Urban Black Youth's Critical Collective Compositions as Method for Resisting Antiblack Textual Suppression

• In Event: 35.075 - Writing Our Truths: Culturally Sustaining Writing as Disruptive Intervention in a Post-Truth Era

Abstract

The suppression of Black literacies (the ways Black people engage in reading, writing, speaking and listening) has always been central to antiblackness—the human races necessity for violence against Black people (Wilderson III, 2017)—in the United States. Historically, anti-Black theories of pseudoscience (Davis, 2003; Selden, 1999) deemed Blacks as naturally unfit for literacy (Collins and Blot, 2003). This historic suppressing and discrediting of Black engagements with literacy directly informs how Black youth textualities are currently dis/engaged by the urban school and the nation (see Fortin, 2018). 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). As a Black Male Urban English Teacher Educator, I am concerned with the ways urban schooling, particularly English teachers are implicated in the enduring suppression of Black literacies, by nature of existing in a society where antiblackness is endemic (Dumas & ross, 2016). Moreover, I am interested in the ways Black youth engage in literacy practices that reject silences brought on by anti-Black structures and sign systems that appear both in society and the urban school.
In this paper, I examine how high-school age Black girls and boys embarked on a collective journey to facilitate their resistance to anti-Black textual suppression through their collective composition of critical cultural cyphers (Williams, 2007) in response to this heightened era of Black terror, #BlackLivesMatter. Particularly, I focus on the liberatory power embedded within Black youth’s writing, while explicating how these collective compositions of resistance can directly inform the transformation of urban English classrooms in a post-truth era. In our current socio-political climate where truths that impact the material and psychic lives of Black youth are warped and distorted, educators must be attuned to the realities of Black youth lived experiences as communicated through their voices.
Data for this paper emerged from a larger literacy-driven phenomenological study, conducted during two summers (2014 and 2015) at a large university in the Mid-Western United States, where I examined the critical literacy practices of Black youth as pathways to social justice in a summer writing course. BlackCrit (Dumas & ross, 2016), Critical Race English Education (Johnson, Jackson, Stovall, and Baszile, 2017), and Critical Hip Hop Pedagogy (Akom, 2009) guided the framing for this paper. Data sources used specifically for this paper include the written scripts and video-recordings of two critical cultural cyphers that students wrote and then performed as a part of the writing course.
Findings revealed that the Black youth in this study possess literacies that are inherently critical of and driven by their desires to survive and live joyously in spite of existing in a context shrouded in antiblackness. Despite historic and contemporary efforts to locate Black youth outside of literacy, the youth demonstrated that when provided the space to create literacy counterpublics (Hill, 2011), guided by their lived truths in a context of antiblackness, notions of Black youth as “naturally unfit for literacy” become disrupted and rendered as non-truths.

Author

• Justin Avery Coles, Fordham Graduate School of Education