In Class with Carr

The annual period between June 19 and July 4 in the US should be viewed as a time when we read Africana Governance formations against contemporary Social Structures that seek to oppress and restrict human possibilities. Juneteenth is a powerful, living ritual of African self-determination that remembers and reiterates freedom as a Ways of Knowing rooted in self-governance and collective memory. This stands in stark contrast to fantasies of “independence” that follow it on July 4th.

This sacred corridor of time, tracing from Port 21 on Galveston Bay to Houston’s Freedmen’s Town and beyond, reveals and embodies African traditions of convening, storytelling, and liberation. The rituals reveal contradictions of state power—from a US citizenry terrorized by masked would-be secret police to an inversion of “states rights” arguments where fascism is rejected from the margins rather than the center, exposing the weaknesses of a system hell bent on repression.

In this moment, Texas serves as a metaphor: a site of contested sovereignty where those human trafficked fought their way out of captivity, simultaneously building enduring communities and institutions despite ongoing threats. Movement and Memory efforts like the Juneteenth Legacy Project, the Houston Freedmen’s Town Conservancy, and the African American History Research Library at the Gregory School activate a corridor from emancipation to freedom, centering economic, cultural and political self-determination, education, faith, and art.

To engage Juneteenth is to be present, to listen deeply to people, and to speak clearly and vulnerably, because each one of us matters. In this way, Juneteenth is not only a celebration but an unyielding act of liberation by and for Black people ourselves.

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As global crises and US domestic reckonings intensify, the New York Community Commission on Reparations Remedies met this week at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, drawing attention to the urgent need to reimagine repair—not merely as restitution, but as a process of decolonization and rehumanization in a fractured United States and world. Reparations is not simply (or even primarily) about monetary compensation, but about dismantling systems of harm and colonization that still define the American state and the world system out of which it emerged and which it anchors.

Literal and figurative disasters persist around the globe. Forces in the US intensify the ongoing Cold Civil War—fractured by ideological extremism, geopolitical escalations like Israel’s bombing of Iran and China’s projection of its Navy Aircraft Carriers into the Pacific, and performative nationalism seen in spectacles like the Trump Army Parade in Washington, DC, among others. 

But resistance rises. Federal District Court Judge Charles Breyer’s ruling against the federalization of the California National Guard by the Trump Administration and thousands of “No More Kings” rallies across the country present formal and organic resistance in a darkening US political landscape. The 100th anniversary of the Schomburg Center gives us a moments to reinforce the fact that we must search our collective memory in order to strengthen our vision of a different country and make better decisions for how to engage politically.

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Black self-determination and liberation requires a holistic and strategic integration of political power, cultural memory, and economic self-determination. Across a week of reflection, convenings, and engagement, from Birmingham’s Civil Rights Historical District to Atlanta’s Sweet Auburn Avenue to Daytona’s Paul Laurence Dunbar House and Wilberforce Ohio’s National Afro American Museum and Cultural Center, we center the urgency of reclaiming and redefining learning, community, citizenship, institution building and governance on African terms.

The Ballot represents more than just voting, though that is an essential element of civic participation: It symbolizes collective potential power. The long fight against voter suppression is revealed by the fracturing myth of inclusion within a settler colonial state to be a potent weapon for realizing collective power. As W.E.B. Du Bois and others demonstrate, the struggle for political power is communitarian, not individualist—and the US South remains a battleground, not of defeat, but of underutilized potential.

The Book highlights the liberatory role of education, historical memory, and cultural knowledge. Case studies of figures like Martin Delany show how Black communities must resist erasure and re-center themselves as global actors in a world system undergoing transformation. Reclaiming narratives that fostering an understanding of internal governance formations is necessary to recover agency.

The Buck calls for an economic awakening—exposing capitalism’s lie of meritocracy and the theft of public wealth. Reimagining collective economics through community interdependence, strategic ownership, and global solidarity becomes a compelling path forward. From the ruins of racial capitalism, a new economic ethos must emerge, rooted in mutual aid and sovereignty.

Voting, reading, and spending must be done with vision and unity. “We’ll find a way, or make one” is not merely a slogan—it’s a generational imperative in the ongoing struggle to complete the unfinished work of Black freedom and transformation.

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“Gaslighting” is the psychological manipulation of individuals or groups into questioning their reality, memory, or sanity—often to maintain control. In a week of continuing mounting chaos in US politics marked by the meeting of the National Organization of Black County Officials in Birmingham, we can recognize that both colonialism and American institutions have gaslit Black communities into believing that our cultures, languages, and histories are inferior.

New Ancestor Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s work explains how elites from would-be oppressed groups are often recruited into tempering mass liberation movements through mental colonization in language, law, politics and economics, enabling forms of structural oppression masked as deep democracy.

The critique extends to today’s struggles, from myths of meritocracy to distortions of Black identity and potential power in education and demography. While selective buying campaigns remain powerful in moments, the example of Alabama’s A.G. Gaston underscores that building movements anchored by independent Black institutions—banks, schools, businesses—is essential for generating sustainable power.

These examples also challenge strands of Black radicalism that suffer from ideological gaslighting, leading them to reject economic self-determination and political pragmatism in favor of ideological purity—undermining efforts to deliver material gains for the poor.

Real liberation requires long-view strategies, rooted in cultural self-determination, global awareness, and networked community infrastructure—not just litigation or protest, but power gleaned from purposeful creation. This is an antidote to being manipulated and trying to govern by gaslight.

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In today’s turbulent global political landscape, relationships between the people, organized groups and the state is shaped by interactions frought with compromise, confrontation, containment, and control. This week’s moment of confrontation between state representatives of South Africa and the United States provide opportunities to examine where unresolved historical trauma, structural inequality, and ideological warfare define terrains of struggle in the Contemporary World System.

South African President Ramaphosa’s recent US visit saw a propaganda assault from the U.S. President featuring inaccurate and unintentionally ironic uses of images from anti-Apartheid era cultural and political struggles as well as current struggles in the Democratic Republic of Congo which highlight continuing instances of state violence and neocolonial entanglements. While white nationalist in both South Africa and the United States continue to enjoy racially-engendered economic status advantage, a small Black managerial elite in both countries thrives as the majority in both countries either remain impoverished or are threatened with even more economic marginality. Oppression reflected in populist movements like South Africa’s Economic Freedom Fighters and the US’s Repairers of the Breach afford another opportunity to compare efforts of social confrontation and political compromise. 

As Trump repeated lies about South Africa, the United States moved another step toward its own political and economic reckoning. The Trump-deployed “Project 2025,” spearheaded by Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought and others, took more steps in its efforts to entrench extreme wealth inequality while seeing other efforts to advance a white Christian theocracy fail at an increasingly besieged US Supreme Court. The propaganda-labeled “Big Beautiful Bill” passed by the US House of Representatives is a blueprint for dismantling democratic safeguards and weaponizing the state to favor corporate and white nationalist interests. As has always been the case, this moment demands intellectual warfare, legal resistance, and community-based institution-building. The people must decide: compromise, confront, contain—or control.

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On Monday, May 19, 2025, we mark the 100th birthday of Malcolm X—a centennial honoring a life shaped by self-transformation, Black self-determination, and an unwavering commitment to global liberation. His words and actions continue to challenge systems rooted in white supremacy, now desperately clinging to power through international self-dealing, global realignments, and domestic attacks on voting rights, birthright citizenship, and national identity.

Since his assassination in 1965, one question persists: What would Malcolm say now? From The Autobiography to ongoing efforts to define—and redefine—his legacy, from dialogues with elders, organizers, artists, and scholars, we remember Malcolm not just as a man, but as representative of an ongoing, unfinished movement.

As explored in many sessions of In Class with Carr, Malcolm taught us to witness—and to act. White nationalism’s violent death rattle is not a moment for silence. As Malcolm said: you don’t make peace with injustice. You finish the job.

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Across political, social, and spiritual spheres, humanity faces a reckoning with the structures of power that shape our world—and the urgent need to turn from putting our faith in unreliable actors in favor of putting our faith in ourselves and responding to oppression with collective action.

The recent acquittal of the police officer killers of Tyre Nichols, Donald Trump’s continued assaults on both international institutions and domestic democratic norms, and the rising threat of regional international wars are all points of entry for deeper reflection on the meaning of collective human purpose—focusing on broad movements for liberating social change despite the constant noise of daily events. Against this backdrop, the selection of Pope Leo XIV (Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost) as the leader of the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics raises a pressing question: How can moments that command the attention of billions signal a renewed call to renegotiate the foundations of the modern world order?

At this critical juncture—amid the accelerating decline of the Age of Europe and White World Supremacy and the emergence of truly multipolar global relationships—even faith, whether in the divine or in each other, can feel insufficient. But history reminds us that, while individuals alone cannot dismantle entrenched institutions, people acting together can. As U.S. courts begin to challenge the most flagrantly illegal acts of federalized white nationalism, and as institutions such as markets and universities resist authoritarian pressure, more and more people are turning to the most potent force in any society: collective action. Whether through town halls, protests, or civil disobedience, communities are rising up.

As this commencement season—a time of hope and renewal—unfolds, we are reminded of a timeless truth: belief must be made real through action.

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The first one hundred days of the second Donald Trump presidency saw an unprecedented campaign to dismantle institutional norms and accelerate structural transformation, evoking the spirit of the earliest days of American settler colonialism. Each executive order, policy decision and rhetorical outburst worked to normalize a vision rooted in theocracy, white nationalist fascism, and xenophobic fervor—aimed particularly at white fear of immigrants and non-white communities and the delusion of narrow, absurdist “community norms.” Yet, amid this full-spectrum assault on democratic institutions and the possibilities of social cohesion, the judiciary, select institutional actors, and a rapidly mobilizing popular resistance have begun to push back with increasing acuity, challenging the fragile aura of inevitability that such authoritarian posturing seeks to imagine.

Meanwhile, within broader Black Governance imaginaries, a different narrative is forming—one epitomized by the Cultural Meaning-Making phenomenon of the movie “Sinners.” This narrative, increasingly disabused of the notion of a cohesive US people, reframes the moment of precarity in the US Social Structure by reconciling the country’s latest crisis of confrontation with its white nativist core with deeper Africana Movement and Memory. In doing so, the reinforcement of Africana Ways of Knowing affirms a critical truth: That information alone does not empower—it is the shaping of that information through collective Movement and Memory that gives rise to communal agency and social, political and economic resistance. The convergence of systemic assault and cultural response poses a vital question: what does it mean to remember—and to move—deliberately through time and space, fueled by ancestral memory and purposeful action?

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The rapid success of Ryan Coogler’s film Sinners provides an ideal text for analysis through the Africana Studies Disciplinary Framework. As we explore some of the film’s central themes, it becomes clear how both the film itself and responses to it reflect intersections of the Social Structure and Governance Disciplinary Conceptual Categories. Rooted in self-determination—both as a cinematic work and a commercial project—Sinners offers repeated examples of Africana African Ways of Knowing, Cultural Meaning-Making, and Movement and Memory. Through its use of icons, shrines, totems, and rituals, and by blending and at once renegotiating elements of The Blues and Horror as both concept and genre, the film opens a powerful space for commentary on culture, race, allyship, appropriation, resistance, and the varied and at once strikingly similar world senses of African peoples. Sinners contrasts the temporary conditions of our physical existence with how humans imagine the eternal realms from which we emerge and to which we ultimately return.

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In a week when Harvard University marked the first full-throated act of resistance in U.S. higher education against the rising tide of institutionalized Trumpism, we are also reminded—through annual rituals of remembrance—of our enduring struggle for liberation. From the commemoration of Jackie Robinson’s debut in Major League Baseball to the District of Columbia's observance of Compensated Emancipation Day, these moments highlight a deeper truth: the fight against limitation and oppression is a fundamental part of life.

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