The “Ed Scare” and the Ritualistic Burning of Black Texts

Abstract

This text employs the lens of Afropessimism to articulate the relationship between the Ed Scare and the legacies of anti-Black activity that continue to structure and govern the social world. The Ed Scare, primarily understood as the culture war combat taking place across K-12 and ivory tower arenas, is described here as that which attempts to resolve the ontological nightmare that "wokeness" presents to the non-Black unconscious. Wokeness, rooted in Black parrhesian defiance, heightens White and non-Black fears of the imagined ontological ascension of Blacks and the undermining of White-led value systems. The Scare emerges to confront and slay this “nightmare” (the Black) whose pursuits in the social arena are “unbecoming” of one who has been deemed Humanity’s slave, and whose negation is a prerequisite for the psychic stability of the nation. The Scare emerges from the longstanding tradition of nourishing non-Black life through a call for non-Blacks to forget not their civic and ontological duty (participation in public anti-Black activity). To quell the imagined threat that Blacks are believed to currently and always represent, a consuming fire has once again been kindled in the depths of the collective non-Black world. And what the collective mob desires is to “burn” Blackness in the world of the symbolic and assault Blackness in the realm of the concrete.