Academic Talk: Fear of a Black Planet

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Revisiting 1980s attacks on anti-racist education is instructive for understanding today’s far-right assault on American education. In this work-in-progress talk, I consider the conflict over the Western Culture course at Stanford University in the late 1980s. I show how Sylvia Wynter, then a professor at Stanford, shaped Black student activism in calling for multicultural curriculum reforms. Then, drawing on W.E.B. DuBois’s phantasmagorical framing of global whiteness, I listen for the white paranoia that fuelled an enraged reaction to this call. I then consider how this paranoia eased during a period of neoliberal multicultural education before resurfacing in the wake of Black Lives Matter protests. I consider what this cyclical, yet enduring, paranoia means for curriculum theory and practice today.

This talk is hosted by the Global Justice Collective.

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Host or Publisher Tyler Denmead