A live debate performance inspired by the Black Studies classroom.
A class is called bad not because it is full of inferior students but because its students have called — and proven — the racist order inferior.
Bad Class is an international debate series inspired by the Black Studies classroom. 2 to 4 speakers take opposing stances on a seemingly minor question grounded in marginalized life. Through moderation and audience participation the debate becomes a conversation about major political issues. Moderated by Dr. Yannick Giovanni Marshall, writer and Black Studies professor. 90 minutes.
Thought against Segregation
Bad Class stages intellectual exchange as it is lived at the margins. Whether Black Studies, “bad schools,” or “Bantu schools,” learning spaces at the margins—often won through protest—have often been treated as spaces where only an inferior education is possible.
Segregation —whether the apartheid and anti-integration campaigns of the last century, or the banishment of protesting students and fields of study from campuses in the anti-DEI campaigns of today— guts the educational resources of marginalized communities. It does not, however, gut critical thought. On the contrary, repression has necessitated new disciplines, new methods, new ways of knowing, innovations in teaching, and repositories of thought in the critical humanities built in contradistinction to the tar and feathering of the university and the death of academic freedom by a thousand cuts.
Bad Class takes aim both at narratives of the inferiority of the philosophical traditions of the colonized and the disposability of the humanities. It opens space for new questions, new approaches to old questions, and invites a broader conversation about the position—or absence—of subaltern, de-colonial and subversive knowledge production in public life.
N.B.
Although forged in the Black Studies classroom, Bad Class events are neither limited to topics in Black history nor designed exclusively for university audiences.
Format
2–4 speakers
1 moderator (Dr. Yannick Giovanni Marshall)
Structured debate followed by audience discussion
Audience polled before and after the debate. At the conclusion, the motion is posed once more as a question to the audience, and selected responses are displayed.