S E1318: In Class with Carr, Ep. 318: "The Way We Were"

This week’s U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Louisiana v. Callais sharpens what we too often soften with abstraction: Whiteness is not passive, accidental, or misunderstood. It is an intentional, strategic mechanism for establishing and protecting an increasingly fragile, minority-centered power base—globally and within the United States. Callais is not just a legal dispute over voting maps, nor merely another instance of judicial ideology overriding clearly expressed legislative intent. It is part of a last-stand effort to preserve a political and legal foothold for Whiteness itself, at any cost. This case represents the latest moment in a multi-generational struggle by proponents of a White nationalist Social Structure to constrain the power of Black Governance formations and movements. Will we defer to a race-first “rule of law” or leverage our Movement and Memory to trust what our Ways of Knowing have repeatedly made clear? The broader project of White minority rule is straining to reassert itself against rising domestic and global forces it cannot control. In doing so, it exposes its own contradictions and erodes the illusions that sustained it at its steadily collapsing peak—marking what must be its final stand. The task before us is twofold: to name reality without euphemism and to organize and assert power with clarity, strength, and coalition, grounded in Africana self-determination.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.

In "In Class With Carr" 320 we ask, “How can we live together?” Opening with the Jackson 5’s Stop! The Love You Save, This week’s conversation examines violence, narrative, community and continuity in African and Black life. In a week marking anniversaries of both the United Nations and the United Negro College fund, we explore how Africana Governance formations can draw on Ways of Knowing and Movement and Memory to shape surrounding Social Structures through commitments to intergenerational responsibility. By centering introspection and dialogue, we challenge ourselves to rethink identity, mediating power, and collective healing in a fractured 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.

This week, In Class With Carr comes from the 42nd International Conference of The Association for the Study of Classical African Civilizations, whose members have worked for over four decades to use the Per Ankh (House of Life) as a model for African renewal. Drawing on presentations in ASCAC’s five domestic U.S. regions over the previous year, we consider ASCAC’s work as a formation for the consideration of ancestral ways of knowing; a set of varied place-making practices; a community of cultural meaning-makers; a spiritually grounded governance formation rooted in service and a living repository of movement and memory. In this way, ASCAC’s work as a House of Life also renews, repositions, and sustains African knowledge as a necessary weapon to be wielded in the face of a hostile and dying contemporary global social structure.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 reflects on memory, leadership, and responsibility, using the passing of media giant Bob Law and global tensions like the Israel-US conflict with Iran to question how power is acquired, held and narrated. The work of educating through effective communication in order to help develop informed communities rather than passive masses requires us to first and simultaneously educate ourselves. Catalyzing the momentum of Africana memory, that work also requires creating flexible, people-centered institutions that harness memory for collective action, imagining futures beyond fading empires and inherited narratives. It challenges us to choose differently together with purpose.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” uses the Trump vs Barbara Birthright Citizenship case to explore questions of belonging, obligation, and power. Using the Africana Studies framework, we discuss how certainty of belonging and investments in creating better societies shape our relationships to others. Oppressive systems thrive on distraction and sensory overload, weakening collective thought and consensus building. When visibility overtakes substance, those with narrow agendas of control are better able to impose their objectives on others. History reminds us that efforts to undermine belonging usually provoke resistance, as people ultimately challenge systems that deny their full participation and humanity.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.

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.