From the Editorial Board: Fugitives from Justice Lucía I. Mock Muñoz de Luna and Raíces Collective1 It’s never seemed harder—or perhaps more hopeless?—to take up the work of writing for and in the academic world. But of course, we’re not the first to feel this, nor the last, and writing worlds and imagining new maps for how we want to be in these worlds is nothing new; it is the work that has always been done (Morrison, 1992; Crawley, 2020). So, the work continues, as will life, even in the wake of this crisis and all the willful disasters ( Sharpe, 2016) we have wrought. We write this editorial in the midst of a pandemic and a continued fight for Black life that has brought the cruelty of our world order into focus: thus, we use this space and time to write about our desperation with the academy as we have come to know it, particularly in this moment, and thus to call for an embrace of fugitivity as a method of dismantling the university and its white supremacist roots and functioning. We offer a few of our own tentative steps here, and look to the important work featured in this special issue on fugitivity as guideposts for how we might go about being fugitives. In the last week of March, as the navy ship USS Comfort made its way into New York Harbor to ostensibly lend care to an ailing city, we were brought back to the work of Christina Sharpe and her book, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Sharpe, in her meditations on the afterlives of slavery manifested in our current world, repeatedly, rhythmically, brings her/our care-full attention back to an image of a Haitian girl with the word “ship” affixed to her forehead. The image, taken in the aftermath of the devastating earthquake in Haiti in 2010, haunts us even now as we recognized that the same “ship” that this young girl was being marked for, is the ship that was docked in New York. The USS Comfort, a symbol of American imperialism, violence—and, somehow, care—once again has become a specter of the inability of our nation to understand and enact this care. Later in her book, Sharpe comes back to the image of the ship, and locates the project of American schooling in the belly of the ship responsible for the wake; that is, the still-unfolding disaster of slavery. In writing about the experiences of a Black girl(s) in the U.S. education system, Sharpe reminds us that schools instruct this girl (and many others) in “how to live in a world that demands her death” (p. 92); an instruction insidiously enlivened by narratives and curriculum of “individual resilience and overcoming” (p. 92). So, Sharpe asks of education, and of the USS Comfort: [End Page 133] How can the very system that is designed to unmake and inscribe her also be the one to save her? How can the one marked by the ship . . .be saved by being marked for it? (Sharpe, 2016, p. 92) The COVID-19 pandemic that worsens by the day— and the continued murders of Black trans women, alongside the highly publicized and brutal deaths of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd at the hands of the police, and Ahmaud Arbery’s murder by white terrorists emboldened by the state—have all brought into stark relief what Sharpe asks, and what we have to realize in our own work as education scholars: the system can only unmake us, it cannot and will not save any of us. We educators, whether we can reckon with this or not, are in the business of harming Black and brown children. We constitute the system. The foundation of schooling in the United States is one of anti-Blackness and Indigenous erasure (Patel, 2016; Dumas, 2018; Ohito, 2020). Schools are not safe places for students of color, nor will they ever be in the current order of the world—no matter how many interventions we design—because Black and Indigenous life and being under the regime of Whiteness will always be outside of...
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Open Access
Dec 1, 2020
Claudia Seymour 
