In the wake of anti-Blackness and Being: A provocation for do-gooders inscribed in whiteness

Abstract

Abstract Curriculum studies, like nearly all education scholarship, are predicated on Black suffering and death. Inspired by Christina Sharpe’s treatise In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, we will engage with the difficult questions of what it means to be curriculum theorists inculcated into whiteness and settlement. Pivoting Cheryl Harris’s renowned assertion that whiteness is property, we consider that whiteness may instead possess us. We draw upon Black and Indigenous brilliance to call for the death of whiteness, proposing that this act is necessary and the only way scholars and educators inscribed in whiteness can possibly imagine playing any positive role in liberation struggles. People are dying, and we either continue being part of the systems that delight in killing, or we take seriously the reordering of our own Being. We do so while being answerable to and in relation with Black studies. To initiate this ontological destruction, we write from the position of the s + cyborg in order to dissociate ourselves from our embodied whiteness. We invite white readers to join us as ghosts in the machine that short-circuit the currents of the wake. To this end, we provoke readers with a prescriptive curriculum towards killing whiteness. While whiteness is under destruction, we call for a turn towards speculative imaginings and futurisms that could envision a curriculum, a way of Being after whiteness.