#blacktheorizing

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Pitt's Black Action Society on Instagram: “Come out tonight to our second event of Indaba Week. We'll be discussing the line between having a preference or having prejudice against…”

35 Likes, 0 Comments - Pitt's Black Action Society (@pittbas) on Instagram: “Come out tonight to our second event of Indaba Week. We'll be discussing the line between having a…”

This demonstrates how Black People use dialog as a means for assessing knowledge claims. At the meeting, people were reflecting on their preferences and prejudices and challenging why they or others thought as they did. With @mbelizabeth

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When I talk about African-American women, especially those who were writing non-fiction prose in the nineteenth century, I can expect, even today after so much contemporary scholarship on such writers, to see people who are quite flabbergasted by anything that I share. Reflected on their faces and in their questions and comments, if anyone can manage to speak back to me, is a depth of surprise that is always discomforting. I sense that the surprise, or the silence, if there is little response, does not come from the simple ignorance of unfortunate souls who just happen not to know what I have spent years coming to know. What I suspect is that this type of surprise rather "naturally" emerges in a society that so obviously has the habit of expecting nothing of value, nothing of consequence, nothing of importance, nothing at all positive from its Others, so that anything is a surprise; everything is an exception; and nothing of substance can really be claimed as a result... I bring tales of difference and adventure. I bring cultural proofs and instructive examples, all of which invariably must serve as rites of passage to credibility. I also bring the power of storytelling. These tales of adventure in odd places are the transitions by which to historicize and theorize anew with these writers re-inscribed in a rightful place. Such a process respects long-standing practices in African-based cultures of theorizing in narrative form. As Barbara Christian says, we theorize "in the stories we create, in riddles and proverbs, in the play with language, since dynamic rather than fixed ideas seem more to our liking

Royster, “When the First Voice You Hear is Not Your Own”

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The commonplace theorizing black scholars engage in as racialized people may differ from white Western academic standards, but it is no less valid, argues Anthony James Williams.

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