Our first plenary launches Summer School with a focus on banned ideas, employing the recent controversy over the AP’s African American Studies Curriculum as a starting point.  Particular attention will be paid to the degree to which ideas and concepts that have been central to Black intellectual thought and freedom struggles are being stricken from school curriculum—and rendered illegal—all over the country

 The escalating war on ‘wokeness’ must be seen as part of a broader and long-standing campaign to destroy a wide range of efforts to  dismantle structural racism and other forms of racial disempowerment. These backlash politics are far from new; the “massive resistance” against the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision and the immediate legal challenges to affirmative action as “reverse discrimination” are earlier expressions of the same sensibilities. The decades-long campaign that has been waged on many fronts recently culminated in the Supreme Court’s repudiation of affirmative action in higher education, overturning almost a half century of precedent on race conscious admissions. The panel will connect the dots between these retrenchment campaigns and address the ways in which right-wing racial aggression and liberal racial discomfort have worked together to facilitate this significant roll back of one of the great victories of the civil rights movement. 

This plenary takes an inward look at liberal and progressive politics.  Because no regime of inequality comes into being without some level of enablement, the fifth plenary examines how—wittingly or unwittingly—the left has been  enabling the “war on woke

 Our second panel will home in on one of those banned ideas: structural racism.  What exactly is meant by the term—and how does the concept of structural racism explain the persistence of racial inequality? Employing a “case studies” approach, the plenary will reveal how structural racism is implicated in various civil rights contexts, including housing, employment, education, and the criminal legal system.

It’s standard fare in left-oriented politics to say that anti-Blackness is not an individual-level problem. It is a structural one that transcends left/right politics and Black/white relationships. Yet, this basic insight is rarely employed to critique coalitional politics. That is what this plenary will do.  Its aim is to explore how anti-Blackness can shape the form, substance, and trajectories of  coalitional politics in ways that enable and legitimize the war on woke.  In addition to describing the scope of this enablement, panelists will suggest strategies to  disrupt it.

a roundtable: This plenary will begin by detailing how the Freedom to Learn Campaign has been fighting back.  Panelists will discuss where the Campaign has been, the challenges it has encountered, and the partners it has engaged. The session will then move forward with a discussion of future work.  Here, the panelists will lay out a tentative agenda for the next year, indicate some of the ways in which participants can get involved both locally and nationally, and describe the resources and “toolkits” the African American Policy Forum has amassed to facilitate this important work.

For over five decades, right-wing think tanks and their deep pocket dark money funders have been waging a war against the modest gains of the civil rights movement. From the 1970s to the present, conservatives have weaponized constitutional law, state governments, and now public schools to roll back just about every gain of the civil rights movement. No arena of Black progress has remained untouched: the desegregation of public schools, the protections against employment and housing discrimination, the right to vote, reproductive justice, affirmative action, and the protection against police abuse have all suffered setbacks at the site where laws are interpreted and made. How have institutions upon which we have relied been used to undermine efforts to repair institutions–and societal arrangements–that continue to be shaped by racism?  What are the conditions that must be in place to fight back against this so-called "war on wokeness?"

Our fifth plenary broadens the frame and examines how anti-Blackness and fascism go hand in hand.  The starting point for the panel is Langston Hughes’s observation that  “We Negroes in America do not have to be told what fascism is in action. We know.”  The panelists will demonstrate not only how fascism can originate in and operate alongside liberal democracy and go undetected across the color line, but also the ways in which fascism operates as a racial project, including as a means to undermine  Black progress and social transformation.