Critical Race History: Exploring the Importance of Historically Situated Counternarratives of Blacks in Education

• In Event: 63.062 - Students in Schools: Issues of Race, Ethnicity, and Class

Abstract

Multiple narratives have been normalized into common beliefs about communities, valid forms of knowledge, and acceptable ways of being. Each of these narratives dictates a sense of reality in which white experiences are privileged as superior and common to all, one overarching “common” narrative. Yet, accompanying circumstances are not necessitated, but constructed, and reconstructed, until their origins cannot be determined. It is inductively inferred that they always have been and, therefore, will always be as such.
My work considers Louisiana’s affluent and learned Free People of Color prior to the Civil War as one counter-narrative that contradicts the notion of historically deficient education for communities of Color. These historical vestiges open up an expanded realm for examining Black education.

Author

• Alisha Johnson, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign