In Class with Carr

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...

This week, In Class With Carr comes from the 42nd International Conference of The Association for the Study of Classical African Civilizations, whose members have worked for over four decades to use the Per Ankh (House of Life) as a model for African renewal. Drawing on presentations in ASCAC’s five domestic U.S. regions over the previous year, we consider ASCAC’s work as a formation for the consi...

This week’s In Class With Carr reflects on memory, leadership, and responsibility, using the passing of media giant Bob Law and global tensions like the Israel-US conflict with Iran to question how power is acquired, held and narrated. The work of educating through effective communication in order to help develop informed communities rather than passive masses requires us to first and simultaneous...

This week’s “In Class With Carr” uses the Trump vs Barbara Birthright Citizenship case to explore questions of belonging, obligation, and power. Using the Africana Studies framework, we discuss how certainty of belonging and investments in creating better societies shape our relationships to others. Oppressive systems thrive on distraction and sensory overload, weakening collective thought and con...

In the Thursday, March 26, 2026 edition of the New York Times, Lydia Polgreen observes that “America does not know how to exist in a world it does not control.” Through vacillations between seizing temporary control of state and federal government, White nationalist politicians in the US continue to fight desperately to impose their narrow ideology on the country’s fragile amalgam of genocidal Eur...

As the US federal government exacerbates global and local political conflict and cultural struggle, this week’s session centers In Class’ latest exploration of secret places of Africana Governance, Cultural Meaning Making and Movement and Memory to highlight how Ways of Knowing in the form of narratives, institutions, and historical memory shape choices individuals and communities must make in ord...

This week’s In Class With Carr comes from Montgomery Alabama, site of the Second Annual National Fred D. Gray Symposium. We return to Alabama to reflect on how human and civil rights struggles waged here force us to consider contemporary questions of transitioning US and global Social Structures and Africana Ways of Knowing. Anchored by reflections from the Symposium and along the Selma-to-Montgom...

As Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu’s war against the world enhances regional and global threats to the planet, this week’s session of In Class With Carr centers community self-determination as a strategy for both resisting oppression and changing the deteriorating Social Structure of the Modern World System. Drawing on the momentum of memory rooted in living movement institutions, we pose a ce...

As we close the final day of Blackest History Month, the governments of the United States and Israel have declared war on Iran, an action that casts both countries as pariah states and threatens the lives and security of everyone in those three countries and beyond. At the same time, doomed efforts by predatory monied interests to shape and control mass media narratives and images are intensifying...

On February 17, 2026, Jesse Louis Jackson made transition at 84, marking a watershed chapter in four generations of African struggle for US and global power. Emerging from Africana Governance formations, Jackson leveraged two currencies—voter power and consumer power—to push US domestic and global Social Structures to have to negotiate with the organized oppressed. From Operations Breadbasket and...

This second session of Blackest History Month centers on questions of freedom and liberty. What conditions define freedom? How is freedom related to self-definition, both individually and collectively? As we continue exploring freedom, governance, and memory in the Semiquincentennial year of the United States, today’s session marks Frederick Douglass’ chosen birthday and the close of the original...

On February 7, 1926, National Negro History Week was first observed. This week, we frame Blackest History Month as a Governance ritual against the coming 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States of America, not as celebration but as struggle—over memory, power, and education. Coming from this weekend’s “Blackprint 20” Conference in Philadelphia, we trace recurring conflicts from 1776...

This week’s In Class With Carr with Dr. Greg Carr and Karen Hunter, launches this year’s Blackest History Month, affirming that African education is not—and has never been—merely a response to domination, but the transmission of enduring cultural coherence across generations. Using the Africana Studies Conceptual Categories, we juxtapose the latest intellectual warfare over the National Park Servi...

This week on In Class with Carr, Dr. Greg Carr and Professor Karen Hunter turn to the geopolitical drama unfolding at Davos and the continued Trump-era decline of U.S. global authority—marked by a disassociative political posture that separates power from consequence and rhetoric from reality, deepening both global and domestic fractures. In this moment of renegotiating global and local Social Str...

We enter episode 306 of In Class with Carr with Dr. Greg Carr and Karen Hunter, as the US cannibalizes its arrangements through increasingly absurdist white nativism and greed driven global destabilization, Social Structures are rapidly reorganizing. Drawing on reminders from figures such as Patrice Lumumba and Martin Luther King Jr., we recall that world orders do not announce themselves into exi...