In Class with Carr

This week’s In Class With Carr comes from the Annual Convening of the National Conference of Black Lawyers. NCBL, founded in 1968 to serve as the Legal Arm of the Movement for Black Liberation, brings together lawyers, scholars, organizers, judges, legal workers, law students and legal activists to enhance our collective ability to struggle for full social, political and economic rights.  Tod...

What happens when a society has access to more information but suffers an underdeveloped capacity for collective understanding? In this week’s In Class With Carr, the concept of "Super Ignorance" is used to label contemporary relationships between education, power, technology, culture, and collective memory and action. Continuing Session 342’s discussion of deepened literacy and slow learning as W...

This week’s conversation, "Cross Colors," confronts our current attention-deficit society, one that causes us to forget what happened last week, much less before, and to attempt to command attention with shorthands that too often court obscuring spectacle. We use our Africana Studies framework to examine recent cultural and historical flashpoints: A new book offering even more proof of Thomas Jeff...

Global and domestic systems upholding US power continue to fracture, threatening partial collapse. Other countries accelerate work to bypass US influence and form new protective alliances. US public institutions face new threats from a determined minority of self-centered political actors moving in a distortion field of disregard, delusion, and avoidance. Amid this instability, African, Indigenous...

This week, Smithsonian Institution Secretary Lonnie Bunch announced his retirement after a nearly four decade affiliation with its network and ending his seven year tenure as the first African American and first Historian to lead the institution founded in 1848. A decade ago this month, the National Museum of African American History and Culture opened. Bunche’s efforts leading both institutions p...

This pre-Labor Day week was marked by the transition of Cultural Meaning-Maker Cassandra Wilson, whose artistic labor reminds us of the power of narratives of long-view memory as anchors for Ways of Knowing that shape our lives. As White nationalist politicians and others’ increasingly desperate efforts to force-feed us their own narrow, absurdist, and fevered stories of US and global authority, S...

During Black August 2026, the Asantehene, Otumfo Osei Tutu II, and Otumfo-Yere Julia Osei Tutu of the Asante People are visiting the United States. Their trip features a Royal Lecture at Howard University and an Akwasidae Festival at Bowie State University, bracketed by a major African business summit. This historic visit highlights a foundational truth: Global African solidarity and belonging mus...

During this Black August, US White Nationalists have continued to compile victories in the federal court, from Donald Trump’s White Nationalist Department of Justice dropping charges against Oath Keepers January 6, 2021 insurrectionists to his illegal White House ballroom project being endorsed through inaction by Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts. Internationally, the US federal government...

As we enter the third week of Black August, our annual Kemet [Ancient Egypt] Study Tour concludes as debates on the changing nature and process of formal education continue in the US. Our work of “Jailbreaking the Black University” offers a clear contrast to current academic discussions on the nature and potential of HBCUs. The Kemet Study Tour is an immersive space that centers inward-focused int...

In Session 335 of In Class With Carr, we continue Black August during our annual study tour of Kemet [Ancient Egypt] and the Nile Valley. Following pathways of liberatory intellectual work of previous generations of Africans engaged in Global Black Study helps us to resist current efforts to disrupt deeper collective study as well as to attempt to privatize and commodify broad access to informatio...

Black August, an annual ritual introduced in the late 1970s as a period dedicated to African self-determination and collective political struggle, requires us to rethink sacrifice, rejuvenation and remembering. The month centers four grounding objectives: to study, fast, train, and fight. As with Kwanzaa, Black History Month and Juneteenth, every year these objectives reinforce the ongoing work fo...

This week’s session continues to explore struggles for political power and cultural survival in hostile, nativist Social Structures. Even as politicians of African descent continue to be elected, even in spaces with majority non-African voters, the challenge to conform, integrate or culturally neuter in order to demonstrate trustworthiness persists. Hard White nationalists such as those who have m...

Around the world, including the United States, those in power fight desperately to cling to it, targeting a foundational element for legitimizing state power: the vote. Fascist efforts to maintain state authority have increasingly worked to undermine our capacity to assess information and distinguish between fact and false narratives. This week, as we continue our Africana Studies approach to refr...

Official commemorations of the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Declaration of Independence have now ended, with anticipated federally subsidized, countrywide conversations about the meaning of the U.S. never materializing. Instead, much of the commemorative and contemplative energy was consumed by a federal government temporarily captured by a White nationalist regime intent on narrowing rather than...

As the United States notes the 250th anniversary of its Declaration of Independence, it confronts its deepest crisis of structural political integrity since its Civil War and Reconstruction. The ritual corridor between Juneteenth and July 4 exposes the widening gap between US founding mythologies and its lived political realities. This year’s observance arrives amid the Trump administration’s tran...

The two-week “liberation corridor” between Juneteenth and US Independence Day (“White Juneteenth”) affords an annual opportunity to evaluate objectives of and rituals for enforcing collective identity. A nakedly white nationalist US federal administration intensifies its assaults on both a shifting global order and a rising domestic opposition to its increasingly absurd efforts, revealing deeper c...

With the 160th observance of Juneteenth, the United States enters the two-week corridor between the largest Black liberation ritual directly connected to global rituals of African self-determination and the country’s nativist Semi-quincentennial Fourth of July celebration ritual. In a country entangled in a war of choice, this week marked a gauche white nationalist White House lawn brawlfest, the...

Cash does not rule everything around us. At best, money is a simplified tally or or proxy for control, while power rests on perceptions of legitimacy and collective assent or consent. The trillion-dollar valuation of SpaceX this week intensifies larger questions about relationships between individuals and communities. Elon Musk has amassed immense financial wealth. He remains one person. No indivi...

Drawing on reflections from last week’s experiences in Tulsa, this session of In Class With Carr traces relationships between roots of memory and community and contemporary branches of interventions, struggle and renewal. Beginning with the annual soil collection ritual at Greenwood’s Standpipe Hill, we consider Greenwood as one of countless other “Little Africas” that expand Governance formations...

In Class With Carr 325 comes live from Justice for Greenwood’s weekend of rituals marking the 120th anniversary of Tulsa Oklahoma’s Greenwood District, where the memory and residue of “Black Wall Street” illuminates irreconcilable questions of violence, self-determination, and state power. We discuss nation-state’s monopolies on violence, restrictions on movement, and how Africans and indigenous c...

The U.S. Memorial Day weekend is often described as the unofficial beginning of summer. Amid mounting regional and global challenges to U.S. power, intensifying US white nationalist politics, and the approach of federal Semiquincentennial celebrations, questions of memory, governance and collective identity take on renewed urgency. This week’s In Class With Carr continues our long-term project of...

In session 323, In Class with Carr uses the 2026 Commencement Season to explore the nature of time and the ways rituals marking transition create opportunities to reflect on Africana Governance, our relationships to one another and our obligations to each other. Centering Sankofa as a Way of Knowing, we examine how individual and collective dignity and power are strengthened through action-oriente...

This week’s In Class With Carr confronts an enduring question at the heart of the U.S. experiment: How long can White nationalism strain the U.S. political order before the contradictions at its core permanently rupture the federated system itself? We trace this week’s racially politicized Southern gerrymanders back to the founding racial logic of the United States, moving from Virginia state cour...

This week’s U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Louisiana v. Callais sharpens what we too often soften with abstraction: Whiteness is not passive, accidental, or misunderstood. It is an intentional, strategic mechanism for establishing and protecting an increasingly fragile, minority-centered power base—globally and within the United States. Callais is not just a legal dispute over voting maps, nor merel...

In "In Class With Carr" 320 we ask, “How can we live together?” Opening with the Jackson 5’s Stop! The Love You Save, This week’s conversation examines violence, narrative, community and continuity in African and Black life. In a week marking anniversaries of both the United Nations and the United Negro College fund, we explore how Africana Governance formations can draw on Ways of Knowing and Mov...