Navigating Black Racial Identities: Literacy Insights From an Immigrant Family

• In Event: Clarifying the Role of Race in the Literacies and Englishes of Black Immigrant Youth

Abstract

Black immigrant families offer a unique perspective on race and racism in America. This research will fill the gap how Black immigrant parents serve as agents of socialization as their children come to understand the way race functions in American society. In this presentation, I describe a critical family literacy book club developed for parents, students, and educators to explore the intersections of race, racism and police brutality. According to Johnson, Jackson, Stovall, and Baszile (2017), “Black youth’s physical deaths are preceded as predictions of themselves as thugs, criminals, uneducable, and subhuman” (p. 61). As they read the word and the world (Freire, 1970), young Black children transact with texts where they encounter symbols of blackness as evil and dangerous and symbols of whiteness as pure and safe. The purpose of this study is to theorize how a Black immigrant family produces counternarratives in a critical family book club.

The study relies on the tenets of CRT (Bell, 1992; Delgado & Stefanic, 2002) and the pedagogical stance of Afrocentricsm to explore and understand the experiences and literacy insights of a Black immigrant family. Solorzano’s (1998) five tenets of CRT as applied to this study included: (a) centering the analytical focus on race, racism, and the intersections of multiple forms of oppression; (b) challenging dominant ideologies of colorblindness; (c) recognizing the significance of experiential knowledge of Communities of Color; (d) utilizing interdisciplinary perspectives beyond the field of education; and (e) holding an overall commitment to racial and social justice. Afrocentrism restores the truth to African American learners about their history and centers the worldview of African principles as a shared value system.

The study took place during the 2018-2019 school year with a fifth-grade child and her family who participated in a family literacy book club with a focus on Yandi and her family’s participation in the book club. Findings demonstrate that participating families rarely spoke about their African ancestry. However, Yandi’s family counternarratives presented a wealth of knowledge. For example, when a few of the mothers suggested that they had not talked about their African ancestry, Etienne, Yandi’s mother, immediately emerged with a response as to why children should know about the beauty of the continent and their ancestry. As Ms. Etienne spoke, her daughter Yandi, chimed into the conversation and expressed her confidence in her skin color. This conversation about loving oneself led the classroom teacher to promote social justice-oriented conversations around colorism in hopes to that meaningful learning could lead to critical and political consciousness.

This paper contributes to the growing literature on how to use immigrant families’’ cultural knowledge and wealth in classrooms and to offer a counterspace for students and families by demonstrating how #BlackLivesMatter truly matters in classrooms. As Baines, Tisdale, and Long (2018) noted, children should not have to rely on spaces outside of school to develop a sense of self-worth and to learn about Black culture, excellence, genius, and worth, but rather they should learn about it in every classroom.

Author

• Eliza G. Braden, University of South Carolina - Columbia