Searching for Somewhere: Fugitive Black Youth Literacies as Destabilizers to Antiblackness

• In Event: 51.032 - Finding Freedom and Fugitivity in Literacies: Multimodal Narratives as Lived Resistance in Educational Spaces

Abstract

Historically, Black engagements with literacy have worked to destabilize and subvert anti-Black societal structures (Anderson, 1988; Edwards, McMillon, & Turner, 2015; Fisher, 2008; Williams, 2009). Particularly during U.S. chattel slavery, despite the punishment that came from reading or writing, Blacks tenaciously engaged in literacy because text revealed a world beyond bondage (Williams, 2009). Given this history, it can be deduced that Black literacies are inextricably linked to Black fugitivity or resisting hegemony through refusal and disengagement (Sojoyner, 2017). While Black youth are often positioned in school as uneducable and as nonwriters (Haddix, 2009), I operate with the assumption that Black youth live deeply literate lives, driven by their desires to disengage anti-Black structures. Moreover, the literacies of Black youth can serve as blueprints for the ways we create more equitable schoolings spaces for Black youth since Black literacies run counter to Black suffering (Johnson et al., 2017). In this paper, I examine how Black high school youth’s critical engagements with literacy operate as embodiments of refusing antiblackness in society and their urban school.
This paper comes out of a BlackCrit (Dumas & ross, 2016) ethnography, where I co-created a Black-centric after-school space with nine students, rooted in exploring what their critical literacies reveal about the ways they understand and resist antiblackness. Data for this paper includes literacy artifacts, dialogic journaling, interviews, and observations of our co-created after-school space. Using the framing of “literacy is who I am…with literacy, my word’s my weapon” (Kinloch 2010, p. 11), the data I collected is rooted in the idea that literacy is deeply embedded within the lives of Black youth and that when cultivated and engaged, can serve as powerful destabilizers to antiblackness both in society and the urban school. As Meiners (2007) explained “reading and writing critically are essential tools for survival in a current educational system in which students of color are disproportionately in special education, suspended, and expelled, which all contribute to a higher likelihood of incarceration” (as cited in Winn & Behizadeh, 2011, p. 149). Considering this, having Black youth document their experiences with antiblackness is not simply about literacy, but this work is about how they embody literacies based in fugitivity that propel them to create joyous existences subversive to antiblackness. In a post-truth era, educators of Black youth must be invested in understanding how antiblackness perpetuates and sustains the suppression of truth. Schooling often operates as if antiblackness is not a reality, robbing Black youth of the truth, which causes them to interpret the overabundance of anti-Black assaults they experience as their responsibility. Findings led me to conceptualize our collective Black space as textual sanctuary, which refers to the actual physical and ideological space that I co-created with these youth, that would function to facilitate their critical engagements with literacy, such that they could fully realize themselves as textual sites necessary to author the futures they want for themselves, and not the futures projected onto their bodies.

Author

• Justin Avery Coles, Fordham Graduate School of Education