"What Am I Without Being Black?" Black Urban Youth Literacies and Centering Blackness as Fugitive Method/ology

• In Event: Seeking Routes to Freedom: Fugitive Methodologies for Rethinking Community Research, Literacies, and Engagement

Abstract

Antiblackness, the legacy of slavery and the human races necessity for violence against Black people is an immutable fact. In such social context, Blackness (a social positioning) is imagined as in opposition to all things “pure, human(e), and white” (Dumas & ross, 2016, p. 417). This structural regime directly informs the education of Black children in urban schools. While research has documented the ways urban schools create and perpetuate harm against Black children (Dumas, 2014; Warren, 2017), urban schools are routinely positioned as positive interventions into the lives of Black youth. As a result of such anti-Black racial frames (Feagin, 2010), Blackness and Black children are conceptualized as inherently outside the realms of and counter to schooling. 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. In this paper, I center the following questions: (1) What do Black youth literacies image of the relationship between Blackness and schools & society? (2) How can Blackness, as unearthed through Black youth literacies, be an intervention to schooling? Within the context of the United States, one of the major ways antiblackness has historically and currently operationalized within the realms of teaching and learning is through barring Black communities from access to literacy (Anderson, 1988; Collins & Blot, 2003; Halpern & Dal Lago, 2008; Williams, 2009). Recently, a federal district judge in Detroit ruled that Black youth’s access to literacy is not a fundamental right (see Gary B. v Snyder). Data for this paper draws from a Black Critical Theory (Dumas & ross, 2016) mini- ethnography, rooted in qualitative methods to examine the research questions. The primary social location for the ethnographic study was a summer social justice-oriented literacy collaborative designed by me for multi-ethnic Black youth (rising sophomores, juniors, and seniors in high school) across the five boroughs of New York City. Students engaged in a myriad of mediums of literacy expression or literacy artifacts (e.g. storytelling & poetry, photography, mini documentary, painting/drawing, spoken word, oratory, autobiography, community mapping, etc.) to document the knowledge which emerged from their lives regarding their Blackness as it intersects with their schooling and societal lived experiences. Throughout the summer collaborative, in addition to the plethora of literacy artifacts, data collection included semi-structured interviews, digital dialogic journaling, focus groups, field notes, observations, and research memos. Findings offer deep insights as to how oppressive structural regimes, such as antiblackness, contribute to the ongoing perception of Black youth as outside the realms of academic literacy. Moreover, they provide concrete ways for schools and educators to better engage in literacy teaching in more equitable and humanizing ways, guided by the ways the Black students’ literacies are oriented to fugitivity. Black youth literacies are rooted in fugitivity. Thus, the literacies of Black youth can serve as a prime method/ology for the ways we create more equitable schoolings spaces for Black youth, particularly since Black literacies run counter to Black suffering (Johnson et al., 2017).

Author

• Justin Avery Coles, UMass Amherst College of Education