for Black Youth Resistance

Abstract

14 | BLACK HISTORY BULLETIN VOL. 79, NO. 1 79 No.1 York: NYU Press, 2014), 59. 9. Federal Bureau of Investigation, Southern Negro Youth Congress, #100-HQ-6548, Part I, “Undeveloped Leads,” 28– 30. 10. Johnetta Richards, “The Southern Negro Youth Congress: A History” (PhD diss., University of Cincinnati, 1987), 48. 11. Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011). 12. Ella Baker, Interview by John Britton, June 19, 1968, Ralph J. Bunche Oral History Collection, Civil Rights Documentation Project, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Washington, DC. 13. Robert P. Moses and Charlie Cobb, Jr., “Organizing Algebra: The Need to Voice a Demand,” Social Policy 31, no. 4 (Summer 2001): 8. 14. Robert C. Smith, We Have No Leaders: African Americans in the Post–Civil Rights Era (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1996). 15. See Clarence Lang, “Political/Economic Restructuring and the Tasks of Radical Black Youth,” The Black Scholar 28, no. 3/4 (Fall/Winter 1998): 32–33; also see Luke Tripp, “The Political Views of Black Students During the Reagan Era,” The Black Scholar 22, no. 3 (Summer 1992): 45–51. 16. Becky Pettit and Bruce Western, “Mass Imprisonment and the Life Course: Race and Class Inequality in U.S. Incarceration,” American Sociological Review 24 (2009): 156–65. 17. Sarah A. Soule, “The Student Divestment Movement in the United States and Tactical Diffusion: The Shantytown Protest,” Social Forces 75, no. 3 (March 1997): 857–58. 18. Sean Ginwright, Black Youth Rising: Activism and Radical Healing in Urban America (New York: Teachers College Press, 2009). 19. Cathy Cohen, Democracy Remixed: Black Youth and the Future of American Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 28. 20. David A. Snow and Robert D. Benford, “Master Frames and Cycles of Protest,” in Frontiers in Social Movement Theory, ed. Aldon Morris and C. McClurg Mueller (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 137. CRITICAL PEDAGOGY FOR BLACK YOUTH RESISTANCE By Tyson E. J. Marsh The rich history and tradition of Black intellectual radicalism, protest, and critical praxis draws upon and informs multiple epistemological spaces while also occupying a variety of physical places and contexts, both historically and in the present. The politics of place and space are woven throughout the Black radical tradition and struggle for social justice, as white supremacist statesanctioned violence (i.e., the maintenance and reproduction of white racial and economic supremacy through violent and racist state-sanctioned laws, policies, and practices enforced through Ideological and Repressive StateApparatuses), both overt and covert, has required that Black folk take a creative and critical approach in locating and creating spaces and places to organize, strategize, and mobilize.As Lefebvre has written, “Space has been shaped and molded from historical and natural elements, but this has been a political process. Space is political and ideological. It is a product literally¿OOHGZLWKLGHRORJLHV´2 While Black radicals such as W. E. B. Du Bois, C. L. R. James, and Richard Wright carved out intellectual spaces for the political work of challenging white supremacy, Septima Clark, Ella Baker, and Fannie Lou Hamer engaged in critical public pedagogical work in the struggle for civil rights in more formal, physical spaces and institutions. Combining the former and latter, scholaractivists Angela Y. Davis, Kathleen Clever, and others have situated their political work within the tradition of critical public intellectualism. Marc Lamont Hill3 KDVLGHQWL¿HGFXOWXUDOFULWLFLVP policy shaping, and applied work as three critical spaces in which educational researchers engage in public intellectual work. However, in acknowledging the marriage between racism and capitalism, we must also begin to position Black youth as public intellectuals in the struggle against white supremacist state-sanctioned violence. Undertaking this work requires that we acknowledge the way in which dominant culture serves to silence Black youth while simultaneously co-creating spaces with them to critique and respond to the culture of systemic violence as it manifests itself in schooling and formal/informal sites of education. Within a top-down education reform and policy context in which Black youth are the last ones consulted, if at all, we must work with them in carving out spaces to inform...