Sean Illing
From your perspective, what’s missing from the current discourse around anti-racism education?
Jarvis R. Givens
The best educational models can teach us to recognize injustices, and they can cultivate a commitment to resisting those things, but equally important — and this is something Black educators have done for a long time in their own communities — is modeling other ways of being in the world, other ways of being in relationship to the world.
If you’re striving to create more justice in the world, you can’t do that if you’re only focusing on the things you’re trying to negate. You can’t just be “anti” whatever. You have to have some life-affirming vision that you can hold on to, a vision that’s more meaningful and points us in the direction of a better world. You have to teach people not just to resist injustice but to transcend it. This is what the Black educational models I’ve studied have always done, and it’s lost in so much of the debate about anti-racism and CRT today.
Sean Illing
Why is it so important to move beyond the “anti”?
Jarvis R. Givens
I think it’s important because I don’t want to be stuck with this narrative of Black people as frail and suffering and nothing else. If that’s the image that’s necessary to advance some agenda, we need to rethink some things. I’m not interested in painting this picture of Black folks as only living lives in suffering. If our strategy for seeking justice relies on this image of black folks as damaged and down and out, well, it just falls into a lot of old tropes that we have to be wary of.
Absolutely, there’s injustice. This is a part of the story, part of our story, but Black life is much more expansive than that. It always has been. And so many of our efforts to demand justice have relied on painting an image of Black people as damaged and deficient, and I’m always interested in trying to resist that, and to expand the aperture for how we have these conversations.
Our strategy can’t be just about proving injury. At the same time, the public has to stop denying that harm and violence has been and continues to be done. Both of these things are challenges before us.
Sean Illing
Take an enormous concept like “structural racism,” which is a catchall to describe how contemporary inequalities have their roots in history and institutions. On the one hand, that’s just obviously true. But at the same time — and I think you share this instinct — we don’t want to reduce people to historical props with no agency, and we don’t want to define any oppressed group by the actions of their oppressors.