As institutions of Higher Education in the United States face existential challenges to their ability to engage, support, and prioritize minoritized students, On Blackness, Liveliness, and What it Means to Be Human: Towards Black Specificity in Higher Education emerges as a timely examination of American universities’ systemic reliance on “anti-Black degradation” as the organizing principle behind such attacks. In this unflinchingly reflexive and meticulously sourced work, Okello models his approach for “unveiling and harnessing Black Futures [. . .] as an epistemological orientation” with which current educational practices might be unsettled. This is accomplished in three parts with each section of the book mobilizing a combination of conventional and creative methods (including auto-ethnography, literary analysis, critical discourse analysis, interview analysis, and visual analysis) to reveal the anti-Black logics at play before demonstrating what it might look like for scholars of Education, Black studies, Policy, and anyone with stake in higher education to try something different.

The three chapters comprising Part One open the book by introducing readers to key concepts, theorists, and referents. Terms like ‘Flesh,” “Human,” “Otherwise,” “Praxis,” and “Refusal,” are introduced with both general and operational definitions that invoke Okello’s primary influences and signal his epistemological framework for the book. This opening volley melds with the borrowed assertion that “Words conjure” (Toni Cade Bambara, What it is I Think I Am Doing Anyhow, 1980) to establishes a trans-disciplinary field of engagement grounded in “Black Study”—which he describes as “the intellectual, social, relational, and political practice of advancing Black ideas about living in the world.” These initial pages broadcast the book’s intended purpose as a consciousness raising tool that speaks on multiple registers to demonstrate the core theoretical contribution of the book: “Black specificity.” This idea, which Okello describes as a corrective to established approaches to higher education and identity development, engages Sylvia Wynter’s theory of humanism to critique holistic development theory as insufficient for understanding the experiences and needs of Black students and people. Okello structures this interventions by first asserting that “study with and about Black existence must intentionally take up Blackness as a set and seat of political relations [ . . . comprised of . . .] histories of violence and exclusion, love, possibility, and traditions toward the principal question: what does it mean to be human.” He concludes Part One by articulating a reformulation of student development theory that begins with “Black specificity,” which he argues “educators and researchers might [adopt to reorient] themselves to the matter, grammar, and vocabularies of Black living in [and beyond] higher education.”

Where Part One proffers “Black specificity” as a window into understanding the life and living that he argues is rendered illegible in both higher education and larger society, Part Two introduces “inventiveness”—a socio-historical and embodied way of knowing that uses “Black Specificity” to challenge predominant theories of student/early adult development like “self-authorship.” The resulting four chapters detail the inextricable connection between identity formation, history, and the often constrained choices Black people are faced with as they navigate what it means to be Black in the US. The “inventiveness” that sustains Black identity formation, he goes on to argue, eludes the knowledge systems and decision making schema educational practitioners are predisposed to recognize and obscures the experiential reality and associated vulnerabilities of Black populations. Chapter Four, thus, engages in a critical analysis of forty Black men’s sexual assault at the University of Michigan to proffer a damning example of US higher education’s predisposition towards such obfuscations. The categorical denial of Black person-hood demonstrated here unsettles college discourses around sexual assault by destabilizing uncritical, racialized, notions of gender and patriarchal domination. Instead of positioning “Black Males as originators and benefactors of sexual domination,” examining this issue through the lens of “Black specificity” confronts readers with the routinized erasure of Black male vulnerability and sexual victimization in on-campus discourses about safety. This stands as a powerful demonstration of “Black specificity’s” utility for understanding the nuances of Black life amongst and beyond experiences of domination.

Okello closes Part Two by proffering a third guiding concept: the “Black intimate.” Described as “A conceptual frame for reading Black interior practices in and against anti-Black logics.” He further defines the “Black intimate” as a space in which Black students (and people more broadly) are able to live in and expand “a world of affect  [ . . . ] that has regard for and makes room for Black (feeling) beings, where emotions are, themselves, a form of worldmaking.” This concept arises in response to the habitual dismissals of Black relationality and interiority often reified by educational and developmental sciences—an erasure Okello attributes to the realities of “living in the Wake” (Christina Sharpe, In The Wake, 2016) of the transatlantic slave trade. Through engagements with James Baldwin”s letter to his nephew, the “Black essay” is then upheld as a method by which “Black intimating” has been and can be accomplished.

Having set the tone in Part One and demonstrated the stakes in Section Two, the final sixty pages comprising Section Three put “Black specificity,” “inventiveness,” and “Black intimating” to work. Turning briefly away from the problems of the higher educational sphere, Okello examines a wider history of Black being and mobilizes his three core concepts to articulate a condition of possibility for educational policy and practice. The seeds of change, he argues, may be found in already existing knowledge making and educational practices that are and have been pursued “on [Black people’s] own terms beyond the scope of [state and nationally supported] accommodations.” A historical analysis of policy-based “inventiveness” is demonstrated through discussion of the Freedman Bureau’s pushes for education and self-definition following the conclusion of the American Civil War. This is accompanied by a critical policy analysis of the Freedom School movement of the 1960’s and 1970’s. Here, Okello highlights their dedication to instituting a “break from the breathtaking paralysis of policy and practice that legitimated,” and continues to legitimate, anti-Blackness by “noticing one’s participation in and commitment to the reproduction of [an anti-Black] system as natural and ordinary.” By learning from these movements, Okello argues, readers can institute epistemic breaks at the intellectual level and begin internalizing the foundations of a “Black policy praxis” committed to “rejecting Western humanist logics [ . . . in favor of . . .] envisioning otherwise futures and [ways of being human].” While Okello doesn’t tell readers what that praxis must look like for each individual, he asserts clearly that embracing “Black specificity” in this practice “is an act of love that sets the conditions for Black Futures.”

From methodological interventions to theoretical and practical applications, On Blackness, Liveliness, and What it Means to Be Human is an endlessly engaging call to embrace a speculative reflexivity that “informed by blackened consciousness [. . .] would rupture the structural silences produced and, facilitated by [anti-Blackness].” This is most clearly demonstrated by neither Okello’s radical trans-disciplinarity nor his extensive citational practice, but by his decision to inaugurate each chapter of the book with art by Mikael Owunna (a Black visual artist), and conclude each chapter with a letter to his own son. Such reflexive practices offer readers a window into some of the fugitive resistance and capacious refusals that epitomize “Black specificity.” These practices, and the wealth of scholarly engagements throughout the book, make Okello’s invitation to readers blisteringly clear: use this book to challenge yourself, the university, and Western epistemic reality. Use this book to discover your own transformative praxis. With threats to higher education mounting and the onto-epistemic violences of anti-Blackness spreading to target everyone, such an invitation could not offer a more timely path forward.