While generations of Black intellectuals have wrestled over the best approach to schooling for racialized communities in the United States, the primacy of education as a tool for Black advancement has been a consistent throughline of diasporic political thought since at least the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. Damien Sojoyner upends the presumption that compulsory education is a liberatory pursuit in his first book, First Strike: Educational Enclosures in Black Los Angeles. In it, he provocatively and powerfully argues, “rather than seek to become inclusive within a structure intent on reproducing structures of domination, it is key that we look to models that challenge power and demand radical change” (187). Central to Sojoyner’s argument is an extended critique of the school-to-prison-pipeline model that has become hegemonic in the lingo of community activism and education research.
Building on an intellectual genealogy of Black radicalism that begins with W....
University of California Press