S E1341: In Class with Carr, Ep. 340: “Maps, Museums and Manifestos”

This week, Smithsonian Institution Secretary Lonnie Bunch announced his retirement after a nearly four decade affiliation with its network and ending his seven year tenure as the first African American and first Historian to lead the institution founded in 1848. A decade ago this month, the National Museum of African American History and Culture opened. Bunche’s efforts leading both institutions provide a lens through which to consider ongoing contests over relationships between integrating various national identities into larger Social Structures of state affiliation, citizenship and belonging.In an era where white nationalist nativism in the United States increasingly aligns with global white supremacist political movements, Bunch’s structural attempts to integrate various competing narratives of collective memory often inflamed U.S. white nationalist ideologues and extremists determined to use high-stakes cultural battlegrounds to cement an emerging minority rule.This collision of narrative and space echoes Paul Goldberger's recent reflection on the World Trade Center's 25th anniversary in The New York Times, where he observed, "You can destroy something in an instant, but it will take a generation to rebuild it, and even then it cannot ever be the same."The Africana Studies Framework allows us to examine both competing ideas of Governance and underlying Social Structures in which they exist. How do we recognize both interpretive differences and undeniable realities? How can we use Movement and Memory to build self-determining Governance formations? And what can and will emerge in the wake of a shifting world system?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 pre-Labor Day week was marked by the transition of Cultural Meaning-Maker Cassandra Wilson, whose artistic labor reminds us of the power of narratives of long-view memory as anchors for Ways of Knowing that shape our lives. As White nationalist politicians and others’ increasingly desperate efforts to force-feed us their own narrow, absurdist, and fevered stories of US and global authority, Social Structure institutions weaken through overreach and the abandonment of previously settled norms. Narratives of authoritarian triumphalism, as always, ultimately fracture under the weight of shifting realities. Meanwhile, structures and formations dedicated to expansive imaginings of better worlds persist. How do the stories we are told and the ones we create for ourselves shape our individual and collective decision-making, and when forces determined to direct our behavior war against our collective memory, what is the ultimate cost to our collective political behavior?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.

During Black August 2026, the Asantehene, Otumfo Osei Tutu II, and Otumfo-Yere Julia Osei Tutu of the Asante People are visiting the United States. Their trip features a Royal Lecture at Howard University and an Akwasidae Festival at Bowie State University, bracketed by a major African business summit. This historic visit highlights a foundational truth: Global African solidarity and belonging must anchor self-determination to drive local, regional, and global advancement. This journey happens during a time of deep global political friction. As the old Age of European Expansion rapidly deteriorates, powerful nations scramble to renegotiate global arrangements. Meanwhile, political figures in the U.S. fetishize authoritarian leadership and try to destabilize existing political and economic orders. Domestic US communities also struggle to claim collective authority and protect explicit individual rights within a destabilizing US legal system. In grappling with relationships between Governance formations and the Social Structures which hold them together, the Asante delegation raises questions of Governance, where authority is informed by the Cultural Meaning-Making that recognizes relationships between memory and vision, the protective custodianship of Ancestral continuity represented by the Golden Stool, and the living assent of the people in renewed and new Governance formations. As corporate lawfare and a compromised SCOTUS threaten US domestic stability, and neoliberal frameworks continue to buffet the modern university, this week we raise questions of structural autonomy, from the protocols of the Asante to the "jailbreaking" of the Black University, and ask several questions: What does it mean to truly govern with the people's assent? How do we reclaim authority when structures built to rule us teeter? What happens when people withdraw their authority? How do we strengthen our global ties for mutual benefit?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.

During this Black August, US White Nationalists have continued to compile victories in the federal court, from Donald Trump’s White Nationalist Department of Justice dropping charges against Oath Keepers January 6, 2021 insurrectionists to his illegal White House ballroom project being endorsed through inaction by Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts.Internationally, the US federal government continues to alienate former allies such as Canada, strong arm African governments like Liberia and support authoritarian and genocidal regimes from North Korea to Israel, all while further attempting to suppress internal critics, from sailors aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln to military media watchdogs like Stars and Stripes.Still, from within the fracturing US polity, both resistance and victory against would-be fascist overlords continues to rise. A US Senate primary victory in Florida and wins in other smaller federal and state races continue to unsettle both soft white nationalist Democratic establishment formations and an increasingly unhinged and embattled White Nationalist Party.Their reactions are well-warranted: A swelling number of people are taking and preparing to take action, independent of establishment politicians, mass media pundits, political operatives and precariously-perched managerial classes.From within Africana Governance formations, hope for creating better lives through collective effort is finding footing, fed by increasing numbers of awakened, informed, and engaged actors.This week, In Class With Carr places the concept of hope as an Africana Way of Knowing formed out of the Momentum of Memory in the context of US and global events.We start today's class with Tequila Johnson.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 enter the third week of Black August, our annual Kemet [Ancient Egypt] Study Tour concludes as debates on the changing nature and process of formal education continue in the US. Our work of “Jailbreaking the Black University” offers a clear contrast to current academic discussions on the nature and potential of HBCUs. The Kemet Study Tour is an immersive space that centers inward-focused intergenerational study, reflection and exchange that empties into the beginning of the formal school year. Dr. Asa G. Hilliard III [Nana Baffour Amankwatia II]’s Sebayt [teaching] reminds us that doing what we want each other to know is the best form of teaching. This model places “back to school” in its proper context. Summer should not bring a pause in education. Instead, it offers unobstructed opportunities to practice a recentering of what should be our regular learning cycle. Jailbreaking the learning ecosystem allows us to bypass familiar institutional gatekeeping through centering community education, re-situating institutional learning spaces, including HBCUs, in order to interface with them in active feedback loops, creating the potential for dynamic, living and learning.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 335 of In Class With Carr, we continue Black August during our annual study tour of Kemet [Ancient Egypt] and the Nile Valley. Following pathways of liberatory intellectual work of previous generations of Africans engaged in Global Black Study helps us to resist current efforts to disrupt deeper collective study as well as to attempt to privatize and commodify broad access to information. Studying Kemet is a foundational element of the broader work of liberating Black people and all humanity from all forms of oppression.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.

Black August, an annual ritual introduced in the late 1970s as a period dedicated to African self-determination and collective political struggle, requires us to rethink sacrifice, rejuvenation and remembering. The month centers four grounding objectives: to study, fast, train, and fight. As with Kwanzaa, Black History Month and Juneteenth, every year these objectives reinforce the ongoing work for our liberation. Our collective study dedicated to reframing time and space, enhanced in this year of the US semiquincentennial, can approach Black August as a time for us to connect how our efforts can affect and potentially transform our current political landscape.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 session continues to explore struggles for political power and cultural survival in hostile, nativist Social Structures. Even as politicians of African descent continue to be elected, even in spaces with majority non-African voters, the challenge to conform, integrate or culturally neuter in order to demonstrate trustworthiness persists. Hard White nationalists such as those who have momentarily captured the federal government push desperately to neuter potential voting power of others and risk an implosion of their existing structural advantage by attacking carefully curated national myths that hold the polity together, at least tangentially. Meanwhile, filmmaker Christopher Nolan‘s latest movie, “The Odyssey,” has begun to make huge global profits. People are hungry for Cultural Meaning-Making that feeds seemingly archetypical myths. Contrasting cherished Western archetypes like the Homeric myth with intra-racial satirizations such as “Oh Brother Where Art Thou” and elder narratives like the Ancient Egyptian story of Sinhue/Sanhat, we explore how long-view African memory–or “Black Odysseys”--can be used to both gain perspective and regain the Momentum of Memory. In a moment when a White Nationalist US federal government is working overtime to destroy all lines between fact and fiction, the value of collective learning and developing our abilities, is more critical than ever. With soaring prices of higher education increasingly out of reach for most, renewed efforts to reshape readily accessible public spaces for learning also increase. As we continue to jailbreak learning during the US semiquincentennial year, we ask again the question W.E.B. Du Bois asked before departing permanently for Africa: When it comes to collective movement and institution building within African and other spaces, “Whither Now and Why?”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.

Around the world, including the United States, those in power fight desperately to cling to it, targeting a foundational element for legitimizing state power: the vote. Fascist efforts to maintain state authority have increasingly worked to undermine our capacity to assess information and distinguish between fact and false narratives.This week, as we continue our Africana Studies approach to reframing the U.S. semi-quincentennial year, we underscore the continuing need to deepen our literacy skills. Deep reading, reflection, and critical thinking are essential in the face of Social Structure assaults on thinking and mass movements informed by objective reality.Recovering the momentum of memory allows us to confront modern tactics that seek to diminish—or even eliminate—the vote as a tool of collective struggle. A post-literate era is particularly vulnerable to these attempts to undermine the very foundations of civic participation, informed engagement, and mass movement.The "Freedom Schools" call to educate ourselves is correct, but it must never stray from the enabling capacity at the core of what is under perpetual assault: deep literacy and reflection as the starting point for meaningful 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.

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.