"Your Brain Is in Chains Today": Urban Youth, Critical Race Theory, and (Micro)Poems as Counterstory Social Critiques

• In Event: Literacies of Liberation Through Writing, Poetry, and Counterstories

Abstract

This paper presentation shares findings of an innovative approach to micropoetry where city youth use their telephone number area codes as a poetic structure for articulating the localized challenges faced by young people, while also redressing these challenges with potential solutions. We used the five tenets of Critical Race Theory as lenses through which to examine student-created poems as counter-stories to articulate the ways race and other forms of discrimination are part of their lived experiences as urban youth of color. Our findings underscore the important role CRT, in concert with creative literacy practices, has in providing racialized urban youth a framework for expressing the lived social realities, both challenges and solutions, city adolescents faced.

Authors

• Jevon D. Hunter, SUNY Buffalo State

• Gliset Colon, Buffalo State College - SUNY