S E1329: In Class with Carr, Ep. 328: Celebrations

Official commemorations of the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Declaration of Independence have now ended, with anticipated federally subsidized, countrywide conversations about the meaning of the U.S. never materializing. Instead, much of the commemorative and contemplative energy was consumed by a federal government temporarily captured by a White nationalist regime intent on narrowing rather than expanding both polity-wide memory and imagination.The country's ongoing inability to either manufacture or negotiate consensus, or forcefully reject its resurgent and desperate White nationalist virus, tells us something more important about the moment itself. We are living through the end stages of a roughly five-century period of Western global strength. As the order it birthed becomes increasingly brittle, narratives that sustain its power require ever more aggressive forms of maintenance.Donald Trump's Freedom 250 State Fair was a fitting illustration. Rather than presenting a negotiated national vision, it projected an anemic, market-driven EuroFuturism detached from the lived realities of the people being assaulted within and beyond it.Against that thin and fitfully curated spectacle stands far more vibrant and complicated social worlds produced through Governance formations of family, community, Cultural Meaning Making, Movement, and Memory.In Class With Carr has spent significant time displacing "250" as an anchoring historical marker, using an Africana Studies method and lens to break through narrowing Social Structure narratives in order to make space for self-determining forms of Governance, Ways of Knowing, and understanding time, belonging, and community.That work makes it increasingly possible to say, publicly and without apology, that Western-style polities need not define or contain our common humanity while remaining fully engaged with the institutions and social formations with and through which we must still struggle.Last week, in Session 330, we proposed moving "Beyond 250." Today, we use ongoing years of collective work informed by deep study and real-time responses to increasingly desperate acts of White political violence to engage in a thought exercise grounded in another way of organizing historical time.The question is not simply what happened in 1776 or even in 1865. The deeper question is why those dates organize our thinking in the first place.What are the odds that we can use this season of endings to harness a momentum of memory for a different and better collective 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.

As the United States notes the 250th anniversary of its Declaration of Independence, it confronts its deepest crisis of structural political integrity since its Civil War and Reconstruction. The ritual corridor between Juneteenth and July 4 exposes the widening gap between US founding mythologies and its lived political realities. This year’s observance arrives amid the Trump administration’s transformation of the government’s America250 commemoration into a religio-fascist, cult of personality-driven “Freedom 250” spectacle, while the Supreme Court’s 6-3/5-4 Birthright Citizenship ruling in Trump v. Barbara saw four justices prepared to abandon the Reconstruction/Second Founding itself by effectively rewriting the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Taken together with renewed efforts to restrict immigration, weaken the administrative state, and redefine citizenship, these developments raise the central question of this year’s semiquincentennial: what becomes of a polity built on competing definitions of belonging when its white nationalist-fueled authority permanently fractures? Using the Africana Studies framework, today’s session continues the work of reframing the semi-quincentennial not as a celebration of 1776 but as an opportunity to rethink time, citizenship, and political community through the last 250 years of African self-determination. Provoked in part by the competing constitutional visions of Black Justices Ketanji Onyika Brown Jackson and Clarence Thomas, we examine citizenship as both shield and struggle, contrasting narratives of inclusion, fealty, and liberation. From the Negro Convention Movement and Reconstruction to today’s battles over birthright citizenship, the SAVE Act, and the policing of bodies and borders, we ask whether the US is entering a post-white nationalist era of rebirth or the final stage of an empire unable to survive its founding contradictions. By tracing Africana Governance work in fifty-year intervals, we use this symbolic anniversary to connect movements, rituals, institutions, and ideas that reveal far deeper meaning than any official national narrative,, laying the foundation for the remaining part of this year’s continuing exploration of liberation, governance, memory, and 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.

The two-week “liberation corridor” between Juneteenth and US Independence Day (“White Juneteenth”) affords an annual opportunity to evaluate objectives of and rituals for enforcing collective identity. A nakedly white nationalist US federal administration intensifies its assaults on both a shifting global order and a rising domestic opposition to its increasingly absurd efforts, revealing deeper conflicts between patriotism and foundational ideals. Using an Africana Studies Conceptual Category method to reject using trauma-anchored identity as a basis for contesting oppressions of all forms, we ask what “liberation” means in the contemporary world system. The United States remains a contested Social Structure whose foundational white nativist mission must not be allowed to center spaces where others are merely tolerated by degree of submission to that mission. Rituals such as the 250th US anniversary “celebration” moments consistently reinforce founding violence as superior and too frequently mask and reinforce systemic harms. Rather than relying on exclusionary definitions of belonging or legalistic metrics of eligibility to belong, this discussion continues our work of reclaiming self-determining expression, prioritizing internal self-restoration and building international solidarity to achieve true repair and liberation.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.

With the 160th observance of Juneteenth, the United States enters the two-week corridor between the largest Black liberation ritual directly connected to global rituals of African self-determination and the country’s nativist Semi-quincentennial Fourth of July celebration ritual. In a country entangled in a war of choice, this week marked a gauche white nationalist White House lawn brawlfest, the opening of the Obama Presidential Center, the continuing celebrations and tensions surrounding soccer’s North America-hosted World Cup, and the multinational New York Knicks Basketball Championship Parade and Ceremony. Alongside these rituals, a proliferation of Juneteenth Emancipation Day/Jubilee commemorative events is taking place. This unique convergence raises questions of Governance, Cultural Meaning-Making and Movement and Memory in the context of US and global Social Structures on the brink of renegotiations. Ritual moments are public narratives that reveal various values while often threatening to flatten looming realities. The space between Juneteenth and July 4 allows us to also consider spaces between facts and wishes, remembrances and aspirations.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.

Cash does not rule everything around us. At best, money is a simplified tally or or proxy for control, while power rests on perceptions of legitimacy and collective assent or consent. The trillion-dollar valuation of SpaceX this week intensifies larger questions about relationships between individuals and communities. Elon Musk has amassed immense financial wealth. He remains one person. No individual creates, maintains, or controls society. Power is always social. The removal of Donald Trump’s name from the Kennedy Center underscores how quickly authority built on perception can collapse, revealing underlying tensions beneath. US Semiquincentennial celebrations speed toward unavoidable contradictions and confrontations rather than consensus, Deeper struggle is not just between powerful individuals, but between individual ambition and collective opinion and will. These tensions appeared everywhere this week in Cultural Meaning-Making sporting events such as the World Cup, where countries like Congo and Haiti reminded a global audience directly of Movement and Memory grounded in liberation and resistance narratives. The heavily subsidized Musk’s seizure of curated public imagination also intensified debates over the role and responsibility of regulatory Social Structures as well as the limits of the nation-state. Trump’s increasingly unstable vanity projects expose rising opposition at the intersection of sports, celebrity and finance. And even the entertainment group Wu-Tang Clan’s appearance at New York’s Madison Square Garden was a reminder that meaning cannot be reduced to market value, polling data, or stock prices. Spirit, memory, and collective identity, Ways of Knowing that undergird Governance logic, continue to matter. The lesson are both simple and enduring: Reality is far too large to be contained in the imagination of a small group. The worlds we inhabit are ones we make, together. Capital may concentrate, institutions may rise and falter, and powerful figures may temporarily dominate headlines, but no single actor or small group of actors stands above communities that ultimately grant—or withdraw—their consent.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.

Drawing on reflections from last week’s experiences in Tulsa, this session of In Class With Carr traces relationships between roots of memory and community and contemporary branches of interventions, struggle and renewal. Beginning with the annual soil collection ritual at Greenwood’s Standpipe Hill, we consider Greenwood as one of countless other “Little Africas” that expand Governance formations to include honored ancestors and fuel Social Structure transformation work with the Momentum of Memory. Through the words of founders of “Black Wall Street” and those who have preserved them and who continue to serve as Djalis, we explore issues of narrative, class, and public memory. By connecting local Cultural Meaning Making and Movement and Memory to Governance designed to also resist external shaping by Social Structure forces with sometimes cross intent, we ask questions of movement building, emphasizing generosity, honesty, and learning across all contexts.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 Class With Carr 325 comes live from Justice for Greenwood’s weekend of rituals marking the 120th anniversary of Tulsa Oklahoma’s Greenwood District, where the memory and residue of “Black Wall Street” illuminates irreconcilable questions of violence, self-determination, and state power. We discuss nation-state’s monopolies on violence, restrictions on movement, and how Africans and indigenous communities continue to resist in pursuit of freedom. In many ways, stories of Tulsa and Greenwood present as a microcosm of the US, where settler colonialism, Indigenous sovereignty, and African world-making converge, clash and intersect. Through reflections on repair, governance, memory, and community, we observe that Greenwood’s story is our story. As the US continues its barreling toward a contested 250th anniversary, this lesson feeds and shapes this week’s Momentum of Memory: We are all Greenwood.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.

The U.S. Memorial Day weekend is often described as the unofficial beginning of summer. Amid mounting regional and global challenges to U.S. power, intensifying US white nationalist politics, and the approach of federal Semiquincentennial celebrations, questions of memory, governance and collective identity take on renewed urgency. This week’s In Class With Carr continues our long-term project of thinking about ourselves and the world through an Africana Studies lens by asking what it means to remember Black spaces in a moment of watershed social transition. From HBCUs seeking position in intensifying data center interventions to the continuing meaning and relevance of Black towns, Black self-determination, Black political organizing and the politics of commemoration, we consider how cultural memory, movement work, and Governance intersect. How do we protect and extend Black spaces? What stories connect us across time and place? How might deepening cultural memory, collective Ways of Knowing, and organized action help create social arrangements capable of serving the needs of all?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 session 323, In Class with Carr uses the 2026 Commencement Season to explore the nature of time and the ways rituals marking transition create opportunities to reflect on Africana Governance, our relationships to one another and our obligations to each other. Centering Sankofa as a Way of Knowing, we examine how individual and collective dignity and power are strengthened through action-oriented rituals of Cultural Meaning-Making that encourage collective reflection. Strengthening this momentum of memory is especially important during moments when Social Structures intensify contests over global and local power arrangements and weaponize identity and memory against groups perceived as threats to existing power systems. This week, during a meeting with the U.S. President and leading figures in global business, Chinese President Xi Jinping invoked a metaphor from the Greek historian Thucydides—“the Thucydides Trap”—to signal a shifting global balance of power. Whether in conversations among BRICS foreign ministers in India, in commencement addresses to anxious graduates at Black and other institutions, or in testimony of rising forces determined to break attempts by White nationalist legislators in the neo-Confederate U.S. South to hold on to their fading power arrangements, one message is clear: We are living through a new time in the perpetual realignment of power. The question we must answer is whether—and how—we will respond.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 confronts an enduring question at the heart of the U.S. experiment: How long can White nationalism strain the U.S. political order before the contradictions at its core permanently rupture the federated system itself? We trace this week’s racially politicized Southern gerrymanders back to the founding racial logic of the United States, moving from Virginia state court battles to US Supreme Court encouraged anti-Black legislative wars in Tennessee, Louisiana, and Alabama. Together, these conflicts reveal that organized power—not faith in the durability of local, state, or federal institutions—has always driven transformations in the U.S. Social Structure. Echoing social comedian Roy Wood Jr.’s reflections on the centrality of Black locality, the Black-led Human Rights Movement of the Second Reconstruction and contemporary coalition politics, we emphasize culture, memory, and solidarity as essential sources of resistance and transformation. Anticipating intensifying disinformation, fascist unrestraint and escalating legal attacks on voting rights, this week’s session reminds us that “everything ends,” including systems rooted in White racial domination. More inclusive and equitable Social Structures can emerge if and when people fight collectively for them from our strengths.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.