Beyond Silence: Disrupting Antiblackness Through BlackCrit Ethnography and Black Youth Voice

• In Event: Talking Back: The Intersection of Multilingualism and Racism Through a Critical Ethnographic Lens

Abstract

Antiblackness operationalizes across time and space to cause disproportionate hurt and harm to Black youth, from Emmett Till in 1955, Latasha Harlins in 1991 to Trayvon Martin in 2012 (Author 3, 2018). Herein lies a point of major importance for centering critiques of antiblackness when conducting research with Black children in the U.S.: Antiblackness is not a metaphorical phenomenon that is meant to merely refer to unfair treatment against Black people, but rather a literal racial regime that “dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth” (Coates, 2015, p. 10). In conjunction with the physical violence that antiblackness enacts against Black children, there also exists a more diffuse and symbolic violence (Bourdieu, 2001), which is particularly helpful here as I consider the presence of antiblackness, which does not always result in physical death, in the social and educational experiences of Black youth. Pedagogic actions in schools serve as one of the main extensions of symbolic violence. Schools and the teachers housed there impose meaning on students, rarely stopping to consider how various student populations may make sense of the knowledge being imposed upon them differently. In some cases, the difference of meanings constructed due to the varying epistemologies of students that may not directly align with the schools can be so drastic that harm is done to students who cannot understand or connect with the meaning imposed by the cultural arbitrary (Author 3, 2016).
When considering physical and symbolic forms of antiblackness, it can be deduced that those working with Black youth in research and/or in practice have a responsibility to not simply acknowledge antiblackness, but to provide the time and environs necessary for counterstructures to antiblackness to be constructed and sustained. What might it mean for researchers and educators of Black youth to not only be concerned with what happens with Black youth in schools and classrooms, but to also be attentive to how the U.S.’s social context directly organizes the ways Black youth are dis/engaged and mis/educated in their school settings? In other words, how do we commit ourselves to become researchers of both school and society, always seeing the two as inextricably linked and bi-directional? In this study, I respond to these questions by sharing my use of a Black Critical Theory (BlackCrit) (Dumas & ross, 2016) guided critical race ethnography with nine Black urban high school youth as one potential way forward. My goal in sharing my enactments of BlackCrit ethnography is to reveal how it provides the necessary theoretical and practical methodological space/s to fully immerse myself in the lifeworlds of youth in ways that center their Black-specific languages and literacies. It is my assertion that ethnographies of Black specificity allow Black youths individual and collective voices to inform how researchers and educators can reorient the ways we think about race and urban schooling.

Author

• Justin Avery Coles, UMass Amherst College of Education