Black Presence Matters: Pandemic, Protest & the Urgency of Online Education

Anti-Blackness is pervasive and persistent within the United States and institutions of higher learning are a reflection of the broader society’s views about Black people. The underrepresentation of Black professors within the academy feeds the perception that we are unqualified to teach. A clear threat exists regarding the presence of Black faculty in brick-and-mortar spaces. As a result, there is a need to maintain what little presence we do possess in both face-to-face and online teaching. The pandemic has clearly shifted our presence and labor to online instruction. In addition, the protests across the nation have marked our online presence as equally urgent in the move to remote instruction. As Black educators who have experienced this shift from late March to mid-June 2020, we discuss the importance of what we teach in relationship to and in the context of a global pandemic and protests in 50 states and Washington, D.C. We center the urgency of the presence of Black faculty teaching about pressing social matters, as well as the urgency with which our teaching and our bodies doing the teaching matters. In essence, we grapple with the “urgency of online education” through the lens of Black presence and in the context of a pandemic that disproportionately kills Black people, as well as protests that are a reaction to persistent acts of anti-Blackness through formal and informal policing in the United States.

Speakers:
Ingrid Banks
Department Chair and Associate Professor of Black Studies
University of California, Santa Barbara

Ingrid Banks is Associate Professor of Black Studies. She received her PhD in Comparative Ethnic Studies from the University of California at Berkeley. Dr. Banks’ main research and teaching areas are within African American Studies and include race, gender, and culture. Her research and teaching areas also examine beauty culture, black popular culture, black feminist theory, politics of the body, critical race theory, and ethnographic methods. She is the author of Hair Matters: Beauty, Power, and Black Women’s Consciousness (New York University Press, 2000). Dr. Banks’ publications appear in Black Renaissance/Renaissance Noire, Feminist Teacher, Work and Occupations, Contemporary Sociology: A Journal of Reviews, Feminist Frontiers (Sixth Edition), The Chronicle of Higher Education, and New York Newsday. She is currently preparing a book manuscript based on a 14-month multi-city ethnographic study that examines contemporary black beauty salon culture. In 2004-05, Dr. Banks was a Visiting Scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation in New York City.

Gaye Theresa Johnson
Assoc. Prof. of Chicana/o Studies
University of California, Los Angeles

Gaye Theresa Johnson is a Professor of African American Studies and Chicana and Chicano Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the Vice Chair of UCLA’s Department of African American Studies, and President of the board of the Central Coast Alliance United for a Sustainable Economy (CAUSE). She has been a research fellow at the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at Stanford University and at the African Leadership Academy in Johannesburg, South Africa, and she writes and teaches on race and racism, cultural politics, and freedom struggles.

Terrance Wooten
Assistant Professor of Black Studies
University of California, Santa Barbara

Terrance Wooten joins the department after serving as a 2017-2018 Mark Steinberg Weil Early Career Postdoctoral Fellow in the Center for the Humanities at Washington University in St. Louis. He received his Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Maryland. He is currently working on his first book manuscript, “Lurking in the Shadows of Home: Homelessness, Carcerality, and the Figure of the Sex Offender,” which examines how those who have been designated “sex offenders” and are homeless in the Maryland/DC area are managed and regulated through social policies, sex offender registries, and urban and architectural design. His scholarly interests are located at the intersections of Black studies, gender and sexuality studies, studies of poverty and homelessness, and carceral studies.

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