Academic Talk: Fear of a Black Planet
Schedule
Wed Jun 10 2026 at 04:00 pm to 05:00 pm
UTC+01:00Location
Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge | Cambridge, EN
About this Event
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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.
Where is it happening?
Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge, 184 Hills Road, Cambridge, United KingdomEvent Location & Nearby Stays:
GBP 0.00
















