To Be Young, Gifted, and #000000: Mapping Digital Blackness in the Identities, Literacies, Protests, and Learnings of Young Black Peoples Today

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

Abstract

In 2018, a young woman in one of my classes, Diamond, crested a website called “We'll Fight For Us--- Young. #000000. Feminist.” Instead of writing out the words, black, she uses the html color code: #000000. She is intentionally referencing the binary code, the system of binary digits 0 and 1 that represent a letter, digit, or other character in computers and other electronic devices. She is also simultaneously referencing social media with the hashtag sign. She marks Black feminist digital ethos with her invention of the terminology of “Young. #000000. Feminist.” in order to remind us that the binary of white/black that attempts to oppress her is reinvented in the logic of digital spaces. In so doing she captures what Charles Linscott (2017) argues is a “recursive dynamic” between resistance and oppression in Black life: digital technologies continually offer the “promise of global reach and rapid dissemination” that is always simultaneously embedded “within structural anti-blackness” (p. 107). As we see with Diamond, she neither discards the opportunities afforded by digital spaces nor wholly celebrates them and instead circulates her own critical, Black digital-cultural motifs.
As cultural historian, Hortense Spillers (2006) argues, Black culture is critical culture, further contending that Black culture represents a narrative of antagonism that is inscribed in its very memory (Spillers, 2007). Spillers’s contextualization of the criticality of Black culture demands a theoretical disposition in shaping an alternative Black cultural imaginary for digital teaching. Using technocultural discourse analysis (Brock et al, 2010) from a researcher-practitioner perspective (Cochran-Smith and Lytle, 2009), this presentation attempts to uncover new possibilities for (digital) pedagogies rooted in the criticality of Black students’ digital literacies and activists today.
In the 21st century, the intersection of digital identities, Black culture, activism, and higher education is a crucial space to think about the relationships between race, gender, sexuality, schooling, and social justice (Bailey, 2015). Inspired by young people’s digital productions, this presentation/research study treats Black undergraduate students’ digital projects as “ipso facto cultural phenomena” (Liu, 2012) related to their deep learning and agency and asks: how does racially marginalized students’ technocultural capital restructure the political purposes, structure, and flow of 21st learning (Nakumura and White, 2011)?
As Gallon (2014) argues, Black digital projects challenge the very core of a humanities/liberal arts education by insistently reminding us that some groups have been categorically excluded from the very rubric of humanity and have, in turn, offered alternative constructions and possibilities to its framing (Everett, 2002; McPherson, 2012). With Black college students’ own digital productions as a critical lens, this presentation shows how different ways of knowing constantly contest the ways that educational space and educational technologies are (re)produced in dominant culture and empire (McKittrick, 2006).

Author

• Carmen Kynard,, Texas Christian University