Histories of Art, Race and Empire: 1492-1865

“Our bodies are gardens, to which our wills are gardeners”- (Othello, I.iii.313-314)

“How can I not know today your face tomorrow, the face that is there already or is being forged beneath the mask you are wearing, and which you will only show me when I am least expecting it?”- Javier Marias

Introduction and Teaching Situation

There is a great confusion in America today that is hard to arrest with words. This is not a new concern. It has been this way for years. We are tired of surviving cultural and national disorientation. What is the cause of this confusion? What makes Americans compete against our neighbors, dissect our friends, and arraign ourselves in the presence of impossible standards–composite shadows of who we are “supposed” to be? This anxiety isn’t new, but it is plausible. Soon our students will be facing a new epoch of history, potentially unarmed and defenseless to handle the new challenges of the world ahead of them.

A confused nation can make reactive decisions out of desperation to forge a path. Historically, decisions by the American government put teachers (and citizens!) in precarious positions. When the World Trade Center was destroyed by Al-Qaeda in 2001, teachers were implicated in a challenging moment in American history where they were charged with the task to sort through personal feelings, warhawk propaganda, and burgeoning Islamophobia that shaped a generation of Arab and Muslim students. Dr.Amy Zegart, a then-new professor at UCLA, described  the weight of responsibility teaching after the September 11th attacks as:

I didn’t have answers that day about why American intelligence agencies couldn’t stop al-Qaeda. It was far too soon to know what had gone so wrong, and why; the search for answers would end up driving my academic research for the next decade. But I had questions, and history—I had studied surprise attacks and past intelligence failures. Together, my colleagues and I did the only thing we knew how: We tried to make sense of the world, to begin searching for explanations for something that seemed inexplicable.¹

We don’t have to wait for the pressure of a national tragedy to feel crushed by the weight of responsibility as teachers. Islamophobia, orientalism, and racism certainly defined the Aughts, just as Coronavirus has shaped our decade. However, we as educators do have agency to resist. Epistemic disobedience is a principle that is necessary for providing a decolonized view of history, rewriting narrative, and polarizing national anxieties to new synthesis. Epistemic disobedience is “a strategy to reject or delink from Eurocentric notions of objectivity, claims to transparency, and the fantasy of writing from an all-knowing position, or “zero point epistemology”² . Epistemic disobedience as a principle of pedagogy creates a tandem casket in order to bury the trope and the stereotype. It can midwife new, empowering interpretations of present realities that the past has given us. 

*

I am a proud teacher at Overbrook High School in West Philadelphia. Overbrook has a legendary history amongst Black Philadelphians, as it is famed for incubating the talents of Wilt Chamberlain, Will Smith and Guion Bluford. Many Black Philadelphians approach the school’s past with passionate mythologizing in relation to Philadelphia’s checkered history of educational segregation. When the top school in the city, Central High School, prioritized the needs of white students, Overbrook was colloquially known as “Black Central”. In present circumstances, much has changed. Based on the 2022-2023 Student Enrollment and Demographics, there are 389 students that attend Overbrook High with 70% of students residing within the catchment area.³ 25% of students have an IEP, and 1% of students who are English language learners.⁴The ELA data for Keystone standardized testing reflects that 15% of students scored proficient.⁵ While there are not any reliable data points to detail race, I teach at an overwhelmingly Black school.

While this curriculum unit can be used by anyone, I write this curriculum unit with fellow Black educators in mind. We are teaching under trying political circumstances as demagogues are hunting educators who teach so-called “Critical Race Theory.” This unit may put some of us front and center in this war against Black history. I hope that this curriculum unit will impart courage and some clarity while living in a factionalized nation divided by its own history. James Baldwin in his famed conversation with poet Nikki Giovanni provides the raison d’être for many Black educators who had modeled epistemic disobedience as a part of their pedagogical genetics (even before the language was reified and recognized in academia): “A teacher who is not free to teach is not a teacher.  If I assumed the responsibility, then I got to be free to teach”⁶.  Whenever I lead conversations about race and difference in my classroom, many students make the assumption that race and racism has existed since the beginning of time. The naturalized acceptance of racism as a natural fact is evidence of their internalized powerlessness and oppression. If I cannot talk to my Black class about race, difference, and power, I run the risk of enabling helplessness and betraying my profession. I am in no position to contribute to the tome of the flowery poetics of “liberation” and “freedom”. Fortunately, they are commonplace. But it is important that as we are under (literal) attack in our classrooms, that we love our students, trust our instincts, and hold our history close.