Fugitive Pedagogy by Jarvis R. Givens

Author:Jarvis R. Givens [Givens, Jarvis R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780674259102
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 2021-04-13T05:00:00+00:00

Conclusion

Vindicating the race constituted a central element of fugitive pedagogy, comprising literary efforts that countered antiblack distortions and erasure in official knowledge. This intellectual practice maintained important distinctions from the politics of respectability, while closely related to it. Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham theorized “the politics of respectability” to describe the social politics of working-class black women in the National Baptist Convention and their use of conventional standards of womanhood to represent the race as deserving of respect and equal treatment.103 Black women employed the politics of respectability as a strategy for social reform, but it also extended to the larger racial group. By behaving and comporting themselves along socially established lines of respectability and virtue, black people could prove to the white world that the race had integrity and deserved equal treatment. Embedded in this discourse, to be clear, was also a critique of the white world, an assertion that respectable black women were morally superior to those who oppressed them. While this challenged scientific notions of racial difference and black inferiority, it at times took the form of social mechanisms that reproduced intraracial class politics.104

Race vindicationism, as represented by these textbooks, spoke to fundamental assertions about black humanity and dealt less with ideas of racial propriety. Socializing black students to develop racial pride and a critical historical consciousness of their racialized experiences was the central objective. While the politics of respectability served as “bridge discourse” to the external white world, race vindicationism, as it manifested in these textbooks, was an intraracial process, even as both challenged distorted representations of black people. Race vindicationism took stock of black people’s history and culture for their own understandings. It pursued a way of knowing the world that accounted for the beauty and terror of black people’s lives, a subjugated people bearing submerged knowledge.

Fugitive pedagogy demanded thinking and imagining beyond Western canons of knowledge, thus leading black Americans to develop an undercanon that shadowed and critiqued the master narrative. There was a political clarity to black teachers’ textbooks; critical analyses of antiblackness and curricular distortions were made transparent and were deeply embedded in their curricular content. What’s more, the black textbook was itself a literary genre inaugurated by runaway slaves. As represented by Johnson, Pendleton, and Woodson, black curricular imaginations of the post-Emancipation era were informed by a fugitive literary culture with antebellum roots.

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