During Sunday’s In Class with Carr episode, Dr. Greg Carr and Karen Hunter use the 2026 Commencement Season as an entry point for thinking through time, time’s relationship to transitional rituals, Africana Governance and our relation to each other.
Centralizing Sankofa as a Way of Knowing, we focus on how collective and individual dignity and agency are enhanced through participative ritual actions of cultural meaning-making in service of collective reflection. This protracted connection and formation of memory is especially vital in a moment of intensified power contestation, where social structures heighten contestation of local and global power arrangements and weaponize identity and memory against groups and categories that pose threats to the prevailing power structures.
During this past meeting with the President of the United States and major global business leaders, the President of China invoked a metaphor by the Greek historian Thucydides, “the Thucydides Trap,” to signify a new phase in the world’s power configuration. From BRICS foreign ministers’ meetings in India, to commencement speeches to worried graduating students in Black and other schools, to observing newly emerging power configurations and intentions designed to disrupt the plans of White nationalist legislators who want to cling to power in the neo-Confederate U.S. South, the imperative of a new phase of power is apparent.
How and will we meet it?
