Race(in)g Critical Literacy: An Afro-Caribbean Immigrant Perspective

• In Event: Critical Literacy for Racial Justice: Cultivating Equity Through Intersectionality

Abstract

Anti-Blackness is a challenge in the U.S. and across the globe, particularly in post-colonial contexts/countries where Blackness is overlooked, and Eurocentric practices prevail. Yet, literacy teaching of predominantly Black populations in and beyond the U.S. does not often draw upon critical literacy in ways that center race and its interrelationships with constructs such as language, and immigration. In fact, across contexts such as Africa and the Caribbean region, where many Black populations exist, the tendency is to overlook the colonial heritage undergirded by racism in literacy teaching and learning which often mirrors the norms and intentions of former colonial powers. In turn, many Black immigrant students in the U.S. engage in literacy learning that does not often focus on racialization.
Critical literacy has functioned both within and beyond the U.S. in the past few decades, as a means of disrupting such norms for literacy teaching that do not allow students to represent or reshape meaning in critical ways (Luke, 2018). Given the continued need to address racialization in literacy for Black immigrant students (Author, 2019), there is an opportunity to consider how models of critical literacy (Luke, 2012), through the lens of intersectionality (Crenshaw, 2021), might function as a vehicle for enabling teachers to center race in conjunction with other social factors in such students’ literacy instruction.
In this conceptual paper, I draw from data excerpts of Afro-Caribbean youth to examine how a long-established model of critical literacy (Luke, 2018) – the four resources model – might function in conjunction with a transraciolinguistic approach (Author, 2021) to facilitate racial justice in literacy practice. The tenets of critical literacy focus on enabling students to read the word and the world in ways that allow them to discern its meanings based on social, political, historical and other contexts (Luke, 2018). Specifically, the four resources model enables teachers to help students focus simultaneously on the code, semantics, pragmatics and critical practices in their teaching allowing students to use both “explicit and metacognitive knowledge of how texts work” (Luke, 2018, p. 4). The term ‘transraciolinguistics’ can be thought of as “trans-” and “raciolinguistics”; “transraciolinguistics” (Author, 2021). The prefix “trans-” refers to that which is simultaneously “between,” “across” and “beyond” (see Nicolescu, 2010 & Author, 2013 on transdisciplinarity for multicultural education). “Raciolinguistics” suggests that race and language work together such that race influences construction of ideas about language and ideas about language influence race (Alim, 2016; see Rosa & Flores, 2017). A transraciolinguistic approach suggests that students use metalinguistic, metacultural and metaracial understanding to identify the literate, racial and linguistic practices that allow them to exercise agency (Author, 2019, 2021).
Presenting a vision of how the four resources model might center race through the intersectional lens of transraciolinguistics can empower educators to address the racialization of Black immigrant youth, and also, provide insights for meeting the needs of immigrant students of color in classrooms.

Author

• Patriann Smith, University of South Florida