Accomplished Black North Americans and Antiracism Education: Towards Bridging a Seeming Divide

Abstract

This article examines the seeming historical disconnect between antiracism education and successful, highly educated, and upwardly mobile black North Americans. Many successful blacks tend to resist racism via strategies informed by the hegemonic neoliberal and individualistic ethos, with the key strategies being educational and occupational attainment. Such individualistic strategies are opposed by antiracism education, which emphasizes battling racism on structural and institutional levels. I argue that this disconnect between middle-class black consciousness and antiracist discourse stems from the general failure of antiracist scholarship to understand adequately the complex and conflicted identities and lived experiences of many successful blacks. This failure on the part of antiracist scholarship can be attributed to a historical premising on binary racial categories and zero-sum conceptions of power. However, recent post-structuralist trends in antiracist scholarship, such as an increasing emphasis on integrative antiracism, hold the promise of creating an antiracist discourse that better resonates with successful blacks.