Throughout Chapters 1 and 3, Shange dives into the central idea of a Progressive Dystopia, and aims to analyze how widespread sentiments of anti-Blackness affect progressivism on an educational level. To do this, Shange makes use of the Robeson Justice Academy as an example of a “small, resistant, and yet imminently civil society” (pg 4), and draws upon her experiences there along with the broader Robeson community to examine the ongoing persistence of anti-Blackness policies. Mainly throughout chapter 1, Shange considers how coalition building and discrimination against Black individuals are interconnected with public education. She also continually speaks to the idea of the state, and how it has worked to perpetuate the exclusion of Black individuals both in the educational realm and also on a community-wide level— which she explains through the broader city of San Francisco.
Throughout the text, two particular terms seem to stand out: progressive dystopia and carceral progressivism. To illustrate the topic of progressive dystopia, Shange describes the overall trend of anti-Blackness through the Robeson community. She speaks to the push for social justice and activism of the Robeson School, but also demonstrates how they have their own practices meant to exclude Black students— once again demonstrating how on multiple levels of the state sentiments of anti-Blackness are still ongoing. Additionally, throughout the reading Shange utilizes a landscape of progressive dystopia and dystopian imagery to highlight her message to end the anti-Black state.
The second theme Shange refers to as carceral progressivism, in which she highlights the irony of certain social reform efforts. Essentially, Shange’s theory of carceral progressivism draws attention to the numerous manners in which efforts to reform and achieve social justice can actually perpetuate anti-Black racism. Shange utilizes the term carceral to encompass the larger trends of the abuse of power on a public and private institutional level. This is exemplified in her discussion of carcerality as it pertained to the Robeson Justice Academy, and how despite their increased enactments of “anti-carceral” policies have nonetheless reenacted “the logics of Black punition and disposability” (pg 15).
Questions I’d ask from this reading would probably tend to me more applicable to our life— How can we see Shange’s idea of carceral progressivism illustrated in communities outside of Robeson? What are other examples of how the state has worked to perpetuate anti-Blackness under the guise of liberal progressivism?