Absent Narratives of the Black Family as a Classroom

• In Event: Dancing in the Rain and Weathering the Storm: Stories of Black Family Agency and Resistance

Abstract

How they are told; who tells them; when they are told; and how many stories are told are dependent on power. Power is not just to tell the story of another person but to make it the definitive story of that person. - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

In the media, popular literature and in educational research, there are “racialized narratives” characterizing the ways in which Black parents interact with schools. Nasir and Shah (2011) refer to these single stories as “racialized narratives,” which the authors break down as follows:

“we use the term ‘narratives’ to refer to these shared storylines rather than ‘stereotypes’ for two reasons. The first is to emphasize the social aspect of these forms, as opposed to conceptualizations that treat them as purely in-the-head phenomena. The second reason is that calling them ‘narratives’ implies the role of storytelling in their propagation, which takes place through the media and through social interaction. In other words, as cultural forms, the narratives are not static – they are continually taken up, reproduced, and resisted in multiple ways in daily life (p. 27).

Many scholars have argued that these racialized narratives of Black parents’ interactions with schools are harmful for at least three reasons. First, as has been well-documented, these racialized narratives are rooted in a history, in the United States, of antiblackness (Du Bois, 1935; Gilroy, 1993; Morgan, 2004). Second is the evidence of the impact of racialized narratives of Black parents on parent-teacher interactions (McCarthy Foubert, 2019). Finally, these racialized narratives impact Black students’ overall experiences in classrooms and in schools (Crozier, 1996; Nasir & Hand, 2011). What is needed is more inquiry and a more complex understanding of Black parents’ relationship to their children’s education because as Adichie (2009) argues, stories have power.

Considering this, in an attempt to confront and disrupt the single story about Black parents, this paper has three aims: First, this paper briefly interrogates the roots of these racialized narratives and situates these narratives in a historically antiblack context. Second, and most importantly, this paper presents a collection of absent narratives that places a more nuanced framing of Black parents and their experience of, and relationship to, their children’s educational experiences. The absent narratives presented in this paper are from archival data and individual qualitative interviews with a cross-country sample of 15 Black parents. This collection of absent narratives is divided into three parts: 1) stories of Black parents’ and education before and during slavery; 2) stories of Black parents and education after the Civil War and before desegregation; and 3) stories of Black parents and education after desegregation. Finally, this paper includes a discussion on the benefits of a more nuanced framing of Black parents and their relationship to education for both schools and parents. As I argue throughout this paper, Black parents are not absent; we, as scholars, have simply refused to acknowledge their presence.

Author

• Tunette Powell, University of California - Los Angeles