Black Youth Textual Sanctuaries as Means to Refusing Suffering in America's Schools

• In Event: The Literate Lives of Youth of Color: Examining Race, Home, and Displacement

Abstract

Anti-blackness—framing Black flesh as disposable, broken, and not fully human (Dumas, 2016; Walcott, 2014)—renders young Black boys and girls as disposable in the public imaginary, which simultaneously frames how schools are organized for the education of Black children. Therefore, teachers and teacher educators must recognize the institutionalized, symbolically violent subjugation of these children in American schooling (Ladson-Billings, 2006; Morris, 2016; Sojoyner, 2016). I note that inattention to urban schools as sites of violence and the proliferation of anti-blackness directly contributes to the silencing and marginalization of Black students in schools (complicated by silencing and marginalization in society), which causes them to seek out places of refuge that restore their souls damaged by this suffering. While typical conceptions of refuge are understood as physical locations, in this paper the author examines what he coined as Textual Sanctuarties—critical literacy examinations of the self against current and historical narratives that are composed within and in response to oppressive environments/moments that birth hope, healing, and (re)imagined futures internally; either as an individual or a collective. So, despite mainstream beliefs about schooling being a positive endeavor for all students, “for many black children and families in the United States, Britain and elsewhere, schooling is a site of suffering” that results in gross silencing (Dumas, 2014, p. 2). Kirkland (2013, p. 9) explained, “The study of literacy quite literally means to search past silences, to listen to the behaviors of words as they perform meaning in people’s lives.” Textual Sanctuaries then, are a direct embodiment of searching past silence. Moreover they are refusals to silence. Both the content and context of antiblackness that frames how schools are organized reveal, “society is designed for Black youth not to be heard (Kirkland, 2013, p. 21).

Data for this paper emerged from a critical race ethnographic, qualitative study that examined the ways the critical literacy practices of Black youth unearth anti-blackness at a comprehensive urban high school. The theory of Double Consciousness (Du Bois & Edwards, 2008), the notion of Nobody (Hill, 2016), and Critical Pedagogy (Freire & Macedo, 1997; McLaren, 2015) guided the framing of this study. Primary data sources included critical literacy artifacts collected during After-School research sessions, (educational) life history interviews, and participant and non-participant observations at the research site and neighborhoods of participants. This data allows Black youth, teachers of Black youth, and society to recognize the specific ways this population experiences anti-blackness in the form of symbolic violence. To really hear and understand the voices of Black youth, “we have to tune into the actual mediums and contexts that they appropriate for expression” (Mahiri, 1997, p. 56). The author found that Textual Sanctuaries of Black youth, essentially compositions of self that challenge and resist dominant power structures and simultaneously provide places/spaces of protection and refuge within, have the potential to serve as primary tools for refusing anti-black symbolic violence that breeds Black suffering in our nation's schools.

Author

• Justin Avery Coles, Fordham Graduate School of Education