Chief Strategist and Joyful Militant UBUNTU Research and Evaluation, United States
Abstract Information: Black people have always created spaces and opportunities to define the world for themselves on their terms and in service of their futures. These spaces and opportunities are not simply the linear progeny of civil rights, Black power, and Black Lives Matter but a fractal output of relentless individual and collective resistances and resiliences across centuries. Through W. E. B. Dubois published works such as The Philadelphia Negro, The Souls of Black Folks, Dusk of Dawn and Black Reconstruction, we have examples of how Black evaluators can approach what it means to hold intentional spaces of healing through creating, using, and sharing measures in service to Black futures. In this paper, I speak about Black futures by discussing the context and creation of these spaces and opportunities. Specifically, this paper will discuss the care-building strategies of Black evaluators who work “in community” with one another. Institution building is a specific strategy for Black Evaluators to provide the liberated container within an anti-Black world. I argue that this implicit framework has guided many Black communities to heal from persistent anti-Black harm and manifest deliberate Black futures using institution-building strategies. I present learnings from an ongoing organizational autoethnographic study of a Black-led community of evaluators to make deep connections to healing through evaluation and building institutions that sustain and promote Black futures. By creating organizations that provided healing and restoration while serving as sites of defense against institutional, interpersonal, ideological, and internalized harms, Black communities can utilize a practical approach to embodying a Duboisian ideology. Finally, as “Black humanity and personhood continue to be filtered and evaluated through the white liberal imagination, (Samudzi and Anderson, 2018)” this paper outlines the steps Black communities may take to create spaces and opportunities to evaluate and measure the world on the terms of their desired Black futures.
Relevance Statement: Boyle and Parry argue, organizational autoethnographic study illuminates “autoethnographic accounts are characterised by a move from a broad lens focus on individual situatedness within the cultural and social context, to a focus on the inner, vulnerable and often resistant self (Boyle and Parry 186).” These reflections will contribute to collective knowledge on Black institution building especially spaces created by Black women.
