A Black Mother's Counterstory to the Brown-White Binary in Discussing Dual Language Gentrification

• In Event: Gentrification 2.0 in Dual-Language Bilingual Education: New Ways of Peeling the Layers From Districts to Schools

Abstract

Purpose
Students of color in dual language (DL) programs are not only underserved but positioned as resources for the benefit of White students. There is a rich body of research documenting, primarily, how Latinx students are marginalized in DL programs for the gain of White students, referenced as the Brown-White binary, in which race relations are over-simplified between White and Hispanic racial groups to the exclusion of other racial categories.
Perspective and Method
In this Critical Race Theory counterstory research, we consider how racialized inequality is perceived and lived from one Black mother of color in one Southeastern U.S. DL program in a Title I elementary school. Through two years of co-participative storying with this highly engaged African American DL parent/co-author, we demonstrate a case of how Black families may also be marginalized in U.S. DL programs. We center an African American Parent-Teacher Association (PTA) president’s interview data as a focal point to draw into question how all students of color, especially English learners, may be both mis-positioned and ignored by White parents, teachers, and administrators in DL programming. Indeed, the White actors often acted sneakily toward achieving their own community’s objectives at the exclusion of families of color.
Findings
Salient themes from interview transcripts were categorized in three areas after multiple rounds of coding and clarifying data through member checking (Marshall & Gerstl-Pepin, 2005), including: (1) literal and metaphoric gentrification; (2) racial battle fatigue; and, (3) resistance, including self-care as part of resistance. First, literal neighborhood gentrification, as well as appropriating access to the selective DL program as White “property” (Harris, 1993) was the most repeated and salient theme throughout data analysis. DL as White property was the foundation from which the other two findings emerged. Second, Author 1 experienced racial battle fatigue from daily lived microaggressions, erasures, and other indignities faced even while being PTA president. Lastly, Author 1 expressed resistance in the form of “talking back” and acknowledging her need for self-care for herself and other parents of color who were confronting racial battle fatigue from the White parents in the DLI program.

Scholarly Significance
We provide recommendations for schools and districts to actively promote equity through DL, instead of acquiescing to the White accrual of property. To transgress Whiteness as property and as an oppressive force in education and to work toward equity, we need to work toward naming and reshuffling what property is. This includes naming what property is not. Specifically, language should not be construed as property. In this visioning of the public good, we then can re-conceptualize property by considering how racialization construes ownership through economic models built on slavery and White supremacy. Unhooking from such models, we can reconceptualize land and ownership and how these figure into issues of urban and DL gentrification. By acknowledging the complex, intersectional legacies of race, language, and schooling, we advocate for a collective reimagining that centers multilingual learners of color, their families, and their communities at the heart of language policy in education.

Authors

• Andrea Blanton

• G. Sue Kasun, Georgia State University

• James Arthur Gambrell, Kennesaw State University

• Zurisay Espinosa, Georgia State University