Pivot Pedagogy: Stepping Through, Around, and Beyond the Permanence of Anti-Blackness from the WNBA to the Classroom

Abstract

Abstract Both the WNBA and education are indebted to Black women, yet their contributions are obfuscated in botharenas. Women’s basketball is a key site where structural and cultural violence are inherent to, and reproduced through, socially constructed systems ofinequality, making it a theoretical space to understand Black women’s experiences broadly and more specifically how Black women educators navigateanti-Black worlds. This shared playbook of intersectional political expression is rooted in Black women’s clarity that our freedom is everyone’s freedom,as it necessitates the destruction of all systems of oppression. Using endarkened feminist epistemologies and critical media studies, I theorize afundamental basketball move, the pivot, as the unifying framework to highlight Black women’s ability to step through, around, and beyond the crackscaused by patriarchal, synthetic white supremacist, colonial, anti-Black projects, and pivot our way into being.