One of my students recently wrote something in a weekly reading reflection that has stayed with me. We had been reading Gholdy Muhammad’s work on criticality, particularly her questions about how students might engage their thinking about “power, oppression and equity” in texts, society, and the world. My student was not entirely convinced. He wondered how productive it is to go “actively looking for oppression,” especially if you begin with a framework that seems to tell you what you are supposed to find.
As part of his reflection, he referenced Tyler Austin Harper’s essay about leaving the tenure track. I had encountered Harper’s argument before, but my student’s response made me go back to it. I wanted to understand why he found Harper useful for thinking through Muhammad, but I also wanted to think more carefully about the question underneath his response. If we give students frameworks for understanding power and oppression, are we helping them recognize things they might otherwise have difficulty seeing, or are we teaching them what they are supposed to find? I thought his question was fair. I didn’t agree with where he went with all of it.
If criticality means walking into every situation having already decided that oppression is there, I understand the concern. Students should be able to examine a claim and decide that it does not adequately explain what they are seeing. They should be able to question Muhammad, Harper, me, or anybody else we read. When Muhammad’s criticality appears in our course, students are asked what they think about the framework and its questions. Those are not very useful questions if I have already decided what their answers need to be.
At the same time, something gets lost for me when criticality is described primarily as looking for oppression. It makes oppression sound like an object sitting somewhere waiting for an overly ideological person to discover it. More than that, it seems to assume that the alternative is simply looking at the world as it is, without a framework, and deciding what is there. I am not sure any of us does that because we make sense of what we encounter through what has been made available to us.
History gives us context. Language gives us ways of naming things. Experience gives us reference points. The intellectual traditions we encounter give us questions and categories we may not have had before. What we have not encountered matters too because there are questions that become difficult to ask when we have never been given the knowledge that would make those questions possible.
Of course, having more knowledge does not guarantee that we will interpret something correctly. A framework can make us too certain that we understand what we are looking at. We can make racism explain something it does not adequately explain, make power do too much work, or connect events into a pattern when another explanation better accounts for what happened. I want a framework to help us investigate the world, not relieve us of the responsibility to do so. But I don’t think the answer to that problem is to know less.
Black Studies has not been important to me because it taught me to find oppression everywhere. It has been important because it introduced me to histories, questions, categories, and traditions of thought that changed what I knew to ask.
How did these conditions develop? What history sits behind them? Where did the categories we are using come from? Who had the power to establish those categories as normal? What knowledge was preserved, and what was pushed aside?
Sometimes those questions lead directly to oppression. Sometimes they take us somewhere else.
Increasingly, though, Black Studies has made me think not only about what knowledge is available but about how knowledge itself is organized. It is one thing to ask whether Black people, African histories, or Black intellectual traditions are present. It is another to ask what happens to the questions organizing the curriculum once they arrive.
I have spent a significant part of my professional life thinking about absence in curriculum. Who is missing? What history was left out? Whose voice do students never hear? Those questions remain necessary, but another question has been bothering me more recently: What happens when we put the missing material back in?
A school can add more Black people to an American history curriculum and still tell essentially the same story about America. Africa can be given more weeks in a world history course while the course continues to rely on European ideas about civilization, development, modernity, and progress. We can put Black writers on a reading list without asking why some traditions of thought are treated as foundational while others appear under diversity, identity, or multiculturalism. More content is there. That matters. But what happened to the framework?
King has helped me think about this because Martin Luther King Jr. was not simply excluded from American education. We included him. Thoroughly. There are streets, schools, monuments, lessons, quotations, and a national holiday. Students encounter the March on Washington, nonviolence, the dream, and the content of one’s character. That King existed.
So did the King who became increasingly concerned with poverty, labor, militarism, economic exploitation, and the limitations of the racial progress the country was congratulating itself for making. So did the King who wrote about the white moderate. When those parts are separated from the King we commemorate, King remains present, but the range of questions his work might raise becomes much narrower. We didn’t have to erase him.
That is what complicates inclusion for me. Leaving knowledge out is one way to protect an existing story. Bringing knowledge in and organizing it so that it fits the existing story can also leave the story relatively undisturbed. I do not think those are equivalent. A curriculum that prohibits Black history is materially different from one that teaches an incomplete version of it. But presence alone tells me less than I once thought it did.
This is also where my student’s question started coming back to me. He was concerned that a particular way of thinking might determine what students find before they begin looking. I think that is possible. But what about the inverse problem? What if the organization of knowledge has already determined which questions seem reasonable to ask before students ever encounter something called criticality?
That changes the inclusion question for me. It is no longer only whether Black knowledge is there, but what that knowledge is allowed to do once it gets there. Does it provide additional examples inside questions that have already been established? Does it become another perspective students are invited to consider? Or does encountering another intellectual tradition change the questions themselves and make available different ways of understanding history, humanity, community, freedom, education, progress, or knowledge?
I do not think the purpose of Black Studies is simply to provide a Black perspective on questions somebody else has already decided are important. Black people have produced questions too. They have produced categories, theories, methods of interpretation, arguments about what education is for, understandings of freedom and community, and ways of imagining human possibility. If we take that seriously, then the question is not simply how much Black content can fit into an existing structure. We also have to ask what happens to the structure when that knowledge enters.
This is part of why I keep returning to Jacob Carruthers’s observation that “liberal white supremacy is just as unacceptable as conservative white supremacy.” I don’t read Carruthers as saying liberal and conservative politics are interchangeable. They clearly are not, and those differences have real consequences, especially when what teachers can teach, which books students can read, and what histories can be discussed are being contested.
What I take from Carruthers is something different. A conservative educational framework can preserve a structure by excluding knowledge that challenges it. A liberal framework can make room for that knowledge while continuing to determine the questions, categories, and terms under which it enters. There are political circumstances in which I may strongly prefer one over the other, but that does not mean I have to accept the boundaries of that choice as the boundaries of what is intellectually possible. This is also where I part ways with Harper more substantially.
I understand his frustration with academic institutions that have become very good at talking about equity, anti-racism, inclusion, belonging, or decolonization. James Cone has a line I keep thinking about: “It is easy to change the language of oppression without changing the sociopolitical situation of its victims.” Institutions can become fluent in the language of critique without allowing that critique to substantially alter how they operate. They can speak about justice while reproducing hierarchy, precarity, exploitation, and the ordinary contradictions of institutional life. I think Harper is right to notice that.
What I kept wondering as I reread him, though, was what exactly his experience with the university allows us to conclude about anti-racism itself. There is a difference between discovering that institutions can co-opt the language of anti-racism and discovering that anti-racist analysis was misguided in the first place. The first tells us something important about institutions. I am not convinced it necessarily tells us the same thing about the traditions and forms of analysis that institutions have absorbed. In some ways, I think Harper diagnoses the sickness of the institution and then risks mistaking it for a sickness in the tradition.
King makes that distinction clearer for me. The domesticated King that institutions commemorate is not evidence that King’s political thought was itself domesticated. It tells us something about what institutions did with King, which parts became useful, and which questions became less visible in the process. If we judged King only through the version of him that survived that process, we might end up criticizing King for the narrowing of his thought that institutions helped produce.
I wonder whether something similar can happen with anti-racism. The version Harper encounters in elite academic institutions has already passed through administrative offices, professional incentives, academic status systems, hiring practices, institutional vocabulary, and all the other ways ideas get translated once institutions take them up. His experience of that version is real. My question is whether its contradictions demonstrate that people have become too willing to ask questions about racism and power, or whether they demonstrate how capable institutions can be of incorporating those questions without allowing the questions to fundamentally reorganize them.
I think those possibilities require different conclusions. Black Studies gives me reasons to be suspicious of an institution congratulating itself because it has learned the language of anti-racism, but it also gives me reasons to be suspicious when the failure of that institution becomes evidence that structural analysis itself has gone too far. I do not have to defend the university because the university says it is anti-racist. Neither do I have to abandon intellectual traditions that might help explain how an institution can absorb the language of transformation without transforming itself.
Black intellectual traditions have certainly helped people interpret oppression, but they have also emerged from people trying to think, organize, educate, worship, create, resist, build community, and imagine freedom under conditions they did not choose. That matters to me because Black people have not simply been objects of structures that need to be explained. They have been producers of knowledge about the world and creators of possibilities within and beyond the worlds they inherited.
That is where my understanding of criticality starts to stretch beyond simply identifying what is wrong. I still do not want students looking for oppression everywhere, and I do not want to replace one predetermined answer with another, including a predetermined radical answer. If every inquiry must end with students discovering oppression and calling for structural rupture, then we have recreated the problem my student identified at the beginning because we already knew where they were supposed to arrive.
At the same time, I do not want students becoming increasingly sophisticated at interpreting a world whose basic arrangements remain beyond their imagination. I want them to know enough to make judgments, enough history to recognize that the present did not appear from nowhere, and enough exposure to different intellectual traditions to understand that the categories they inherited are not the only categories available. I want them to be able to question a conservative attack on Black Studies and a liberal institution congratulating itself for embracing Black Studies. I also want them to be able to tell me that a framework I gave them does not make sense.
Maybe more importantly, I want them to understand themselves as capable of producing knowledge rather than simply selecting among the interpretations other people have placed in front of them. That is part of what my student was already doing in the reflection that started all of this. He was taking Muhammad, connecting her work to Harper, bringing his own questions to both, and forcing me to reconsider something I thought I understood. He did not have to arrive where I arrived for his thinking to matter.
That has left me with a slightly different version of the question I started with. I am still interested in whether teaching students about oppression can lead them to see oppression where the evidence does not support it. I think it can. But I am equally interested in what happens when education has organized what students know in ways that make certain histories, relationships, explanations, and possibilities difficult to see in the first place.
What happens when students encounter knowledge that allows them to see the arrangement differently? They may decide the framework does not explain what they are looking at. They may recognize something they could not recognize before. They may ask a question the curriculum did not anticipate or imagine an option we did not give them. I think Black Studies has to leave room for those possibilities. Otherwise we risk bringing Black knowledge into the curriculum while leaving untouched the structure that determines what knowledge is for. We added the knowledge. We left the structure.
My student began by asking whether education can teach us too aggressively what to look for. I think that question still deserves an answer. But before we decide whether someone is looking too hard for oppression, we might also ask what our education taught us to look for in the first place, what it made difficult to see, and who decided the questions through which we learned to make sense of the world. Taking his question seriously does not make me want to teach students what they should see. It has made me think more carefully about what we make available for them to see, the questions we make possible for them to ask, and whether our teaching leaves enough room for them to imagine something we did not already have in mind. I am still working through that one.
