In Class with Carr

Election Day has arrived for most of the United States, with over twenty million people having already cast a vote as of late October. In Class With Carr 346, “Running in Place,” balances tensions of Governance-centered African political engagement in and against a convulsing US Federal Social Structure during this election cycle and beyond.

How can, should, and/or will we exert energies and gather and expend resources in this fraught political moment?

How are we undertaking efforts to protect our basic ability to be, to survive systemic and collective assault, and to prevent further erosion of our current social and cultural status and political and economic position while strengthening the Momentum of Memory in order to feed larger visions and work for our collective future?

“Running in Place” challenges us to reflect on our relationships to the US Social Structure, drawing from ICWC Session 345’s discussion of Governance protocols for defending “home.” Examining Movement and Memory for evidence of collective motivations for voting as acts of collective self defense and self preservation, we displace appeals to individual interest as Ways of Knowing. This also removes notions of “patriotic responsibility,” “civic duty” or “saving America” as grounding motivations.

In the face of increasingly desperate attempts to disrupt, intimidate, target, and/or suppress electoral political action, we continue the work of community-subsidized education and active study as vital tools of resistance and building for a better today and tomorrow.

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In the United States, France and Brazil, country-wide election cycles are heavily underway. As global Social Structures continue to be remade by conflicting economic, political and social agendas, Africana Governance formations and impulses fight to harness a Momentum of Memory in order to contest for collective state power and resist coordinated efforts to suppress popular social and political movements.

As African and other students fight for quality education in French colonies and its mainland and African students in the US march for their lives and to protect and exercise collective Black power through the vote, HBCU homecoming season reinforces rituals of Cultural Meaning-Making.

What is the nature, meaning and value of a concept of “home” as place, idea and context for social transformation?

What happens when our sense of self and home are roiled by serial assaults grounded in who we have been to other, hostile social forces?

How do or can our responses determine the course of our individual and collective lives?

Is there a coming Black home?

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This week’s In Class With Carr comes from the Annual Convening of the National Conference of Black Lawyers. NCBL, founded in 1968 to serve as the Legal Arm of the Movement for Black Liberation, brings together lawyers, scholars, organizers, judges, legal workers, law students and legal activists to enhance our collective ability to struggle for full social, political and economic rights. 

Today’s discussion uses an Africana Studies Conceptual Category framework to frame “law” as both concept and tool, not to create a "more perfect union" in the United States or elsewhere but as a battlefield for resistance and collective local, state-level and global self-determination.

This is intergenerational, multigenerational work, connected through an unbroken genealogy and bridging gaps between elders and youngers in exchanges of experience, knowledge, ability and innovative energy. 

In a moment of both heightened opportunity and challenge, we must challenge our intergenerational warriors to use globally-anchored strategies, to defend institutional memory, and to anchor legal and policymaking battles in African Intelligence (AI).

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What happens when a society has access to more information but suffers an underdeveloped capacity for collective understanding? In this week’s In Class With Carr, the concept of "Super Ignorance" is used to label contemporary relationships between education, power, technology, culture, and collective memory and action. Continuing Session 342’s discussion of deepened literacy and slow learning as Ways of Knowing that also combat hostile Social Structures, we include additional examples centering these traits in struggles over what can and should be taught, emphasizing that learning is never just the acquisition of information.

Using the Africana Studies Conceptual Category method, we ask who controls knowledge, how communities preserve and interpret it and how systems of power can produce ignorance even amid unprecedented access to information. Donald Trump’s absurdist injection of "super intelligence" as a label to mask predatory relationships between social control and human learning obscures a deeper dilemma. The problem for oppressed people is not simply whether machines can process more information for their individual use (and exploitation), but whether an information-saturated culture fragments collective learning, replacing sustained inquiry and collective action with individualized consumption and manipulated interpretation.

Against this, we position select examples of Freedom Schooling, rites of passage, culturally grounded education, teacher collaboration, ritual, art, and memory as Cultural Meaning-Making practices. These practices center and connect Ways of Knowing to Governance purposes in hostile, anti-Black Social Structures. “Saving Institutions from Social Ignorance” asserts that answers cannot be found by simply adding more information or more powerful technologies. Instead, alternatives lie in education grounded in long-view memory, alongside honed and consistent protocols for developing individual capacity to contribute to collective inquiry and action. This is the type of education that teaches people not only how to know, but what knowledge is for.

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This week’s conversation, "Cross Colors," confronts our current attention-deficit society, one that causes us to forget what happened last week, much less before, and to attempt to command attention with shorthands that too often court obscuring spectacle.

We use our Africana Studies framework to examine recent cultural and historical flashpoints: A new book offering even more proof of Thomas Jefferson fathering children across “racial” lines; the unveiling of a new Kwanzaa stamp that replaces Pan-African flag colors with pink, lime green, and yellow pastels; and a new New York Times Magazine article that grapples with dilemmas of collective Black US public education without a mention of education as self-determination and intellectual warfare by Africans in the US during the era of human trafficking and its afterlives.

To confront a racialized US and global Social Structure in pursuit of collective power, we continue to ask core Africana Studies Framework questions: What are our best and most effective Governance experiences with educating our children and how do we scale them in hostile, anti-African Social Structures? How do we confront race without centering it as the comparative lens for viewing our humanity? What happens when race obscures our Ways of Knowing, leading to endless debates about crossing colors in a racial state and is racial integration while preserving the whole African person even possible within it?

In this conversation, we will be generous with one another, agreeing to agree with love, facts, and in pursuit of self-determining Governance formations.

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Global and domestic systems upholding US power continue to fracture, threatening partial collapse. Other countries accelerate work to bypass US influence and form new protective alliances.

US public institutions face new threats from a determined minority of self-centered political actors moving in a distortion field of disregard, delusion, and avoidance. Amid this instability, African, Indigenous, and immigrant communities face renewed pressure to organize to protect themselves against a system that still values and protects whiteness as a property interest.

Against these threats, the 55th annual Congressional Black Caucus Legislative Conference convened with the theme "Rooted, Ready and Rising." Despite an array of policy analysis and extensive networking, efforts to catalyze urgent calls for decisive collective action remain a challenge. With US mid-term elections less than two months away, a wave of media disinformation is swelling to protect more organized actors. This onslaught threatens to leave the general public unequipped to navigate crumbling structures around them.

As In Class With Carr continues our collective work of repair, we are determined to prepare for a potentially collapsing US political house by rooting ourselves in the reliable weekly space of our Mbongi.

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This week, Smithsonian Institution Secretary Lonnie Bunch announced his retirement after a nearly four decade affiliation with its network and ending his seven year tenure as the first African American and first Historian to lead the institution founded in 1848. A decade ago this month, the National Museum of African American History and Culture opened. Bunche’s efforts leading both institutions provide a lens through which to consider ongoing contests over relationships between integrating various national identities into larger Social Structures of state affiliation, citizenship and belonging.

In an era where white nationalist nativism in the United States increasingly aligns with global white supremacist political movements, Bunch’s structural attempts to integrate various competing narratives of collective memory often inflamed U.S. white nationalist ideologues and extremists determined to use high-stakes cultural battlegrounds to cement an emerging minority rule.

This collision of narrative and space echoes Paul Goldberger's recent reflection on the World Trade Center's 25th anniversary in The New York Times, where he observed, "You can destroy something in an instant, but it will take a generation to rebuild it, and even then it cannot ever be the same."

The Africana Studies Framework allows us to examine both competing ideas of Governance and underlying Social Structures in which they exist. How do we recognize both interpretive differences and undeniable realities? How can we use Movement and Memory to build self-determining Governance formations? And what can and will emerge in the wake of a shifting world system?

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This pre-Labor Day week was marked by the transition of Cultural Meaning-Maker Cassandra Wilson, whose artistic labor reminds us of the power of narratives of long-view memory as anchors for Ways of Knowing that shape our lives. As White nationalist politicians and others’ increasingly desperate efforts to force-feed us their own narrow, absurdist, and fevered stories of US and global authority, Social Structure institutions weaken through overreach and the abandonment of previously settled norms. Narratives of authoritarian triumphalism, as always, ultimately fracture under the weight of shifting realities. Meanwhile, structures and formations dedicated to expansive imaginings of better worlds persist. How do the stories we are told and the ones we create for ourselves shape our individual and collective decision-making, and when forces determined to direct our behavior war against our collective memory, what is the ultimate cost to our collective political behavior?

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During Black August 2026, the Asantehene, Otumfo Osei Tutu II, and Otumfo-Yere Julia Osei Tutu of the Asante People are visiting the United States. Their trip features a Royal Lecture at Howard University and an Akwasidae Festival at Bowie State University, bracketed by a major African business summit. This historic visit highlights a foundational truth: Global African solidarity and belonging must anchor self-determination to drive local, regional, and global advancement. This journey happens during a time of deep global political friction. As the old Age of European Expansion rapidly deteriorates, powerful nations scramble to renegotiate global arrangements. Meanwhile, political figures in the U.S. fetishize authoritarian leadership and try to destabilize existing political and economic orders. Domestic US communities also struggle to claim collective authority and protect explicit individual rights within a destabilizing US legal system. In grappling with relationships between Governance formations and the Social Structures which hold them together, the Asante delegation raises questions of Governance, where authority is informed by the Cultural Meaning-Making that recognizes relationships between memory and vision, the protective custodianship of Ancestral continuity represented by the Golden Stool, and the living assent of the people in renewed and new Governance formations. As corporate lawfare and a compromised SCOTUS threaten US domestic stability, and neoliberal frameworks continue to buffet the modern university, this week we raise questions of structural autonomy, from the protocols of the Asante to the "jailbreaking" of the Black University, and ask several questions: What does it mean to truly govern with the people's assent? How do we reclaim authority when structures built to rule us teeter? What happens when people withdraw their authority? How do we strengthen our global ties for mutual benefit?

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During this Black August, US White Nationalists have continued to compile victories in the federal court, from Donald Trump’s White Nationalist Department of Justice dropping charges against Oath Keepers January 6, 2021 insurrectionists to his illegal White House ballroom project being endorsed through inaction by Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts.

Internationally, the US federal government continues to alienate former allies such as Canada, strong arm African governments like Liberia and support authoritarian and genocidal regimes from North Korea to Israel, all while further attempting to suppress internal critics, from sailors aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln to military media watchdogs like Stars and Stripes.

Still, from within the fracturing US polity, both resistance and victory against would-be fascist overlords continues to rise. A US Senate primary victory in Florida and wins in other smaller federal and state races continue to unsettle both soft white nationalist Democratic establishment formations and an increasingly unhinged and embattled White Nationalist Party.

Their reactions are well-warranted: A swelling number of people are taking and preparing to take action, independent of establishment politicians, mass media pundits, political operatives and precariously-perched managerial classes.

From within Africana Governance formations, hope for creating better lives through collective effort is finding footing, fed by increasing numbers of awakened, informed, and engaged actors.

This week, In Class With Carr places the concept of hope as an Africana Way of Knowing formed out of the Momentum of Memory in the context of US and global events.

We start today's class with Tequila Johnson.

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