Teaching to Transgress: Race and a Pedagogy of Empowerment in Kinesiology

Teaching to Transgress: Race and Empowerment in Kinesiology

The Legacy of Racism in Education

Racism and anti-Blackness are pervasive in society and higher education, leading to marginalizing experiences for Black students.
Critical discussions about race are often lacking in kinesiology or are conducted in a way that is oppressive or neutralized through "safe talk," racial coding, and color blindness.
This creates a "quiet game" in kinesiology classrooms, where racial silence has a particularly harmful effect on Black students whose history and lived experiences are deeply connected to race.
The essay discusses "learning while Black" and how kinesiology can "teach to transgress" racial oppression by embracing education as a practice of freedom and incorporating race into a pedagogy of empowerment.

"Learning While Black"— A "Different" Type of Education

The Black experience in the U.S. is marked by a history of inferiority, oppression, and marginalization, which extends into higher education through curricula and pedagogical practices.
Education has been linked to freedom, but this has been elusive for the Black community, who have faced struggles in accessing quality, racially affirming education.
Historically, Black schools provided liberating and racially affirming education, fostering joy, challenge, and empowerment for Black students.
Black teachers played a critical role in empowering Black students through an antiracist and anticolonial pedagogy aimed at uplifting the race.
However, racial integration led to the loss of these safe spaces, with Black students in predominantly White schools experiencing cultural miseducation and indoctrination by racially marginalizing lessons.
Knowledge became disconnected from lived experience and antiracist struggle, leading to a loss of love for school as classrooms became places of domination.

Black Lives Matter in the Classrooms, Too

hooks's remarks on the classroom being an unpleasant place and pedagogy reinforcing racial domination resonate with many Black students in predominantly White institutions (PWIs) today.
Black students in PWI settings often face racism, navigate the "imposter syndrome," and experience racial biases from teachers and peers disrupting their learning.
These students suffer cultural, emotional, and environmental deprivation, with racial encounters in classrooms becoming tormenting and traumatic.
The accumulated racial stress exacerbates psychological, physical, emotional, and behavioral distress, impacting academic motivations, aspirations, and performance.
Black students often engage in coping skills and self-monitoring tactics to deflect attacks on their racialized personhood.
Sharing experiences of racism can be risky, with potential repercussions from faculty who control grades, and concerns about appearing "aggressive" or perpetuating stereotypes like the "Angry Black Woman."
Some students cope by avoiding situations that cause racial stress and disengaging from learning, leading to absenteeism and social isolation that hurts academic performance.
Many Black students in PWI kinesiology programs must exert a "herculean effort" to compensate for racism and achieve academic excellence, with the goal often being survival rather than thriving.
Freire (2000) highlights the duality of the oppressed, who desire freedom but fear it, caught between being themselves and being divided, speaking out or remaining silent.
Students thrive when they can bring their whole selves to the classroom, but for many Black students, their race is used to weaponize their educational abilities and expectations.
Educators need to create liberatory pedagogies in oppressive spaces, recognizing that Black students are affected by racial issues and crises.
Kinesiology departments have released statements supporting racial justice and combating anti-Black racism, but Black lives must also matter in kinesiology classrooms by addressing racial stressors.

Purpose of this Essay

This essay advocates for kinesiology to embrace education as a practice of freedom and impart a pedagogy of empowerment to address racial oppressions experienced by Black students.
It reflects the author's experiences as a Black learner and activist-educator seeking to use pedagogy as liberation and empowerment, while being aware of the challenges faced by students "learning while Black."

Pedagogical Concepts: Banking Domination and Problem-Posing Liberation

Paulo Freire is considered the father of critical pedagogy and advocated for teachers to develop liberatory pedagogies in oppressed spaces.
Freire viewed teachers as "cultural workers" and teaching as a transformative process to change unjust social relations.
He categorized pedagogy into two contrasting domains: banking and problem posing.

Banking Education (Domination)

Banking education involves teachers depositing information, and students passively receiving it.
This system lacks partnership and inquiry, characteristic of an ideology of oppression.
Students are seen as objects, and the focus is on helping them adapt to an oppressive world.
Freire considers banking education dehumanizing, inhibiting students' authority and creativity, and serving the oppressor.

Problem-Posing Education (Liberation)

Problem-posing education involves teachers and students co-creating knowledge, with education seen as unveiling reality.
Rather than submerging students’ consciousness, it strives for the emergence and evolution of their consciousness, facilitating their critical engagement and intervention in problems that relate to their oppression(s) and how they are in the world and with the world (Freire).
It stimulates creativity, reflection, and action, affirming students as learners and acknowledging their histories.
It embraces dialogue, celebrates critical thinking, and embodies teaching to transgress.

Safe Talk, Race Talk, and Real Talk in Kinesiology

"The Quiet Game"

Dialogue is essential for people to transform the world, but the academy cannot impart a liberating experience if it does not address the source of pedagogical oppression: race/anti-Black racism.
Race is a salient part of Black students' history and educational realities, but pedagogical racial blindspots persist.
Fears, guilt, resistance, and anxieties associated with discussing race have been documented.
Many kinesiology faculty lack intercultural training to critically discuss race and social justice.
Consequently, a racial "quiet game" occurs in kinesiology courses, with racial silencing happening in various ways.
It is not always easy to identify the fear regarding addressing race because it is often hidden and very subtle.
Hylton (2015) applied Bonilla-Silva’s (2010) frames of colorblindness to "race" talk in kinesiology:
- Abstract liberal race talk
- Minimization of racism
- Cultural racism
- Naturalism
Racism is often co-opted by factors, such as market dynamics, naturally occurring phenomenon, general dispositions, and other rhetorical nonrace concepts (Buffington & Fraley, 2011).
Race-muffled discourse reinforces "racism without racists" (Bonilla-Silva, 2010).
The co-option and institutionalization of a reductionist racialized speech has prevented more critical discussions of race in kinesiology.
Racial silence has a different meaning for and impact on people of Color.
Notwithstanding their (often unwitting) participation in “the quiet game,” even when Black students are silent, they want a pedagogical presence (Maniglia, 2020).
When race talk is not silent, it is often sidetracked or distorted.
Students used strategies, such as:
- Mitigation
- Credentialing
- Transfer
The students in Buffington and Fraley’s (2011) study also exhibited a form of enlightened racism, attributing racial phenom- enon to individual choice rather than structural processes underly- ing and sustaining racism.
These findings regarding the coddling of race talk are not unique to the participants in Buffington and Fraley’s study, but are also emblematic of many kinesiology discourses.
Race in sports has become something to talk around, something to divert, and sometimes, something to encode.
Race neutrality in kinesiology preserves the value of Whiteness (Hylton, 2015; Leonard, 2004) and sustains the "othering" of Black students.
Freire (2000) rejected the notion of "neutral" educators and challenged teachers to question what was being conveyed in their pedagogical choices.
An apt description of much of the race talk in kinesiology is actually one of safe-talk.
Racial fallacies and stereotypes often persists in a number of ways in kinesiology, such as associations between race and physicality and athletic ability/performance.
It the responsibility of kinesiologists to name race—and illuminate the social structures, power dynamics, and mechanisms that underlie, create, sustain, and perpetuate it.

Racial Literacy

Racial literacy requires acknowledging race as an individual and structural concept and understanding how racism is rooted in sociopolitical systems (Guinier, 2004).
- Contextual rather than universal
- Interconnected with power and analyzed through psychological, interpersonal, and structural dimensions
- Connected to intersecting sociocultural factors
Three I’s framework of information, interpretation, and inspiration (Bell, 1993; Brown, 2017):

Race as Information

Acquisition of a deep, robust, and critical content knowledge of race, including racial self-awareness and its impact on how one lives, functions, and moves in the social world (Brown, 2017).

Race as Interpretation

The ability to go beyond the mere acquisition of knowledge and pertains to the ability read, analyze, and make sense of the role of race, noting its historical legacy and contemporary importance (Bell, 1993; Brown, 2017).

Race as Inspiration

The hopes and aspirations for racial enlightenment, while also acknowledging the challenges and complexity of race as a fixture in America’s culture (Bell, 1993; Brown, 2017).

Race Talk/Real Talk

Kinesiology must give voice to the silence of race that reverberates in many of our classrooms.
Kinesiology needs more critical discussions about race and anti-Blackness to illuminate the dark corners of our students’ minds where their fear, frustrations, ignorance, and oppressions about race reside and breed.
Conversation about race should delve deep into the bowels of the genesis of racial ideology
The elements of race—how and why it is socially constructed and the implications thereof—should be critically discussed in a way to engage students on a journey of discovery.
The racial “quiet game” in kinesiology must end, and race talk must earnestly become real talk.

Engaged Pedagogy: Touching My Mind . . . Feeling My Soul

Teachers are the architects of their students’ learning.
Pedagogy is therefore a powerful tool for addressing the marginalization and oppression many Black students experience in classrooms.
Incorporating the interests and concerns of students into the curriculum is a necessary precondition for a critical pedagogy.
In so doing, pedagogy offers Black students a “transformative exit” from educational oppression.

Racially Empowering Classroom Climate

Safe, Safer, and Brave Space

The most important ingredient of a classroom is the manner in which it encourages students to be their authentic selves.
The teacher must set the tone and racial temperament of the course in a way that welcomes the “uncomfortable” questions and comments, and creates a learning that includes/allows making mistakes.
Students are more likely to embrace and engage in a racially empowering pedagogy when in trusting, civil, and respectful classroom environments.

Learning Communities

Having the classroom vibe to reflect a learning community is critical in promoting a sense of belonging to racially underrepresented students.
Learning communities often give them presence and visibility as a viable learner.

Racially Empowering Course Delivery

Visibility of Race in Curricula

Many Black students feel disconnected from learning based on the ways in which race is present or absent in the curricula.
Failing to explicitly address race leads to a conflation of concepts, such as culture, diversity, multiculturalism, and other proxies for race (Clark, 2020).
Therefore, kinesiologists must amplify and normalize Black voices and a Black presence throughout the curricula (course readings, lecture content, guest speakers, etc.).

Refraining From "Racial Othering"

Validating the histories and experiences of Black students in examples and illustrations regularly and not just during special occasions (such as during Black History or other cultural heritage celebrations) also prevent their oppressions as “others."
Incorporating elements, such as self-determination, self-actualization, and self-efficacy in conversations about race (Warren & Coles, 2020) positively centers Black students and counters the oppressive racial othering they often experience.

Racially Empowering Course Assessment

Active/Action-Oriented Learning

Allowing and encouraging Black students to engage in active/action-oriented and experiential learning that addresses social issues impacting their racial communities generates the “power and pure energy” (King) to engage them in meaningful learning beyond the classroom “proper” and contributes to their racial uplift.

Race Conscious Activists Projects

Hylton further asserted that engaging in such race learning projects “without this aspirational element leaves the stu- dents complicit and likely to passively reproduce their usual con- clusions, leaving them further convinced of these fundamental half- truths, falsities, myths, and stereotypes” (p. 509).
Activists projects also allow Black students to accomplish what Freire (2000) consid- ered the greatest task of oppressed people—their ability to liberate themselves from the conditions which subjugate them.

Reflexive Practice

Qualitative, “nontraditional,” and nonpositivist metrics of learning that encourage critical reflection, such as narratives, stories/ storytelling and counterstories, essays, photo-elicitation, poetry/creative expressions, and so on, are ways of engaging Black students in the act of liberation.
Reflexive assessments also allow Black students to acknowledge, address, and contest their racialization (and the ways in which they experience race in their lives) in the inner dialogs they have with the learner inside of them.
They allow Black students to own their Blackness as intellectual engagement, and they validate the experiences of Black students as the known and authenticate Black students as knowers (Armstrong & Jennings, 2018).

Teaching to Transgress: "In Black, White, and in Color"

Kinesiology must confront the racial crises impacting the souls of Black students as hooks (1994) commanded.
Black teachers have traditionally and historically enacted “a revo- lutionary pedagogy of resistance that was profoundly anticolonial” (hooks, 1994, p. 2).
“to do the race work,” is often reserved for and relegated to Black faculty, is one of the biases that has shaped the teaching of race in kinesiology (and throughout higher education), and has created psychic pres- sures, undue emotional labor, occupational stress, and increased incidents of racial fatigue (Smith, 2004) among Black faculty.
Embracing a race-infused liberatory pedagogy is not based on an educator’s racial or ethnic ascription, but their race consciousness, racial literacy, conviction to address anti- Black racism, and embracing of teaching as a practice of freedom.
Therefore, race discussions are often avoided to prevent the emotional tug-of-war that often results among different racial groups of students when the end goal is to cast blame or fault for systemic racism.
However, racial liberation should not be perceived as a “zero sum game” (McGhee, 2021).
Therefore, teaching to transgress in kinesiology is a practice that should cultivate and enable empowered and liberated learning mosaics in “Black, White, and In Color.”

Conclusion

If we are promoting a system of teaching and learning in kinesiology that fails to critically address the episteme of race, attack systemic racism, and eradicate anti-Black racism that is endemic in our society and embedded throughout higher education, we are furthering the colonization, marginalization, and oppression of our Black students (and other students of Color).
Hylton (2015) further noted the transfor- mation necessary for the challenges kinesiology educators must meet “to shift from tokenistic and additive models of teaching around ‘race,’ and for students to be empowered to be critical of everyday assumptions” (p. 513).
By virtue of creating engaged learning communities in the classroom, such practices will also release the genius of all of our students.
Education as a practice of freedom should be kinesiology’s pedagogical mission, our moment, and our movement!