Black Youth as Border Crossers: Navigating Education Within Metro Detroit Utilizing Perceptions of Place and Racial Story Lines

• In Event: Race and Place: Youth Political and Racial Identity in Context

Abstract

Detroit is a majority Black city where schools have served vital functions in Black communities (Boyd, 2017). Educational movements for desegregation and local control in schools and community-based organizations reflects a living legacy of Black communities’ strivings to make public education in Detroit and more broadly, Metro Detroit, accessible, democratic, and affirming for Black children (Baugh, 2010). Contemporarily, while Detroit is rich with beautiful Black life and history, it is also rife with neoliberal education projects that are part and parcel of struggles over space and place in the city (Pedroni, 2010). Moreover, for-profit charter schools, school closures, and inter-district transfer programs have destabilized neighborhood schools; creating a highly mobile student population in search of quality schools (Einhorn, 2016, April 11; Wilson, 2015).
While we uplift the agency and resilience of Black families and students, the literature sparsely addresses how perceptions of place, or the ways in which Black youth think about, feel about, and remember places, shapes racial injustice in education. In this paper, we center the understandings of Black youth in the region and focus on their daily navigations of contested and stratified urban and suburban dynamics. Black youth’s navigation, with the support of their families and/or caregivers, is coupled with histories of racial exclusion and violence in many places across the region that continue to shape education policy and practice (Khalifa, Douglas, & Chambers, 2015; Holme, Finnigan, Diem, 2016; Mirel, 1999). Given these lineages, Black youth are positioned to critique educational inequities due to their navigations and border-crossing in pursuit of educational opportunity. Furthermore, Black youth’s educational struggles are intimately tied to Black place-making in the face of formidable barriers and institutional violence.
Drawing from two qualitative studies, we interrogate Black youth’s perceptions of place and race via their border-crossing to better understand how this shapes their racial identities. The qualitative studies are comprised of interviews with Black youth as educational activists and students within Detroit, and Black youth who have navigated city-suburb divides to attend school in Lyndon, an inner-ring suburb of Detroit. We position youth in our study as “agentic border-crossers” as they negotiate the racial storylines, or stereotypes, of Detroit that influence Black youth’s racial and learner identities (Wilson, Ek, & Douglas, 2013, p.5; Nasir, Snyder, Shah, 2012). We highlight how they are making sense of contested education and community spaces and places that seek to narrow or silence their racial and cultural identities. Our guiding questions include: 1) How does Black youth’s perception of place and racial storylines in Metro Detroit affect the ways in which they navigate their educational terrain? And secondly, how do these perceptions inform their racial identity development as learners within Detroit? It is with these questions that we highlight Black youth voice. As scholars, educators, policymakers, and communities, Black youth are our best teachers. Their perspectives and analyses can inform the ways in which we advocate and construct the educational realities of Black youth within changing U.S. metropolitan landscapes

Authors

• Naomi Mae W., The Spencer Foundation

• Dana Gabrielle Nickson, University of Washington - Seattle