Moving Beyond the Binary?

Hank Willis Thomas’s 2013 sculpture “Raise Up” is a striking embodiment of black social death. Ten brass figures reach out of a white pedestal, facing the wall with their hands held up. While each differing slightly, all ten are presumably men. Why are their faces obscured? Perhaps it is a lineup (but none of the hands are flat against the wall). They could be at a prayer service (though that is not reason enough to face them away from us). After the Michael Brown shooting of 2014, it would certainly be easy to imagine it paying homage to the activist “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot!” We can only see one’s set of shoulders. The rest are submerged so deeply in the white base that torsos, necks, mouths are sliced off. Some sort of inhumanity has occurred – these are incomplete people; not only have we been cut off from them, but they are have been separated from themselves. In spite of everything, the figures are still somehow active. It is not as if the heads and arms have been carelessly strewn about or arranged in a stilted attempt to unnaturally pose them.

Against the Dark: 

Antiblackness in Education Policy and Discourse

Providing readers with an explanation of the focus of antiblack scholarship as a framework for the article, Michael J. Dumas looks at the concepts of antiblackness through racialized educational policies, the signification of Black bodies in educational spaces, and the perceived threat of the Black body to non-Black students. Like Leonardo, Dumas operates within an understanding that whiteness is a social construct, employed as a method of negating “others,” to which Blackness is oppositional. That Blackness, however, is constructed as a “racialized social group that shares a specific set of histories, cultural processes, and imagined and performed kinships,” that the various white (European) ethnic groups do not share. (Dumas, 2106, p. 12) Dumas makes the point that his capitalization of Black is used “to signify the imagined representations of the physical Black body.” (p. 13) His usage of this signification is particularly important, not only to the message of the essay, but also to the greater historical understanding of Black bodies. We are again living through a period in which white supremacists are attempting to use imagined representations of the physical Black body as ideological scare tactics. Such ideologies support Dumas’ argument that the Black body is not recognized as human. Following the argument that Blacks are not considered fully human citizens in our society, then it is understandable to see why Afropessimists believe that there are no true methods for Blacks to petition for reparation.

Compounding the argument that this is truly an antiblack society is the embrace of capitalistic multiculturalism, which Dumas argues is more profitable global economy that ignores Black experience, justified as anti-racist because it’s inclusive beyond the white/Black binary. This movement beyond the binary represents a “social death” of Black people and further contributes to the concept of the Black problem, thus again underscoring the removal of Black humanity. (p.15) Perhaps most aptly illustrating the thesis of the article is this statement, and also the result of historical anti-Blackness, “And this, then, is the essence of antiblackness in education policy: the Black is constructed as always already a problem-as nonhuman; inherently uneducable, or at the very least, unworthy of education; and, even in a multiracial society, always a threat to what Sexton (2008, p. 13) described as ‘everything else.’” (p. 16)

The whole article was engrossing, but one passage caught my eye. “Antiblackness allows one to capture the depth of suffering of Black children and educators in the predominantly white schools and connect this contemporary trauma to that of the longue dureé of slavery from bondage to its afterlife in desegregating (and now re-segregating) schools.” (p. 16) This is an especially intriguing conceptualization, and I wish that Dumas had dedicated more space within the article to expand on this topic. 

BEYOND BLACK AND WHITE: 

The Model Minority Myth and the Invisibility of Asian American Students

Jean Yonemura Wing addresses the negative effects resulting from the stereotype of the Asian American Model Minority student through a case study of a diverse group of Asian American students attending Berkeley High School in California. In American culture, Asian American students are believed to be naturally hard-working, smarter than non-Asian students, and excel in mathematics. According to Wing, these students are often “lumped together, with no distinctions regarding such basic differences as national origin and history, class background, immigration status, language(s) spoken, or parent’s educational levels and occupations, or what classes they are taking.” (Wing, 2007, p. 457) This reductive lens thus ignores the diversity of Pan-Asian representation, as well as the academic and economic struggles that these students may encounter. Of the six students interviewed, we meet: students with working-class parents and students with a more middle-class upbringing; parents with no education and college educated parents; and students who have navigated the traditional gender expectations in different manners.  

The social construct of the model minority, although seemingly benign, allows Asian Americans (more broadly) to be utilized as a political tool, providing white people a buffer between other, and potentially more threatening, people of color. (p460) Wing later provides further examples of discrimination against Asian Americans, such as Yellow Peril, “You all look alike,” inability and apathy toward correct pronunciation of student names, and selective exclusion from the school curriculum by focusing on select histories of select Asian immigrants. One of the more interesting foci of discrimination felt by the Asian American students in the study involved high school athletics. Where prestige sports are dominated by students exhibiting size and strength, the students in the study were involved in lower-prestige sports in which speed or agility were more beneficial. Similarly, the notion of relative functionalism as an explanation for the large percentage of Asian students in STEM fields was intriguing, but also disappointing that so-called “soft skills” such as reading, writing, and speaking, are neglected rather than addressed for improvement. (p. 479)

Cambodian-American education activists and members of the Khmer Parent Association discuss the struggles the community faces in schools, and why there is no “one-mold-fits-all” approach that can address the needs of all Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. (NBC Asian America)

Other Works Cited

1. Thomas, Hank Willis. Raise Up. 2013. https://anarchistwithoutcontent.wordpress.com/2015/05/31/the-black-radical-tradition/ Accessed 9/24/2018
2. Re-Examined: Cambodian-American Fights ‘Model Minority’ Stereotype In Education. NBC Asian America. https://www.youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=T2HQkQe9qVM. Accessed 9/24/2018