Lance Eaton

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
― Oscar Wilde

“If a person’s behavior doesn’t make sense to you, it is because you are missing a part of their context. It’s that simple.”
― Devon Price

“Black students’ “oppositional gaze” was not an opposition to learning itself but a way of looking that critiqued the practices of antiblack exclusion and confinement in education and that challenged the racist ideas that animated these experiences of domination. It was a way of looking that documented and destabilized relations of power by cultivating an awareness from black students’ marginalized perspectives. This looking back challenged the position of black learners as “substudents”—whereby black people were written into the social contract of the American School or included through distorted ideas that defined blackness as the antithesis of the human subject: the ideal (white) citizen / student.”
― Jarvis R. Givens, Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G. Woodson and the Art of Black Teaching

“Stories of black learners developed into a critical black memory—a visual narrative comprising individual yet interrelated historical events. These accumulated accounts of black student witness formed a vantage point from the view of the black pupil: first, outside the American schoolhouse; then, inside on contingent and probationary terms. These memories prefigured the oppositional gaze of black students as a historically situated group of learners. The oppositional gaze of black students was made and remade through shared testimonies and personal experiences, and these memories were called on in black students’ educational journeys.”
― Jarvis R. Givens, Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G. Woodson and the Art of Black Teaching