Institutional Diversity and Its Discontents: Antiblackness, University Political Economy, and George Floyd Uprising Statements

Abstract In this R. Freeman Butts Lecture, the authors engage this year’s AESA theme, “Dreaming of Otherwise Worlds and Alternate Nows: Unsettling Colonialisms and Racism in the Social Foundations of Education,” through a set of Black knowledge traditions and schools of thought and how these implicate our ideologies about education, specifically the university, and broader concerns about life and death, freedom, insurgency, and coalitional politics. As a contribution to the undertheorized field of Black critical educational studies, we read and dialogue about the university’s liberal-multicultural, so-called “anti-racist” intervention following global uprisings after George Floyd’s suffering and death at the hands of a structure that invented Derek Chauvin and the state police force. We query what is to be done about the university, drawing from nearly two years of collaborative research. In this effort, we discuss Black educational study, antiblackness as a scholarly lens, and offer a way it helps us think about policy and practice.