S E1315: In Class with Carr, Ep. 315: “You Gotta Choose”

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 European settler colonies, built on stolen African labor and sustained by a narrative of self-creation that projects inevitability and dominance. The illusion they seek to impose afresh at its semi-quincentennial is that the US is something founded as anything other than that as part of Europe’s global rise. As the country’s population continues to move toward reflecting the world’s overwhelming non-white majority, this illusion is unraveling as excesses of nativism, Eurocentrism, and racial capitalism produce global fracture, desperate attempts to prop up and seize control of the old system and demands for renegotiation by those who suffer under it. Against this backdrop, the 19th annual United Nations International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade became a site of growing demands for reckoning. Ghanaian President John Mahama introduced a resolution on behalf of Africans globally, declaring the trafficking of Africans the greatest crime against humanity and demanding repair. It was passed overwhelmingly by member states and rejected in both telling dissent and abstention from the old global power states. The vote exposed both hopes and fears in the current world's social structure and raises urgent questions about responsibility, memory, and repair.Are you a member of Knarrative? If not, we invite you to join our community today by signing up at: https://www.knarrative.com. As a Knarrative subscriber, you'll gain immediate access to Knubia, our growing community of teachers, learners, thinkers, doers, artists, and creators. Together, we're making a generational commitment to our collective interests, work, and responsibilities. Join us at https://www.knarrative.com and download the Knubia app through your app store or by visiting https://community.knarrative.com.To shop Go to:TheGlobalMajorityMore from us:Follow on X: https://x.com/knarrative_https://x.com/inclasswithcarrFollow on Instagram  IG / knarrative   IG/ inclasswithcarr Follow Dr. Carr: https://www.drgregcarr.comhttps://x.com/AfricanaCarrFollow Karen Hunter: https://karenhuntershow.comhttps://x.com/karenhunter IG / karenhuntershowSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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 order to survive and thrive. Africana governance spaces persist in perpetually hostile Western Social Structures, reminding us of the enduring power of being present, undertaking intentional study and investing time and energy in deliberate acts of building meaningful collective futures. With every day, we choose the lives we live and the ones we want to live.Are you a member of Knarrative? If not, we invite you to join our community today by signing up at: https://www.knarrative.com. As a Knarrative subscriber, you'll gain immediate access to Knubia, our growing community of teachers, learners, thinkers, doers, artists, and creators. Together, we're making a generational commitment to our collective interests, work, and responsibilities. Join us at https://www.knarrative.com and download the Knubia app through your app store or by visiting https://community.knarrative.com.To shop Go to:TheGlobalMajorityMore from us:Follow on X: https://x.com/knarrative_https://x.com/inclasswithcarrFollow on Instagram  IG / knarrative   IG/ inclasswithcarr Follow Dr. Carr: https://www.drgregcarr.comhttps://x.com/AfricanaCarrFollow Karen Hunter: https://karenhuntershow.comhttps://x.com/karenhunter IG / karenhuntershowSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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-Montgomery trail, the Black Hospital Movement, and figures from Fred Gray and JoAnn Bland to the students of HBHS Tuskegee High School and many others, we continue the work of Africana Studies as “Intellectual CSI.” U.S. Reconstruction’s unfinished promises demand a renegotiation anchored in Africana Governance logics in order to resist exclusion and collectively re-center our common humanity in a post-Western world.Are you a member of Knarrative? If not, we invite you to join our community today by signing up at: https://www.knarrative.com. As a Knarrative subscriber, you'll gain immediate access to Knubia, our growing community of teachers, learners, thinkers, doers, artists, and creators. Together, we're making a generational commitment to our collective interests, work, and responsibilities. Join us at https://www.knarrative.com and download the Knubia app through your app store or by visiting https://community.knarrative.com.To shop Go to:TheGlobalMajorityMore from us:Follow on X: https://x.com/knarrative_https://x.com/inclasswithcarrFollow on Instagram  IG / knarrative   IG/ inclasswithcarr Follow Dr. Carr: https://www.drgregcarr.comhttps://x.com/AfricanaCarrFollow Karen Hunter: https://karenhuntershow.comhttps://x.com/karenhunter IG / karenhuntershowSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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 central question: How do we free our minds so that we can liberate our spaces? Answering that question requires challenging the illusion of inevitability under a dying empire. It means building independent institutions while also reimagining shared spaces in order to remake them, infusing them with our Governance protocols and Ways of Knowing, all in our collective interest. Central to this work is the power of storytelling to restore collective memory, cultivate disciplined political clarity and strengthen global solidarity—transforming hope into collective positive action.Are you a member of Knarrative? If not, we invite you to join our community today by signing up at: https://www.knarrative.com. As a Knarrative subscriber, you'll gain immediate access to Knubia, our growing community of teachers, learners, thinkers, doers, artists, and creators. Together, we're making a generational commitment to our collective interests, work, and responsibilities. Join us at https://www.knarrative.com and download the Knubia app through your app store or by visiting https://community.knarrative.com.To shop Go to:TheGlobalMajorityMore from us:Follow on X: https://x.com/knarrative_https://x.com/inclasswithcarrFollow on Instagram  IG / knarrative   IG/ inclasswithcarr Follow Dr. Carr: https://www.drgregcarr.comhttps://x.com/AfricanaCarrFollow Karen Hunter: https://karenhuntershow.comhttps://x.com/karenhunter IG / karenhuntershowSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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. Filmmaker Haile Gerima has described narratives as scalpels that cut into the center of our minds and consciousness. The struggle of liberation-oriented Governance formations against an increasingly fragile contemporary global Social Structure, then, is first and foremost, a clash between forces determined to reduce humanity to servitude and people who refuse to submit. What happens when increasingly desperate would-be masters can no longer control those they seek to dominate?Are you a member of Knarrative? If not, we invite you to join our community today by signing up at: https://www.knarrative.com. As a Knarrative subscriber, you'll gain immediate access to Knubia, our growing community of teachers, learners, thinkers, doers, artists, and creators. Together, we're making a generational commitment to our collective interests, work, and responsibilities. Join us at https://www.knarrative.com and download the Knubia app through your app store or by visiting https://community.knarrative.com.To shop Go to:TheGlobalMajorityMore from us:Follow on X: https://x.com/knarrative_https://x.com/inclasswithcarrFollow on Instagram  IG / knarrative   IG/ inclasswithcarr Follow Dr. Carr: https://www.drgregcarr.comhttps://x.com/AfricanaCarrFollow Karen Hunter: https://karenhuntershow.comhttps://x.com/karenhunter IG / karenhuntershowSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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 PUSH to Rainbow Coalition Presidential campaigns of 1984 and 1988, Jackson utilized and tested every tactic available to oppressed people confronting entrenched Social Structures. In Class With Carr 311 interprets the meaning of Jackson’s life and work as a case study in the possibilities and limits of Black self-determination, asking what it reveals about today’s fragile and reshaping political order and what understanding him, it and ourselves demands of us now.Are you a member of Knarrative? If not, we invite you to join our community today by signing up at: https://www.knarrative.com. As a Knarrative subscriber, you'll gain immediate access to Knubia, our growing community of teachers, learners, thinkers, doers, artists, and creators. Together, we're making a generational commitment to our collective interests, work, and responsibilities. Join us at https://www.knarrative.com and download the Knubia app through your app store or by visiting https://community.knarrative.com.To shop Go to:TheGlobalMajorityMore from us:Follow on X: https://x.com/knarrative_https://x.com/inclasswithcarrFollow on Instagram  IG / knarrative   IG/ inclasswithcarr Follow Dr. Carr: https://www.drgregcarr.comhttps://x.com/AfricanaCarrFollow Karen Hunter: https://karenhuntershow.comhttps://x.com/karenhunter IG / karenhuntershowSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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 “Negro History Week.” Applying the Africana Studies Conceptual Categories Framework to struggles over Philadelphia’s President’s House Historical Site and related subjects, we examine internal and external intellectual warfare in a moment of accelerating U.S. imperial decline. The path forward depends on whether we choose freedom—or remain slaves without masters.Are you a member of Knarrative? If not, we invite you to join our community today by signing up at: https://www.knarrative.com. As a Knarrative subscriber, you'll gain immediate access to Knubia, our growing community of teachers, learners, thinkers, doers, artists, and creators. Together, we're making a generational commitment to our collective interests, work, and responsibilities. Join us at https://www.knarrative.com and download the Knubia app through your app store or by visiting https://community.knarrative.com.To shop Go to:TheGlobalMajorityMore from us:Follow on X: https://x.com/knarrative_https://x.com/inclasswithcarrFollow on Instagram  IG / knarrative   IG/ inclasswithcarr Follow Dr. Carr: https://www.drgregcarr.comhttps://x.com/AfricanaCarrFollow Karen Hunter: https://karenhuntershow.comhttps://x.com/karenhunter IG / karenhuntershowSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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 to 1976 to the present: Social Structure spectacle versus Movement and Memory; the archive versus living intergenerational transmission; and curriculum as Governance protocol beyond simple skill development. White supremacy cannot coexist with African self-determination, equity or any other form of full beingness. Rituals that mark anniversaries must activate memory into action, revealing intellectual warfare over history, schooling, and national identity in a convulsing settler state.Are you a member of Knarrative? If not, we invite you to join our community today by signing up at: https://www.knarrative.com. As a Knarrative subscriber, you'll gain immediate access to Knubia, our growing community of teachers, learners, thinkers, doers, artists, and creators. Together, we're making a generational commitment to our collective interests, work, and responsibilities. Join us at https://www.knarrative.com and download the Knubia app through your app store or by visiting https://community.knarrative.com.To shop Go to:TheGlobalMajorityMore from us:Follow on X: https://x.com/knarrative_https://x.com/inclasswithcarrFollow on Instagram  IG / knarrative   IG/ inclasswithcarr Follow Dr. Carr: https://www.drgregcarr.comhttps://x.com/AfricanaCarrFollow Karen Hunter: https://karenhuntershow.comhttps://x.com/karenhunter IG / karenhuntershowSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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 Service’s President’s House site in Philadelphia, White nationalist attacks on expression and global political shifts with African-centered thinking to discuss how power, knowledge, and memory operate across time and space. We frame February as a recommitment to elevating African Ways of Knowing—cumulative, communal, and grounded in a long-view genealogy that refuses disappearance and insists on continuity.Are you a member of Knarrative? If not, we invite you to join our community today by signing up at: https://www.knarrative.com. As a Knarrative subscriber, you'll gain immediate access to Knubia, our growing community of teachers, learners, thinkers, doers, artists, and creators. Together, we're making a generational commitment to our collective interests, work, and responsibilities. Join us at https://www.knarrative.com and download the Knubia app through your app store or by visiting https://community.knarrative.com.To shop Go to:TheGlobalMajorityMore from us:Follow on X: https://x.com/knarrative_https://x.com/inclasswithcarrFollow on Instagram  IG / knarrative   IG/ inclasswithcarr Follow Dr. Carr: https://www.drgregcarr.comhttps://x.com/AfricanaCarrFollow Karen Hunter: https://karenhuntershow.comhttps://x.com/karenhunter IG / karenhuntershowSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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 Structures, Africana Studies must reassert its role as both discipline and Governance refuge. Movement and Memory converge in the birthday of pioneering bibliophile and institution builder Arturo Alfonso Schomburg and the transition of master teacher and researcher Dr. Charles Sumner Finch (1948–2026),whose lives modeled study as resistance as Ways of Knowing, centering the search for clarity as method and grounding practice amid disassociative conditions.Are you a member of Knarrative? If not, we invite you to join our community today by signing up at: https://www.knarrative.com. As a Knarrative subscriber, you'll gain immediate access to Knubia, our growing community of teachers, learners, thinkers, doers, artists, and creators. Together, we're making a generational commitment to our collective interests, work, and responsibilities. Join us at https://www.knarrative.com and download the Knubia app through your app store or by visiting https://community.knarrative.com.To shop Go to:TheGlobalMajorityMore from us:Follow on X: https://x.com/knarrative_https://x.com/inclasswithcarrFollow on Instagram  IG / knarrative   IG/ inclasswithcarr Follow Dr. Carr: https://www.drgregcarr.comhttps://x.com/AfricanaCarrFollow Karen Hunter: https://karenhuntershow.comhttps://x.com/karenhunter IG / karenhuntershowSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.