The Search for Darker Planets: Multiethnic Black Youth's Literacies as Fugitive Critical Race Praxis

• In Event: Exploring the Interplay of Identity, Learning, and Literacy

Abstract

Gathered from a larger BlackCrit mini-ethnography, which examined L.I.T. (Literacy Inspiring Transformation) City, a 4-week Black-centric summer literacy program for high-school students, this paper details the utility of Black literacies in (re)constructing U.S. schooling to counter and lessen the impacts of antiblackness—demonstrating a clear model of literacy as critical race and social justice praxis. Findings reveal how Black literacies, as informed by the vastness of Black youth identities, can serve as a liberatory intervention to disrupt U.S. schooling curriculum, pedagogy, and policy that enact antiblackness in teaching and learning experiences. The socio-structural regime of antiblackness directly informs the education of Black children in U.S. schooling (Author, 2019, 2020; Baker-Bell, 2020; Colleague & Author, 2020; Dumas, 2014; Warren, 2017). Through the logics of antiblackness, Blackness (a social positioning) is imagined as in opposition to all things “pure, human(e), and white” (Dumas & ross, 2016, p. 417).
In schools, this operationalizes in the ways schools are routinely positioned as positive interventions into the lives of Black youth. As a result of such anti-Black racial frames, Blackness and Black children are often conceptualized as inherently outside the realms of and counter to schooling; Black children are framed through narratives of damage. This view of Blackness leaves urban schools to operate under the logics of determining how school can intervene into the lives of Black urban youth. I center the question: How can the lived experiences of Black youth intervene into the project of urban schooling? While Black youth are often positioned in school as uneducable and as nonwritiers (Haddix, 2009), I operate with the assumption that Black youth live deeply literate lives, driven by their desires to disengage and counter anti-Black structures.
Pulling from the larger study, here, data specifically includes multimodal literacy artifacts produced within L.I.T. City and semi-structured interview data that explored questions related to student conceptions of their Blackness (at the intersection of other identity markers) in relation to urban schools and society. Guided by my theoretical interlacing of BlackCrit, Critical Race English Education, and Living Black History, findings led me to conceptualize the methodological (and pedagogical) concept of Leaning into Blackness as critical race praxis. The lived experiences of Black youth are a crucial method for intervening into the structural regime of antiblackness in which urban schooling is framed through. I end this paper with a framework for Leaning into Blackness, which functions as both fugitive method/ology and pedagogy for urban education researchers and practitioners of Black youth.

Author

• Justin Avery Coles, UMass Amherst College of Education