In Class with Carr

Session 305 of In Class With Carr with Dr. Greg Carr and Karen Hunter, examines this week’s U.S. and global political developments as a “Good vs. Evil” moment. The Trump administration’s escalation of a domestic and global Cold Civil War against legal, moral, and international norms is an attempt to normalize violence, abandon even the appearance of factual communication in favor of state propagan...

In Class With Carr 304, with Dr. Greg Carr and Karen Hunter, opens the new year by naming our unavoidable choices in a moment of U.S. imperial desperation. The session centers our obligation to renew commitment to collective study as an act of courage and discipline, as U.S. bombs fall in Venezuela and Nigeria and a fear-driven minority attempts to sabotage people-centered local and national power...

Session 303 of In Class With Carr frames the passage of the Northern Hemisphere’s Winter Solstice as a time for celebration, remembrance and disciplined renewal. On the second day of Kwanzaa, Kujichagulia [Self-Determination], we reinforce Governance principles to center study over spectacle, memory over amnesia, and defining ourselves rather than allowing narratives imposed by others with differe...

As we enter the Annual Kwanzaa/Christmas/New Year two week corridor, Session 302 of In Class With Carr centers on the meaning of naming, framing, and narrative as sites of Governance, self-determination and collective power. Drawing on Carter Godwin Woodson’s “Much Ado About a Name” essay in his 1933 book “The Miseducation of the Negro,” this week we use our Africana Studies Framework to reflect o...

This week’s session with Dr. Greg Carr and Professor Karen Hunter comes live from the 10th annual Celebration Bowl HBCU National Football Championship and Band of the Year Competition. These are Governance formation rituals where Ways of Knowing, Cultural Meaning-Making and Movement and Memory imprint our future. Against an increasingly desperate death rattle of US White Nationalism fed by intensi...

The 300th session of "In Class With Carr" opens with a framing question: “How has our communal intellectual project endured through shifts in the contemporary Social Structure, especially through society’s technology-fueled constant churn of noise and distraction?” Our weekly commitment to seeking and sharing deepening knowledge traces the evolution of the class—from pandemic-shaped learning to th...

What happens when a train barrels down a track and reaches a junction where the signal to slow or stop has failed? It keeps moving at full speed—toward collision or derailment—a looming disaster now determined only by momentum. What happens when we miss signals, not only as individuals or communities, but as countries? In a social moment increasingly shaped by cognitive overload, familiar signals...

What does it mean to have and to nurture the ability to take in information and convert it to action? What happens if the mechanism for taking in that light in the mind’s eye is damaged or not well tended to? Those gathered at the 8th Black Male Educator Convening in Philadelphia, are considering this year’s theme: “Power to the Pupil: History, Hip Hop, & the Future of Teaching & Learning....

In this session of In Class With Carr, real estate violence against the East Wing of the White House becomes the latest point of entry to examine the latest episode of the US “demolition derby”—the conflict and renegotiation of the political architecture and collective memory of a United States under siege by the latest assault of an increasingly desperate and fascist white nationalism. JOIN KNARR...

The early November state and local elections held in the United State are part of a broader global wave of resistance to rising inequality and predatory government. From Tanzania and Madagascar to Bangladesh and Nepal, popular uprisings have triggered sudden changes in governments—or threatened to do so. In the United States, this week’s results reflect popular and voter response to deepening ineq...

This week’s conversation, “Day of the Trick,” invites us to explore how deception, ritual, and resistance intertwine. We’ll look at how Trick-or-Treat traditions of Halloween can be contrasted with rituals of generosity and remembrance in Ways of Knowing such as the Day of the Dead. How does manipulation, coercion, and transactional power threaten the work of mutual care? How does resistance revea...

In session 294 of In Class With Carr, real estate violence against the East Wing of the White House becomes the latest point of entry to examine the latest episode of the US “demolition derby”—the conflict and renegotiation of the political architecture and collective memory of a United States under siege by the latest assault of an increasingly desperate and fascist white nationalism. JOIN KNARRA...

In this session, we explore acts of Cultural Meaning-Making and Movement and Memory as antidotes to fast-spreading poisons of disinformation and White nationalist distortion threatening African progress and the broader society. This week marks the birthdays of George Washington Williams, Lerone Bennett Jr. and Kerry James Marshall. We are reminded by their practice and genealogies of the power of...

In this session, we use the Africana Studies Framework to reflect on continuities and disruptions in US and global Social Structures and how thinking in and with Africana Governance formations must lead to rejuvenating and sharing connections between memory, ritual and vision. How do we move beyond distractions to embrace ancestral wisdom in order to renew and best utilize our genealogies? Gleanin...

In the 291st session of In Class With Carr, we explore the question: Can America Continue? Fresh from a gathering with legendary civil rights attorney Fred Gray, we connect past and present to examine how a US Social Structure grounded and reliant on a global network of unequal labor and exclusion, is speeding its inevitable and perhaps dispositive existential crisis. We juxtapose broadly inclusiv...

On Thursday, September 25, 2025, Assata Olugbala Shakur made transition  in Cuba. In Chapter 3 of her autobiography, she contrasts the long history of criminal assaults against African people by Western Social Structures with the work of African resistance grounded in self-determining Governance spaces, closing her famous July 4, 1973, “To My People” recording with the powerful words: “It is...

What happens when manufactured grievances are used to shape politics, mass and social media, and even a sense of government? This week, we explore how economic inequity, white nationalism, and billionaire-driven media power collide to enable a modern playbook for authoritarian control. Why are independent platforms and civic education so crucial at this point in the US and world Social Structure?...

In this moment in US history, fear has been weaponized as a political tool, using white nationalist rhetoric to target anyone who can be cast as a political enemy. Terms like “The Left” become labels for “enemies of the people” of “enemies of our country,” shifting categories that include anyone who refuses to conform to narrow and white nativist politics. Whenever claims of blameless white nation...

Missouri Senator Eric Schmidt’s September 2, 2025,speech delivered at the National Conservatism Conference in Washington, DC was a white nationalist battle cry, the latest volley in a growing war on truth. These assaults on our common humanity are naked attempts to seize public resources to reshape the US state and the contemporary world system. JOIN KNARRATIVE: https://www.knarrative.com it's the...

In the US Social Structure, Labor Day weekend is both a ritual of Summer’s ending and a potential lens for examining how labor, Cultural Meaning-Making and love in Africana Ways of Knowing fuel the Momentum of Movement and Memory. In the rituals of this season, from the Annual West Indian American Labor Day Parade to anniversaries of the 1963 March on Washington and the 1955 murder of Emmett Louis...

The formal academic school year is underway in most places in a United States facing accelerated fascist overtures from elements in federal and state governments. Memories of Anti-Black state action evoked at the 20th anniversary of the Hurricane Katrina disaster can be juxtaposed against current attacks on both state and African memory and education to remind us that we live in a moment demanding...

In the United States, the back-to-school season signals more than just a return to “traditional” classrooms—in a moment of open white nationalist warfare on our common humanity, it is also a moment for renewed reflection on origins, connections, and relationships. This fall, a new iteration of that search in the discipline of Africana Studies takes shape with the launch of “The Black University,”...

Our Annual Nile Valley study tour continues the process of strengthening the work of Africana Studies as a tool for jailbreaking the university and renewing deeper traditions of community-centered education. Inspired by a 1996 exchange between Greg Kimathi Carr and Jacob Carruthers—where Carruthers urged embracing language and concepts from Mdw Ntr over attempting to repurpose European concepts as...

Can we live together? We must. This week’s funeral of Officer Didarul Islam in New York City, where leaders honored his immigrant journey and anchoring cultural identities, place current global tensions, tariff wars, and political upheavals at the center of our efforts to compare ourselves to each other. We explore the state’s role in that process, and find in our study of the past in relation to...

The weaponization of the judiciary, cultural institutions, and federal agencies threatens deeper fissures. As demographic shifts challenge already fragile power hierarchies in places like Texas, the backlash grows, manifesting in state repression and ideological crusades. This week, "In Class with Carr" looks to historical memory to remind us that Governance formations can and must be reimagined w...