Meditating Gunrunner Speaking, Part I: A Black Male Journey Teaching in South Korea

Abstract

In this article, I offer my own decolonizing counterstory of teaching as a Black American man in a teacher education program in South Korea, to purport how I was both a colonizer and the colonized, inside and outside of the classroom and the curriculum (Asher, 2010; Baszile, 2008, 2009, 2010). To further complicate matters, my Black male body did not fit the Eurocentric manuscript of who teaches in South Korea, rendering me a problem (Du Bois, 1903/1969), and also placing a particular high value on Eurocentric epistemologies (Mignolo, 2011a). To decolonize my Black teaching experiences in South Korea, I rely on Baszile's (2010) critical race currere to perform a reading of my radical Black subjectivity in exile, while also tending to the public/private autobiographical racialization in an East Asian context. Thus, it leads me to raise the following questions: (1) What does it mean to teach while Black and male in South Korea? (2) How does one's Black man's story decolonize the narrative of who teaches abroad? To address these ontological/epistemological questions that Baszile addresses in her work, I begin with three vignettes (named meditations). The first meditation finds me strolling through a Korean neighborhood on my way to a coffee shop. The second meditation finds a cohort of Korean pre-service teachers and me in a coffee shop discussing Korean education and Black violence in America. The third meditation follows me home after my incident in the coffee shop. Ultimately, to decolonize ourselves as teachers and learners, I propose as many curriculum studies scholars do, that we must continue to offer counterdiscourses (Asher, 2010) to our racialization and colonization. Herein lies the importance of my meditations.