In Class with Carr

Can we live together? We must. This week’s funeral of Officer Didarul Islam in New York City, where leaders honored his immigrant journey and anchoring cultural identities, place current global tensions, tariff wars, and political upheavals at the center of our efforts to compare ourselves to each other. We explore the state’s role in that process, and find in our study of the past in relation to the now new ways to build ...

The weaponization of the judiciary, cultural institutions, and federal agencies threatens deeper fissures. As demographic shifts challenge already fragile power hierarchies in places like Texas, the backlash grows, manifesting in state repression and ideological crusades. This week, "In Class with Carr" looks to historical memory to remind us that Governance formations can and must be reimagined with a focus on relational...

The Cultural Meaning Making trope of Superman, especially as a trope used in US white nationalism, serves as a point of entry to consider power, collective identity and belief in the US Social Structure. In a moment in US and global history especially fraught with mass and social media manipulation, how can we leverage the momentum of memory to empower alternative visions of self-determination?

Critical white nationalist r...

In the 2025 Supreme Court term, Justice Ketanji Onyika Brown Jackson authored more dissents than any of her colleagues, offering a searing critique of expanding executive power and the erosion of constitutional norms and the Rule of Law. This week we focus on her dissent in Trump v. CASA, the White Nationalist frontal assault on birthright citizenship, placing Brown Jackson’s dissent in historical context. Her dissents rep...

The United States once again finds itself metaphorically “on the ropes,” staggering beneath the weight of white nationalism and nativist logics, elite-driven legislation, electoral political theater, digital mass media distortion, and deepening economic, social, and cultural divides. Buffeted by increasingly powerful international forces, is the idea of a US counterpunch more delusion than reality? Can the various groups i...

The final US Supreme Court decisions of the term continue the assault on Reconstruction-era federal law, suborning the “neo-Confederate” agenda of reasserting racialized citizenship and dismantling protections clearly intended to be enshrined in US law in the Reconstruction Constitutional amendments. By restricting judicial orders to named plaintiffs, the Court once again attempts to curb collective legal remedy, hinting p...

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 contras...

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 compe...

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 u...

“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, l...

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 ...

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 citi...

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 instituti...

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 ...

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—S...

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 ...

This week, Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie Bunch offered expansive public remarks that help reframe how we think about nationhood, identity, and responsibility to the group. While we often see ourselves bound by narratives tied to constructs like “nations,” Bunch’s assertion that there is no single U.S. narrative—that there are many stories—reminds us that our existence is both local and global, rooted in daily life yet conne...

In a week when the imposition of US tariffs by an increasingly unstable federal government weaponized by white nationalism pushes the US and global economies towards global recession and depression, the University of South Carolina Women’s Basketball Team highlights ongoing tensions between race, power, and control in U.S. society.

While Black students make up only 10% of USC’s student body, they represent over a quarter of...

The white nationalist movement in the U.S., now overburdening its manipulation of the electorate to dominate the executive and legislative branches, has become both more emboldened and chaotic in response to growing opposition from the courts, media, and the public.

This movement, recognizing its increasing anxiety, has resorted to distractions such as controversial trips, absurd executive orders, and threats to impose hars...