In Class with Carr

In the US Social Structure, Labor Day weekend is both a ritual of Summer’s ending and a potential lens for examining how labor, Cultural Meaning-Making and love in Africana Ways of Knowing fuel the Momentum of Movement and Memory. In the rituals of this season, from the Annual West Indian American Labor Day Parade to anniversaries of the 1963 March on Washington and the 1955 murder of Emmett Louis Till which prompted the March’s August 28 date, Africana Studies opens a window for us to think how celebration intertwines with struggle. Africana Ways of Knowing commingle the work of justice and memory, prompting us to also consider how and where we spend our labor and what we owe to past and future generations. True “labors of love” emerge in lives and communities that choose self-governance and self-determination over blind compliance with oppression and that resist exploitation and affirm human dignity across time and space.

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The formal academic school year is underway in most places in a United States facing accelerated fascist overtures from elements in federal and state governments. Memories of Anti-Black state action evoked at the 20th anniversary of the Hurricane Katrina disaster can be juxtaposed against current attacks on both state and African memory and education to remind us that we live in a moment demanding more of us than compliance. We must look to ourselves, both to survive and to grow. Other anniversaries we consider this week include the birthday of Asa G. Hilliard III, a pioneering educator who used his platform to remind us of our best practices in education across time and space. 

As we continue our work of jailbreaking the Black University, this week we continue to pose more essential questions: What is education? What should it be? How do we meet the challenge of both defending hard-won political victories and of building institutions that can sustain us against escalating fascism, white nationalism and cultural amnesia. Strengthening the Momentum of Memory provides an action that reminds us that, when we have grounded ourselves in our Ways of Knowing, we have transformed ourselves and the Social Structures we have found ourselves in in recent memory. The challenge before us is to do it again. It is time to go Black to School.

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In the United States, the back-to-school season signals more than just a return to “traditional” classrooms—in a moment of open white nationalist warfare on our common humanity, it is also a moment for renewed reflection on origins, connections, and relationships. This fall, a new iteration of that search in the discipline of Africana Studies takes shape with the launch of “The Black University,” an open public course running in parallel with a Howard University class that initiates students into a deeper investigation of the meaning and purpose of Black educational institutions.

Rooted in our ongoing project to “Jailbreak the Black University,” the course will center on uncovering the origins of Africana Ways of Knowing, Governance formations, and the search for connected traces of Movement and Memory. As our annual Kemetic (Ancient Egyptian) Study Tour draws to a close, we are guided by a central conviction: A search for “foundational Blackness” is essential to understanding and advancing the intellectual and cultural traditions of the African world.

This pursuit of “foundational Blackness”—tracing the origins, structures, and living memory of Africana educational and cultural practices—is a critical effort for reimagining and revitalizing Black institutions today.

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Our Annual Nile Valley study tour continues the process of strengthening the work of Africana Studies as a tool for jailbreaking the university and renewing deeper traditions of community-centered education. Inspired by a 1996 exchange between Greg Kimathi Carr and Jacob Carruthers—where Carruthers urged embracing language and concepts from Mdw Ntr over attempting to repurpose European concepts as a form of Africana hermeneutics—this week’s reflections link Carruthers’ notion of ancient Kemet’s governance-through-education process to the “Black University” as a concept.                                     

Against a Social Structure hellbent on bending collective memory to serve exclusion, fear, and hatred, this annual study tour affirms education as the highest expression of self-determined nationhood, peoplehood, and statehood. This fall, Carr will teach The Black University in a public format, constructing a syllabus open to all, to explore African people’s uncompromising commitment to communal intellectual life, rooted in ancestral guidance and seeking to inspire others to join in liberating knowledge from institutional restraints.

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Can we live together? We must. This week’s funeral of Officer Didarul Islam in New York City, where leaders honored his immigrant journey and anchoring cultural identities, place current global tensions, tariff wars, and political upheavals at the center of our efforts to compare ourselves to each other. We explore the state’s role in that process, and find in our study of the past in relation to the now new ways to build bonds of “nations within nations.”

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The weaponization of the judiciary, cultural institutions, and federal agencies threatens deeper fissures. As demographic shifts challenge already fragile power hierarchies in places like Texas, the backlash grows, manifesting in state repression and ideological crusades. This week, "In Class with Carr" looks to historical memory to remind us that Governance formations can and must be reimagined with a focus on relational citizenship rather than always deeply flawed racial state structures.

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The Cultural Meaning Making trope of Superman, especially as a trope used in US white nationalism, serves as a point of entry to consider power, collective identity and belief in the US Social Structure. In a moment in US and global history especially fraught with mass and social media manipulation, how can we leverage the momentum of memory to empower alternative visions of self-determination?

Critical white nationalist reaction to the latest “Superman” movie reminds us of the US’s persistent need for savior figures, often racialized to uphold white nationalist ideologies.

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In the 2025 Supreme Court term, Justice Ketanji Onyika Brown Jackson authored more dissents than any of her colleagues, offering a searing critique of expanding executive power and the erosion of constitutional norms and the Rule of Law. This week we focus on her dissent in Trump v. CASA, the White Nationalist frontal assault on birthright citizenship, placing Brown Jackson’s dissent in historical context. Her dissents represent a form of intellectual resistance—urgent, unflinching, and deeply rooted in the very framework and principles now being overtly obviated by the Supreme Court’s majority and more accommodated by those who oppose them less directly. Her words offer lessons for integrity in a moment where both the concept of “America” and the reconfiguration of the United States’ role in the Contemporary World System is increasingly marked by institutional instability and authoritarian retreat.

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The United States once again finds itself metaphorically “on the ropes,” staggering beneath the weight of white nationalism and nativist logics, elite-driven legislation, electoral political theater, digital mass media distortion, and deepening economic, social, and cultural divides. Buffeted by increasingly powerful international forces, is the idea of a US counterpunch more delusion than reality? Can the various groups in the US rediscover their best moments of clarity of collective purpose in order to push back oppressive forces, or have both the country and the people in it already punched themselves out? 

The two-week ritual corridor from Juneteenth to Independence Day is symbolized by the 1910 Jack Johnson–Jim Jeffries “Fight of the Century,” where African racial pride met white panic in full and deadly public view. Today’s avatars —from politicians to marching bands defying the narrative—continue to represent resistance. Like Bobby Blue Bland’s silken lament in “I Pity the Fool,” the momentum of memory to be found in our cultural meaning-making enables unfiltered introspection on shame, resilience, and the never-ending determination to renegotiate the ever-fracturing terms of the US social structure.

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The final US Supreme Court decisions of the term continue the assault on Reconstruction-era federal law, suborning the “neo-Confederate” agenda of reasserting racialized citizenship and dismantling protections clearly intended to be enshrined in US law in the Reconstruction Constitutional amendments. By restricting judicial orders to named plaintiffs, the Court once again attempts to curb collective legal remedy, hinting perhaps that the next step may be a frontal assault on birthright citizenship. These maneuvers are not isolated; they reflect a broader effort to preserve legal standing for whiteness. As politically backward states like South Carolina restrict access to health care and religious zealots seek the Court’s blessing to opt out of tolerance for others, the messages seem clear: Protect a narrow ideological whiteness, shield elite interests, and suppress the multiracial majority through judicial capture. This week’s New York City mayoral primary signaled that such a strategy is doomed to long-term failure when people mobilize to resist.  A central question lingers: What does freedom mean now, and for whom?

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