Chapter 2: Browning Beyond Debate: Mapping an Excursion Through Power, Privilege, and Praxis

Many of us left Akron last October uneasy with concerns for the Curriculum and Pedagogy (C&P) Group regarding what had happened at the annual conference, wondering how we, as an organization, will choose to respond. Particularly in light of how Browning efforts at and within C&P played out just a year earlier there—when Browning/Coloring Curriculum and Pedagogy was first recognized as a 2010 conference theme.

The Browning Caucus (BC) officially came into being at C&P in 2009, emerging from an ad hoc committee's efforts in the months prior to that (as well as less formal efforts and discussions toward these ends in the preceding years). In the aftermath of heated debates around race and the role of antiracism in curriculum, a number of scholars committed to critical inquiry and generative resistance to systems based around and intersecting with race came together as the first body of the Browning Caucus. The Browning Caucus's goals were and are diverse, but include making shifts in the culture of race and the ways in which it is included or erased from curriculum theorizing at the conference and in the field in general. The caucus' existence rests on the implicit acknowledgement that we are living in a White supremacist, heteropatriarchal, settler society—or, in other words, that we live in nations whose wealth and privilege have and do depend on the appropriation of Indigenous land and resources as well as the exploitation of bodies and communities of color while those bodies and communities are pushed to the margins or outside of the nation. As teachers, we might see this reality at play when we wonder why our Black students are so much more likely to be targeted by police or suspended for minor or subjective infractions than our White students (Romero, 2011; Skiba, Michael, Nardo, & Peterson, 2002). As scholars we might notice these issues when we investigate the social conditions behind low rates of academic success correlating with high rates of poverty, criminalization and illness in minoritized communities (Akbar, 2011; Kivel, 2011; Razack, 2006; Wuerth, 2011).