Campaign Research Notes

“Stereotype management is thus a process—and tool used—in which racialized students make sense of, evaluate, and respond to their negative racialized experiences, while having the knowledge and understanding of what they are doing and why they are doing it. Stereotype management accounts for students’ awareness and reflection of thoughts and actions pertaining to how their race is valued and understood within the environment (often perceived as deficient), and why they decide to respond to negative racialized situations in the way that they do, knowing that their actions could either diffuse or antagonize the racialized event.”

Morton, Terrell R., et al. "Being vs. Becoming: Transcending STEM Identity Development

through Afropessimism, Moving toward a Black X Consciousness in STEM." Journal of

Negro Education, vol. 88 no. 3, 2019, p. 327-342. Project MUSE

muse.jhu.edu/article/802617.

Afro pessimism:

• A lens of interpretation that accounts for civil society’s dependence on antiblack violence.

• an evolving idea, used in critical social theories to refer to the irremediable devastation of colonialism and chattel enslavement on African and African-descended people.

• Many scholars use Afro pessimism as a shorthand insistence that the subordination of Black interests and exploitation of Black labor are inherent to Western imperialism and Western modernity.

• “The afterlife of slavery.”

“Black struggle for educational opportunity [as] a struggle against what has always been (and continues to be) a struggle against specific anti-Black ideologies, discourses, representations, (mal)distribution of material resources, and physical and psychic assaults on Black bodies in schools.”

Dumas, M. J. (2014). ‘Losing an arm’: Schooling as a site of Black suffering. Race Ethnicity

and Education, 17, 1-29.