"He Kicked Me Out": Generating Space for Writing Refusal Among Academically High-Achieving Black Male Secondary Students

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

Abstract

Black male high school students in urban contexts often experience schools as “spirit murdering” (Love, 2015) and dehumanizing spaces, even if they are academically high-achieving students. Dehumanizing classrooms make it difficult for students to maximize the full range of their humanity practically (limited access to resources and opportunities), intellectually or spiritually. One way that Black male students disrupt dehumanizing classroom spaces and sustain their humanity is by engaging in “refusal.” Refusal, according to Tuck & Yang (2014), is a dynamic and generative stance for communities to (a) problematize settler colonial knowledge and (b) utilize their critical understandings of settler colonialism and its regimes of representation to refuse to be a spectacle. In other words, refusal is not just a “no” to participate in the reproduction of “damaged-centered narratives of pain” (Tuck & Yang, 2014). Rather, it is a conscious decision for the actor (i.e. academically high-achieving Black male students) to contain and re-position their power and agency in classroom spaces to create a new truth. This presentation centers the writing refusal practices of Black male students in an urban academic setting. Refusals are needed, according to Tuck & Yang (2014), to “shift the gaze” (p. 241), serve as a “critical intervention into research” (p. 242), and create opportunities for new methods and theories.
Academically high-achieving Black male students are virtually absent from literacy research. Thus, it is important to identify and analyze how these students (who occupy an under-explored intersectional identity) navigate in-school academic literacy spaces, if we want to meet the needs of all Black male students. An explicit focus on the ways academically high-achieving Black male students perform refusal through writing offers this much-needed insight.
In this presentation, the presenter will analyze data from a larger 11-month ethnographic multiple case-study (Yin, 2014) about the literacy practices of academically high-achieving Black male high school students engaged in writing refusal practices in an academic setting. In doing so, the presenter offers theoretical and pedagogical insights of different understandings what “truths” exist classrooms and whose truths matter in re-imagining teaching and learning, particularly for marginalized youth in urban classrooms. These inconsistencies illuminate why and how Black male youth with developing critical consciousness performed “refusal” (Tuck & Yang, 2014) in dehumanizing classroom spaces that did not honor their humanity or intellectual development.

Author

• Sakeena Everett, University of Georgia - Athens