Rise Up!: Activism as Education

by Amalia Dache (Editor), Stephen John Quaye (Editor), Chris Linder (Editor), Keon M. McGuire (Editor)

Overview

We live at a time when the need for resistance has come front and center to international consciousness. Rise Up! Activism as Education works to advance theory and practice-oriented understandings of multiple forms of and relationships between racial justice activism and diverse and transnational educational contexts. Here contributors provide detailed accounts and examinations—historical and contemporary, local and international—of active resistance efforts aimed at transforming individuals, institutions, and communities to dismantle systems of racial domination. They explore the ways in which racial justice activism serves as public education and consciousness-raising and a form of education and resistance from those engaged in the activism. The text makes a case for activism as an educational concept that enables organizers and observers to gain important learning outcomes from on-the-ground perspectives as it explores racial justice activism, specifically in the context of community and campus activism, intersectional activism, and Black diasporic liberation. This volume is an essential handbook for preparing both students and activists to effectively resist.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781611863246
Publisher:	Michigan State University Press
Publication date:	09/01/2019
Series:	Perspectives on Access, Equity, and Diversifying Pathways in P-20 Education
Edition description:	1
Pages:	348
Product dimensions:	7.00(w) x 10.00(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Amalia Dache is an Afro-Cuban American scholar who is an Assistant Professor at Penn Graduate School of Education at University of Pennsylvania.
Stephen John Quaye is an Associate Professor in the Higher Education and Student Affairs program at Ohio State University and is the past president of ACPA: College Student Educators International. His research focuses on engaging in dialogues about difficult issues, student and scholar activism, and strategies for healing from racial battle fatigue.
Chris Linder is an Assistant Professor of Educational Leadership & Policy at the University of Utah, where she studies sexual violence and student activism through a power-conscious, historical lens.
Keon M. McGuire is an Assistant Professor of Higher and Postsecondary Education at Arizona State University. Drawing from Africana frameworks, he examines how race, gender, and religion shape minoritized college students’ identities and the ways they experience and resist racism, sexism, and heteronormativity.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Community and Campus Resistance

Contrary to normative liberal assumptions, educational institutions are not inherently just. Despite many public relations efforts that signal otherwise (Ahmed, 2012), rather than existing in opposition to matrixes of domination (Collins, 1991), many K–12 schools as well as colleges and universities reproduce and maintain white supremacist capitalist (cishetero) patriarchal systems and institutional practices (Dancy, Edwards, & Davis, 2018; hooks, 1990). As a microcosm of societal phenomenon, educational institutions often reflect similar processes and practices of inequality (Perry, 2011). From disproportionate disciplining, informal tracking, lack of culturally relevant curriculum and instruction, systemically underfunded schools, and comparatively lower graduation rates, students who are marginalized because of their sexual orientation, gender identity, race, primary language, nationality, or ability often experience a perpetual sense of material and ideological estrangement in schools. Put differently, a marginalized student is consistently reminded that they are a "guest in someone else's house" (Turner, 1994).

One outcome of this lived reality is that educational institutions often become the sites of vigorous and sustained resistance. This is particularly true during the times of radical mass movements. Similar to the ways in which the Civil Rights, Black Power, antiwar, anticolonial, and Women's Rights mass movements of the 1960s and 1970s contributed to unprecedented campus unrest (Rogers, 2012), the Movement for Black Lives has enraptured a new generation of largely student activists committed to resisting and challenging racial injustices on their campuses and in their communities. Maxwell Little and Storm Ervin's reflective vignettes illustrate their journeys to higher education from urban communities that have been sites of symbolic and state violence against Black communities ad infinitum. Max's evolving political consciousness makes clear, living in the world as a multiply marginalized human being does not allow one the luxury to ignore that which occurs beyond the Ivory Tower. Witnessing events such as the too frequent murdering of Black and Brown children and adults, routine deportations of undocumented citizens, lack of access to basic resources, and rising mass incarceration by agents of the state necessitates that one joins the fight for justice.

For Max, it was the death of unarmed teenager Michael Brown at the hands of then police officer Darren Wilson that represented his call to action. As Max stated, "I could have easily been Micheal Brown." This realization ultimately led Max to join local protests, such as MU 4 Mike Brown, and profoundly informed his commitment to use his graduate training towards achieving educational equity through his professional work. For instance, Max employed concepts engaged in a research to practice application course to challenge what he referred to as the "regime of whiteness," preserved by his College of Education, and to establish MU-National Alliance of Black School Educators — an organization that works towards recruiting and retaining Black students in his college.

In Storm Ervin's vignette she contextualizes her activism in Mizzou's CS1950 with a description and analysis of growing up as a Black working-class student in St. Louis. She shares how liberated it felt to be on the ground in Ferguson after witnessing the outpouring of the St. Louis community on West Florissant Avenue, where protests began on August 10, 2014. She states:

Ferguson was a part of the city where I grew up and a seven-minute drive from home. Abusive police are only a fraction of the larger system of racism, but it was one that united the people in St. Louis, and we were not going to back down. They killed one of us in cold blood with six shots, left his body on the ground for four hours, and carried him away in a van. The sheer and utter disrespect for a Black boy's life was abominable. It was only right for the people to resist!

In many ways, Storm's and Max's personal and collegiate journey captures what Baldwin referred to as the "paradox of education," — "that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated" (2008, p. 17). Moreover, in both implicit and explicit ways, the authors who have contributed to this part reflect Baldwin's analysis.

The chapters that make up this part provide illustrative examples of students, parents, faculty, and teachers who, similar to Max's response in the face of injustice, are compelled to not only struggle against various forms of dehumanization experienced in schooling and community contexts, but also transform the policies and institutions that manufacture inequality. In their chapter, "Youth Participatory Action Research as Praxis: The Importance of Shared Power Among Youth and Adults to Counter Systemic Racism" Anjalé Welton and Melanie Bertrand demonstrate what is possible when youth (particularly of color) are able to share power with adults and are acknowledged for their "valuable insider insights into the everyday mechanisms of white supremacy and intersecting forms of oppression along lines of gender, gender identity, sexuality, religion, immigration status, language, and more" in their collaborative work toward systemic equality. After offering an overview of youth participatory action research (YPAR) as collective praxis and learning, the authors provide two YPAR case studies. The first looks at a Midwest, social-justice focused high school class that examined racial politics, while the second engages the work of an afterschool YPAR group made up of middle school youth of color and adults who collaboratively researched racism and culturally relevant curriculum at their school. Each case represents the potential of educational inquiry, while acknowledging the very real limits and barriers created by educators and adults unwilling to respond to students' call to action.

Two other chapters in this part provide examples of efforts at institutional transformation in college and university settings through collective organizing that attempts to educate others throughout the process. In "How Does It Feel to Be a Problem: Lessons Learned through Art, Activism, and Dialogue," Durell M. Callier discusses the powerful possibilities of employing nontraditional research methods. Having taken up "Black performance methods, theory, and modes of presentation," Callier describes how his scholar-activist collective used Bodies on Display — a performance art installation based on research with Black girls and Black queer youth — to "create a space which holds central the sacredness of Black life, while simultaneously critiquing the structures, policies, and individuals' actions and agents responsible for anti-Blackness, queer antagonisms, and the premature deaths of Black people" (p. 7) with University of Alabama community members. More specifically, Callier shares lessons learned from using performance art to engage in difficult dialogue about the sustained marginalization of Black workers, staff, students, and faculty within the university community.

Similarly, productively operating outside of normative boundaries of traditional research, in "We Were Tired of Talking: The Catalyst for the Mobilizing Anger Collective," Dominique C. Hill, Mahauganee D. Shaw Bonds, and Stephen John Quaye provide a glimpse into the cost of being a Black faculty member at a predominantly white institution during these times. Highlighting the collective work of community members, staff, faculty, and students through the Mobilizing Anger Collective, Hill, Shaw, and Quaye use reflective writing to make space for their anger and frustrations related to their lived experiences as Black faculty, and use autobiographical reflections of living at various intersections of race, sexuality, nationality, gender, and class unsatisfied with local and national efforts to address injustice. The chapter concludes with affirmations of their continual commitment to the labor of social justice within their communities.

Continuing the theme of scholar activism, in "Defining the Struggle: Epistemological Explorations of Social Geography and Digital Space in Ferguson," Amalia Dache and Cristina Mislán provide an analysis of their efforts to empirically document the collective protest and ongoing resistance to the murder of Michael Brown. Pushing back against social scientific analyses that do not fully account for the dialectical relationship between physical and digital communities of resistance, Dache and Mislán "describe the methodological scaffolding and design of conducting research on media, activism, and space in a contested geography such as Ferguson and the larger St. Louis area." Working to produce an archive more germane to the lived realities of individual and collective organizers in and around Ferguson, Dache and Mislán engage ethnographic fieldwork in order to push readers to challenge epistemological racism in the very ways we ask and attempt to answer research questions.

Finally, in another engagement with community based-activism, Charles H. F. Davis III's multi-sited ethnographic project explores how the Dream Defenders — a group of college student activists and youth of color — used peer pedagogies of during their thirty-one-day occupation of the Florida Capitol in Tallahassee, Florida. In "Peer Pedagogies, Communities of Memory, and Occupying the Florida Capitol," tracing the emergence of Dream Defenders, which was coeval to the murder of seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin, Davis III emphasizes the importance of peer pedagogies that occur beyond traditional campus boundaries such as in homes, on social media, or in this example in a state's capitol. Through rich description, Davis III provides an important analysis of how storytelling and replication of governmental protocol was used to educate community members and students with various strategies for organizing, mobilizing, and resisting.

While each of these chapters are connected vis-à-vis their sites of consideration — community and campus — they also share a commitment to the idea that activism can be actualized through research and that research may very well be a form of activism. Refusing assumed apolitical scholarly stances, these authors understand that research as process has the potential to transform individuals and institutions in ways that are racially just. In this way, similar to other chapters throughout the text, our scholars challenge genre and normative standards of distance in order to participate in, benefit from, and bear witness to research as a form of activism.

VIGNETTE: CONCERNED STUDENT 1950

Resistance Matters

Maxwell C. Little

I told the Englishman that my alma mater was books, a good library. Every time I catch a plane, I have a book that I want to read — and that's a lot of books these days. If I weren't out here every day battling the white man, I could spend the rest of my life reading just satisfying my curiosity — because you can hardly mention anything I'm not curious about.

— Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X

In this chapter, I reflect on the early stages of my life, revealing how my community-based cultural identity and education served as an essential problematic ingredient for the racial status quo at the University of Missouri, Columbia. My lived experiences growing up in the city of Chicago, as segregated as it is, allowed me to develop multiple identities, which have served me well in navigating institutions of higher education. One by-product of growing up in the city of Chicago, for me, is that I learned how to stand up for myself and fight for what I believed in. As a juvenile, I fought for pride and respect in a gang-infested environment, but as I got older, I took that same energy and directed it towards civic engagement, peacefully fighting to create a diverse, inclusive, and equitable university, specifically for Black students.

During my academic journey at the University of Missouri, Columbia, there were multiple student-led organizations and movements that I was involved with: MU National Alliance of Black School Educators, MU 4 Mike Brown, MU for Eric Gardner, the Student Coalition for Critical Action (SCCA),#PostYourStateofMind, and Racism Lives Here. But in the fall of 2015, Concerned Student 1950 (CS1950), the student vanguard movement I joined as a founding member, consisted of eleven Black students who were the products of Lloyd L. Gaines, Lucile Bluford, Gus T. Ridgel, and the second generation of affirmative action. We were highly unsatisfied with historical and contemporary political concessions at Mizzou. Therefore, we took action to demand institutional change. The name Concerned Student 1950 was influenced by the first group of African American students admitted for enrollment at the University of Missouri in the year of 1950.

The University of Missouri, Columbia history of racial exclusion, including contemporary compliance with racism on campus in the fall of 2015, impacted our education. Since then, at approximately seventy-five predominately white institutions across the country, institutional leaders' failure to address and condemn racist behavior within higher education has inspired students of color to petition for, among other things: an apology and acknowledgement of the history of slavery and racism in the founding of higher education institutions; diverse and inclusive curriculum; an increase of African American faculty and staff; the creation of social justice centers; the removal of memorials, monuments, statues, and names from buildings that honor slave owners and sexual abusers; and the implementation of diversity training for students, faculty, and staff (the Demands, 2018).

This chapter is based on personal narratives of my lived experiences as a youth to my time as a student activist at Mizzou. The first narrative includes a brief journey of my community-based cultural identity — a glance of what it is like for many young Black males growing up in the city of Chicago. Learning how to navigate this reality, my social world provided several critical life lessons that a university cannot teach. The knowledge I acquired from my father during my rough patch as a youth served me well as I engaged in activism at Mizzou. As seen in the following narrative, I abandoned street mentality altogether as I began to take advantage of the scarce educational opportunities I was offered while in high school. By this time, I was focusing more on understanding the political and social nature of Black people in the city of Chicago — and in America, period.

After becoming aware of racial injustice in society, I began to accept and acknowledge who I was — a critical scholar-activist. In the book, White by law: The legal construction of race, Ian Haney-Lopez (2006) stated that "race-blindness is a racial act to the extent that it maintains the status quo, thus serving certain racial group interests and not others" (p. 126). In the spirit of embracing my new identity as a critical scholar-activist, which I discovered during Dr. Harper's course, I challenged and critiqued race-blindness within the College of Education undergraduate program for its lack of effort to recruit and retain Black students. Next, I focused on the presence of Dr. Amalia Dache's scholarship during my academic journey at Mizzou. I credit Dr. Dache for opening my eyes to a world of cultural diversity. It was her mentorship, guidance, and critical emancipatory scholarship that sparked my activism. In the next section, I briefly explore my experiences mobilizing with student-led movements and Concerned Student 1950 during the fall of 2015. Utilizing disruptive resistance methods to expose systemic and structural racism is not popular to those who wish to maintain the status quo, but resistance is absolutely necessary. In this chapter's conclusion, I briefly advocate for antiracist policies and continued efforts of resistance against racial exclusion and inequality in higher education systems.

Growing up in Chicago

"Maxwell, do you have any homework today?" "Nope!" "What do you mean you don't have homework; you have homework every day. Now go and get your book!" Those were the words of my father — the first person to teach me about Malcolm X and Harold Washington. Back in sixth grade when Ms. Pickett did not assign homework, I could not rejoice to an upcoming evening of freedom like many of my classmates did. My father made it clear to me at a very young age that reading was essential to survival. His long and repetitive speeches about the consequences of not reading were exhausting to listen to. However, the thought of not providing my father full attention while he was talking never crossed my mind — his butt whoopings were petrifying. However, those same dull speeches got me through elementary school, high school, and a master's degree in education from the University of Missouri, Columbia in the spring of 2016.

(Continues…)

---

Excerpted from "Rise Up!"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Michigan State University.
Excerpted by permission of Michigan State University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---

Table of Contents

Foreword David Omotoso Stovall vii

Preface xi

Introduction xv

Part 1 Community and Campus Resistance

VIGNETTE. Resistance Matters Maxwell C. Little 9

VIGNETTE. A Resistance Journey in Higher Education Storm Ervin 33

Youth Participatory Action Research as Praxis: The Importance of Shared Power among Youth and Adults to Counter Systemic Racism Anjalé Welton Melanie Bertrand 49

How Does It Feel to Be a Problem: Lessons Learned through Art, Activism, and Dialogue Durell M. Collier 69

We Were Tired of Talking: The Catalyst for the Mobilizing Anger Collective Dominique C. Hill Mahauganee D. Shaw Bonds Stephen John Quaye 81

Defining the Struggle: Epistemological Explorations of Social Geography and Digital Space in Ferguson Amalia Dache Cristina Mislán 97

Peer Pedagogies, Communities of Memory, and Occupying the Florida Capitol Charles H. F. Davis III 115

Part 2 Intersectional Activism

VIGNETTE. University Activism and the Central Role of Black Womyn Abigail Hollis 147

Undocumented and Unafraid, Queer, Trans, and Unashamed: How Undocuqueer Immigrants Are Redefining the Traditional Classroom Jesus Cisneros 157

The Coalitional Factors of Student Activism: How Student Coalitions Struggle to Move beyond Diversity Logics Jalil B. Mustaffa Oscar J. Mayorga 177

Nuanced Activism: A Matrix of Resistance Terah J. Stewart Brittany M. Williams 201

Activism, Immigration, and Graduate School: Letters of Hope and Solidarity Susana M. Muñoz Angelica Velazquillo 225

Part 3 Black Diasporic Liberation

VIGNETTE. Threads of Global Political Consciousness Jonathan L. Butler 251

Locked in the Shadows: Chicago's Black Community College Campus Movement Fredrick Douglass Dixon 261

Black Solidarity Matters Ifeyinwa Onyenekwu 283

The Role of the University in Building a Twenty-First-Century Pan-Africanism: Reconstituting Transnational Solidarity for Liberation Brian Kamanzi 297

Contributors 321

Editorial Reviews

"Around the world, university students of color have tired of fraudulent political discourses of racialized normativity that have violently betrayed subaltern dreams of justice. In response, they are rising to resist and challenge the destructive impact and persistence of racialized and economic subjugation on their lives and their communities. Anchored in the critical power of a Black feminist tradition, Rise Up! Activism as Education engages this reality not only through incisive critique and analysis of contemporary issues but also by advancing a much-needed call to action—if we are to genuinely dismantle and reinvent the oppressive conditions of education and society that defy our liberation."
—Antonia Darder, Leavey Presidential Endowed Chair of Ethics and Moral Leadership, Loyola Marymount University, and Distinguished Visiting Professor of Education, University of Johannesburg


"RiseUp! Activism as Education expresses the ideas and aspirations of a new generation of student and scholar activists who feel compelled to wake up, stand up, step up, and speak up. It presents firsthand accounts from the front lines of struggle that delineate the work of an outpouring of creative and critical collaborations among people who refuse the unlivable destinies intended for them as a first step for forging new democratic practices and possibilities."
—George Lipsitz, author of The Possessive Investment in Whiteness

From the Publisher