The archives mixtape: an education in (un)making Black deaths

Education is usually framed as critical for saving Black youth. From beyond their passing, dead Black youth call for a critical stance on US educational institutions. This study adopts this critical stance. Such a critical stance allows me to ask: What do educational institutions, and their governing laws and policies, have to do with the premature deaths of Black people? I start with examining the role of changes in law and policy governing how schools are allocated federal Title I funding for “equitable” support of children from lower-income families and households in Black student premature deaths in three regions of the country during the Obama era like teenager Trayvon Martin’s February 26, 2012 death in Sanford, Florida. Then I document and investigate the underground systems and spiritual initiatives of the Black biologically dead that are connected to Black biologically living people in the world aboveground. Next, through the examination of publicly available college documents written in a context of growing precarity and antiblack violence (police and otherwise) in the US, I examine the genealogy of #BlackLivesMatter statements from one college at a predominantly white university that said it supports Black lives following the murder of George Floyd. In other words, drawing on Christina Sharpe’s concept of “anagrammatical Blackness,” I offer readings and formulations of K-12 laws, policies, and practices and of archival documents from higher education through the diverse and complex experiences of Black students and Black faculty and staff. Similarly, I draw on Sharpe’s concept of “wake work” and Ashon Crawley’s “otherwise possibilities” to provide readings of the afterlives of the Black dead as they (re)appear on earth through sound. In turn, I argue that US public education is a death supplier that uses its laws, policies and practices to preserve white life and regulate Black (early) death in K-12 schooling contexts, but also in higher ed., shifting the meaning of #BlackLivesMatter politics and discourse. Further, I contend that while the Black biologically dead are no longer physically present in the world, they are nevertheless alive and in it, guiding theory and praxis and are crucial social architects in determining the shape and course of something revolutionary and radical for the cause of Black liberation today, tomorrow, and into the future (which is also a cause for race, gender, sexuality, education, health and labor justice). This work is evident in popular music put out into the world by artists like Beyoncé and J. Cole, the resulting tracks a kind of Black biologically dead/Black biologically alive mashup. This project demands a kind of reading that is accountable to the Black biologically dead/Black biologically alive, and opens up a much needed conversation so that we might imagine other ways for relation across difference in the world beyond antiblackness and white supremacy that always means Black death.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Educational Policy Studies

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2022

Author dc:creator

• Trotter, Pasha Marcol

Contributors dc:contributor

• Brown, Ruth Nicole
• Anderson, James D
• Haas Dyson, Anne
• Hamilton, Kevin
• Rana, Junaid

• Trayvon Martin
• afterlife of slavery
• Black premature death
• memory
• Blackness
• antiblackness
• Black Studies
• Afro-pessimism
• Black feminism
• Black spirituality
• Black Lives Matter
• educational death supplier
• K-12 education policy
• ESEA
• NCLB
• zero tolerance
• higher education
• sound studies
• performance
• Beyoncé
• abolition
• reparations
• otherwise life
• care

Statement dc:rights

• © 2021 Pasha Marcol Trotter

Language dc:language

en

Handle dc:identifier

http://hdl.handle.net/2142/113321

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/113321