If Your Son Is Friends With Black Boys: Poetic Sampling for Critical Inquiry

• In Event: 34.064 - Soundscapes, Poetry, Mothering, and Marginalization: Arts-Based Educational Research Methodological Possibilities and Praxis

Abstract

Part of a larger parent-child autoethnography grounded in critical sociocultural theory and critical whiteness studies, this paper documents my journey from avoidance to deliberation as a white mother during the first four years of the Black Lives Matter movement. I use a technique I call Poetic Sampling which juxtaposes poetic transcription (Glesne, 1997) and excerpts from contemporary popular texts created by people of Color. I posit that Poetic Sampling both grounds and decenters my own white voice. Findings indicate that engagement with texts by Black authors is essential but insufficient; whites “must go beyond the texts” to develop authentic relationship with people of color which move them/us “outside our existing ways of knowing and understanding” (Thompson, 2003, p. 14).

Author

• Rhianna Kay Thomas, University of Missouri - Kansas City