Black Youth as Border-Crossers and Place-Makers: Navigating Education Within Metro Detroit Utilizing Perceptions of Place and Racial Story Lines

• In Event: Imagined and Realized Places: Spatializing Youth Political and Racial Identity Development

Abstract

Detroit is a majority Black city where schools have served vital functions in Black communities (Boyd, 2017). Educational movements for desegregation and local control in schools and community-based organizations reflects a living legacy of Black communities’ strivings to make public education in Detroit and more broadly, Metro Detroit, accessible, democratic, and affirming for Black children (Baugh, 2010). Contemporarily, while Detroit is rich with beautiful Black life and history, it is also rife with neoliberal education projects that are part and parcel of struggles over space and place in the city (Pedroni, 2010). Moreover, for-profit charter schools, school closures, and inter-district transfer programs have destabilized neighborhood schools; creating a highly mobile student population in search of quality schools (Author, 2020; Wilson, 2015). Yet, Black youth continue to advocate and navigate these joys and tensions within Detroit and carve out space for their educational and sociopolitical lives.
While we uplift the agency and resilience of Black families and students, the literature sparsely addresses how perceptions of place, or the ways in which Black youth think about, feel about, and remember places, shapes racial (in)justice in education. In this paper, we center the understandings of Black youth in the region and focus on their daily navigations of contested urban and suburban dynamics. Black youth’s navigations, with the support of their families and/or caregivers, are coupled with histories of racial exclusion and violence in many places across the region that continue to shape education policy and practice, especially while in a global pandemic (Khalifa, Douglas, & Chambers, 2016; Holme, Finnigan, Diem, 2016; Mirel, 1999). Given these experiences, Black youth are positioned to critique educational inequities due to their navigations and border-crossing in pursuit of educational opportunity. Furthermore, Black youth’s educational struggles are intimately tied to current sociopolitical struggles such as maneuvering the COVID-19 terrain in schools, the Black Lives Matter resurgence, and nationwide calls for defunding school police.
Drawing from two qualitative studies, we interrogate Black youth’s perceptions of place and race via their border-crossing to better understand how this shapes their racial and political identities. The qualitative studies are interviews with Black youth as educational activists and students within Detroit, and Black youth who have navigated city-suburb divides to attend school in a demographically changing inner-ring suburb of the city. We position youth in our study as “agentic border-crossers” as they negotiate the racial storylines, or stereotypes, of Detroit that influence Black youth’s racial and learner identities (Wilson, Ek, & Douglas, 2013, p.5; Nasir, Snyder, Shah, 2012). Our guiding questions include: 1) How does Black youth’s perception of place and racial storylines in Metro Detroit affect the ways in which they navigate their educational terrain? and 2) How do these perceptions inform their racial and political identity development as learners within Detroit? As scholars, educators, policymakers, and communities, Black youth are our best teachers. Their perspectives and analyses can inform the ways in which we advocate and construct the educational realities of Black youth within changing U.S. metropolitan landscapes.

Authors

• Naomi Mae W., The Spencer Foundation

• Dana Gabrielle Nickson, University of Washington - Seattle