In Class with Carr, Ep. 250: "The More Things Change..."

2024 is ending with Intensifying nationalist and populist movements capturing more electorates and elected officials in key countries around the world. In the US, the Republican Party is no exception, its intensifying battles between oligarchs and policymakers enabled by white nationalism previewing what is in store for the general US population in 2025. Meanwhile, the global social structure moves inexorably toward an increasingly multipolar world system. While specifics will no doubt hold some surprises, what will remain the same in many countries is a fight over resources and policy making based on racial and class-based logics. The more things change in this deteriorating world system, the more these essential fights will reveal themselves to be the same.

Meanwhile, local governance formations across the world continue to search for different and better ways of building community and resisting systemic human oppression. The center of racial oppression logics continues to deteriorate ”in the wake.” Several recent applications of Science and Technology in the form of museum exhibits evoke the potential to reveal enduring Ways of Knowing through acts of Cultural Meaning-Making that focus our attention on unbroken acts of Movement and Memory in service of answering the question, “How do it free Us?” The 250th session of In Class With Carr uses points of entry from two of these exhibits—“Flight into Egypt” at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art and “In Slavery’s Wake” at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture—to reflect on key lessons learned in our efforts to harness the momentum of African memory as a tool for achieving and maintaining liberation as we enter our fifth year of collective work.

Are these exhibits concessions, embraces or merely a shuffling of modalities without displacing hierarchies of Black institutional subordination? Does not whiteness remain “in charge,” now performing “inclusion” while the lives of those who resist it remain unchanged except when they achieve their own acts of Kujichagulia, of self-determination? If the answer is yes, then these exhibits at best may suggest fruitful directions for that specific work. If that, wha,t if anything, will change as a result of their mounting? Can anything? Can artistic imaginings, displays, change ourselves, change the world? Or the more things change will they remain the same?

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