By Cheryl A. Kirk-Duggan.
“Eliminating Ignorance”
“Ain’t Got Time to Die” (The Spiritual, Redacted):
Well, she kept so busy praising her savior
Kept so busy fighting for justice
Kept so busy pondering pedagogy
Ain’t got time to die!
In response to a lead article for the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, “Silent Scripts and Contested Spaces,” Cannon illustrated “Eliminating Ignorance.”[ 1] We must be willing to embrace the benefits of embodied multiculturalism to address effectively, with powerful strategies, the dismantling of hierarchal, mechanistic patterns of racist misogyny that justify reasoned legitimacy of oppressive, systemic domination. Cannon did not simply choose to become an extraordinary pedagogue. Rooted in the legacy of her maternal great-grandmother, Martha Zella Barringer, one subjected to brutal, dehumanizing violence against her personhood, Cannon mirrored Barringer’s intellectual curiosity and zeal for learning. Barringer completed her elementary and secondary education at Scotia Seminary, a school of the Presbyterian Church. Generations of Cannon women believed education to be the oldest, most important field where they have served powerfully and have long focused their energies on embracing education as an arena of opportunity. Despite the paucity of funds, horrible living conditions, and other challenges, Martha and other black women, the vanguard of knowledge for freed people, were educators, courageously committed to emancipatory epistemology.
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Want to read more? Click here for full (free) access to Kirk-Duggan’s reflection at JSTOR: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/jfemistudreli.35.1.16.
Next to Peter J. Paris’s “Katie Cannon’s Encounter with Africa“
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This piece originally appeared in the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion Issue 35.1, Spring 2019.