“You have to know that you know that you know”: Cognitive Reasoning and the Potentialities of Embodied Knowing

To be racialized as a Black person in a US context provokes a series of questions that necessarily indict history, human experience, and anti-Black reverberations that pathologically script them as unlearned and uneducable (Dumas, 2014). Against this backdrop, Black students are engaged in meaning-making. More research is needed to explicate how Black students know as they grapple with anti-Black realities and the dissonance those realities incur. Thus, we examine the ways cognitive reasoning has functioned to understate the complexity of knowing and being for Black people by privileging cognitive reasoning over the body as a meaning-making entity. Moreover, we explicate the potential of embodied knowing as a critical alternative to the emphasis on cognitive reasoning in student development theorizing by keying into one Black woman’s experience through critical race testimony (Baszile, 2008).