In Class with Carr

This week’s conversation, “Day of the Trick,” invites us to explore how deception, ritual, and resistance intertwine. We’ll look at how Trick-or-Treat traditions of Halloween can be contrasted with rituals of generosity and remembrance in Ways of Knowing such as the Day of the Dead. How does manipulation, coercion, and transactional power threaten the work of mutual care? How does resistance reveal the weakness of deceptio...

In session 294 of In Class With Carr, real estate violence against the East Wing of the White House becomes the latest point of entry to examine the latest episode of the US “demolition derby”—the conflict and renegotiation of the political architecture and collective memory of a United States under siege by the latest assault of an increasingly desperate and fascist white nationalism.

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In this session, we explore acts of Cultural Meaning-Making and Movement and Memory as antidotes to fast-spreading poisons of disinformation and White nationalist distortion threatening African progress and the broader society. This week marks the birthdays of George Washington Williams, Lerone Bennett Jr. and Kerry James Marshall. We are reminded by their practice and genealogies of the power of nurturing imagination thro...

In this session, we use the Africana Studies Framework to reflect on continuities and disruptions in US and global Social Structures and how thinking in and with Africana Governance formations must lead to rejuvenating and sharing connections between memory, ritual and vision. How do we move beyond distractions to embrace ancestral wisdom in order to renew and best utilize our genealogies? Gleaning insight from a variety o...

In the 291st session of In Class With Carr, we explore the question: Can America Continue? Fresh from a gathering with legendary civil rights attorney Fred Gray, we connect past and present to examine how a US Social Structure grounded and reliant on a global network of unequal labor and exclusion, is speeding its inevitable and perhaps dispositive existential crisis. We juxtapose broadly inclusive Ways of Knowing against ...

On Thursday, September 25, 2025, Assata Olugbala Shakur made transition  in Cuba. In Chapter 3 of her autobiography, she contrasts the long history of criminal assaults against African people by Western Social Structures with the work of African resistance grounded in self-determining Governance spaces, closing her famous July 4, 1973, “To My People” recording with the powerful words: “It is our duty to fight for our ...

What happens when manufactured grievances are used to shape politics, mass and social media, and even a sense of government? This week, we explore how economic inequity, white nationalism, and billionaire-driven media power collide to enable a modern playbook for authoritarian control. Why are independent platforms and civic education so crucial at this point in the US and world Social Structure? And how do we leverage Gov...

In this moment in US history, fear has been weaponized as a political tool, using white nationalist rhetoric to target anyone who can be cast as a political enemy. Terms like “The Left” become labels for “enemies of the people” of “enemies of our country,” shifting categories that include anyone who refuses to conform to narrow and white nativist politics. Whenever claims of blameless white nationalism collapse, the claims...

Missouri Senator Eric Schmidt’s September 2, 2025,speech delivered at the National Conservatism Conference in Washington, DC was a white nationalist battle cry, the latest volley in a growing war on truth. These assaults on our common humanity are naked attempts to seize public resources to reshape the US state and the contemporary world system.

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In the US Social Structure, Labor Day weekend is both a ritual of Summer’s ending and a potential lens for examining how labor, Cultural Meaning-Making and love in Africana Ways of Knowing fuel the Momentum of Movement and Memory. In the rituals of this season, from the Annual West Indian American Labor Day Parade to anniversaries of the 1963 March on Washington and the 1955 murder of Emmett Louis Till which prompted the M...

The formal academic school year is underway in most places in a United States facing accelerated fascist overtures from elements in federal and state governments. Memories of Anti-Black state action evoked at the 20th anniversary of the Hurricane Katrina disaster can be juxtaposed against current attacks on both state and African memory and education to remind us that we live in a moment demanding more of us than complianc...

In the United States, the back-to-school season signals more than just a return to “traditional” classrooms—in a moment of open white nationalist warfare on our common humanity, it is also a moment for renewed reflection on origins, connections, and relationships. This fall, a new iteration of that search in the discipline of Africana Studies takes shape with the launch of “The Black University,” an open public course runn...

Our Annual Nile Valley study tour continues the process of strengthening the work of Africana Studies as a tool for jailbreaking the university and renewing deeper traditions of community-centered education. Inspired by a 1996 exchange between Greg Kimathi Carr and Jacob Carruthers—where Carruthers urged embracing language and concepts from Mdw Ntr over attempting to repurpose European concepts as a form of Africana hermen...

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...