Black Textualities as a Tool for Literacy Educators' Explorations of Blackness and Antiblackness

• In Event: Different Approaches to a Shared Dilemma: Challenging Racism Through Anti-Oppressive Literacy Education

Abstract

Purpose:
This youth-centered research demonstrates the role antiblackness plays in the lives of Black youth as a way to provide a different layer into the ways literacy educators of Black youth become attuned to their racial realities. A significant amount of race and literacy research center the ways educators can learn to understand race through text or their own racial explorations of self. However, little to no research in educator preparation centers Black students (and other students of color) as texts themselves who can serve as powerful guides to the ways literacy educators come to know and understand race in meaningful ways that transform their pedagogical practices and overall dispositions of empathy.

Perspectives
American schooling is deeply implicated in antiblackness and the limiting of Black futures (Author, 2017; Dumas, 2014; Sojoyner, 2016). The tendency for educators to view schooling as free of antiblackness (read free of violence against Black youth) undermines changes in schooling curriculum, climate, and policy that work toward equity for Black children. Equity cannot be achieved if we are ignoring the underlying perpetrator of inequity against Black children, antiblackness. I argue that the textualities of Black youth (Cherry-McDaniel, 2017) can serves as vehicles to disrupt the way antiblackness gets rendered invisible in schooling—an invisibility which causes Black youth to misrecognize it. Specifically, in this paper I focus on Black youth deeply theorizing antiblackness in their urban school and society as they use those documentations to author themselves into a future where antiblackness is continuously subverted and refused.

Method
The data for this paper comes from a larger critical race ethnography (Duncan, 2005) conducted with 9 Black boys and girls at an urban high school, which is rooted within the key concepts of CRT, but narrowed in on the specificity of Blackness as outlined by the framing of BlackCrit (Dumas & Ross, 2016). I particularly adhered to the BlackCrit framings that conceptualize (1) Antiblackness as endemic and (2) the necessity to create space for Black liberatory fantasy. At the core of this ethnography was the question: what do the critical language and literacy practices of Black youth reveal about antiblackness and the im/possibility of liberatory Black futures? Specific data methods utilized in this paper include audio-recorded after school sessions, dialogic journaling, literacy artifacts, and semi-structured interviews.

Results and Scholarly Significance
The results suggest that BlackCrit can be an effective theoretical and practical tool for language and literacy educators and researchers to better understand the necessity of explicitly using anti-black racism as a lens in urban schooling, as informed by the literacies of Black youth. This research provides a prime example of the ways youth-centered scholarship can be a prime tool in literacy educator preparation, while explicating the ways Black youth operate as textual sites necessary for all educators to read.

Author

• Justin Avery Coles, UMass Amherst College of Education