Leaning Into Blackness: The Literacy Lives of Multiethnic Black Urban Youth as Fugitive Method/ology and Praxis

• In Event: Seeking Routes to Freedom: Fugitive Methodologies for Rethinking Community Research, Literacies, and Engagement

Abstract

Like racism in U.S. society, antiblackness, the legacy of slavery and the human races necessity for violence against Black people is an immutable fact. In such social context, Blackness (a social positioning) is imagined as in opposition to all things “pure, human(e), and white” (Dumas & ross, 2016, p. 417). This structural regime directly informs the education of Black children in urban schools. In particular, while much research has documented the ways urban schools create and perpetuate harm against Black children (Dumas, 2014; Sung, 2018; Warren, 2017; Wun, 2016), urban schools are routinely positioned as positive interventions into the lives of Black youth. As a result of such anti-Black racial frames (Feagin, 2010), Blackness and Black children are conceptualized as inherently outside the realms of and counter to schooling. This view of Blackness leaves urban schools to operate under the logics of determining how school can intervene into the lives of Black urban youth. I center the question: How can the lived experiences of Black youth intervene into the project of urban schooling? While Black youth are often positioned in school as uneducable and as nonwritiers (Haddix, 2009), I operate with the assumption that Black youth live deeply literate lives, driven by their desires to disengage and counter anti-Black structures. Black youth literacies are rooted in fugitivity. Thus, the literacies of Black youth can serve as a prime method/ology for the ways we create more equitable schoolings spaces for Black youth, particularly since Black literacies run counter to Black suffering (Johnson et al., 2017).
In this paper, I examine how Black (Caribbean Black, Black American, and African) high school youth’s lived experiences operate as counter structures to antiblackness that inform urban schooling’s ability to create environments that center Blackness as the prime pedagogue, rather than pulling away from Blackness. Data for this paper comes out of a larger BlackCrit (Dumas & ross, 2016) driven qualitative case study (Yin, 2018), which examined Black World, a 4-week Black-centric summer literacy program for high-school students in a large Northeastern urban center, designed to unearth how the literacy lives of Black urban youth reveal “pedagogies of possibility” that can work to restructure urban schooling in ways that counter and lessen the effects of antiblackness. Pulling from the larger study, here, data specifically includes multimodal literacy artifacts produced within Black World and semi-structured interview data that explored questions related to student conceptions of their Blackness (at the intersection of other identity markers) in relation to urban schools and society. Guided by my theoretical interlacing of BlackCrit, Critical Race English Education, and Living Black History, findings led me to conceptualize the methodological (and pedagogical) concept of Leaning into Blackness as critical race praxis. The lived experiences of Black youth are a crucial method for intervening into the structural regime of antiblackness in which urban schooling is framed through. I end this paper with a framework for Leaning into Blackness, which functions as both fugitive method/ology and pedagogy for urban education researchers and practitioners of Black youth.

Author

• Justin Avery Coles, UMass Amherst College of Education