Becoming Black American Through Language and Literacy Practices

• In Event: Black and Brown Immigrant Youth Constructing and Negotiating Identity in Canada and the United States

Abstract

When Black immigrant youth move to the United States, race becomes their most salient identifier (Awokoya, 2012). In turn, their ethnic and cultural identities are overlooked, leaving them with expectations to redefine their identity based on America’s racial categories (Landale & Oropesa, 2002; Waters, 1999). The family environment also plays a critical role in Black immigrant youth identity formations (Suarez-Orozco & Suarez-Orozco, 2008), as parents often fear that their children will adopt Black American youth culture and stray away from long-standing ethnocultural traditions (Awokoya, 2012). This paper explores how Blessing, a 13-year-old Nigerian girl, constructed a Black American racial identity and negotiated it alongside her Nigerian identity across school, family, and cultural communities.
I draw on anti-Blackness (Dumas & ross, 2016), postcolonial theory (Ashcroft et al., 2007; Cesaire, 1972/2000; Fanon, 1967), and literacy as a social practice (Scribner & Cole, 1978; Street, 1984) to define and analyze Blessing’s identity negotiations as literacy and language practices embedded in historical configurations of race and colonization. Anti-Blackness provides a lens to examine the racialization of non-Europeans in America (Omi & Winant, 2014). Postcolonial theory, however, operates as a lens to examine the racialization and othering of Africans by the American West. Literacy as a social practice, which privileges the sociocultural contexts, methods, and range of modes – visual, linguistic, aural, gestural, and spatial – of learning within and beyond school (New London Group, 1996; Skerrett, 2015), facilitates understanding of Blessing’s literacy and language practices as multiliterate and multimodal. These three theories allow me to examine intersectional influences of race and colonization on Blessing’s language and literacy practices used in her identity formations.
This paper derives from a larger 11-month, critical ethnographic study (Vaught, 2011) in the Southwestern United States that employed questionnaires, home observations, interviews, and collection of literacy artifacts to explore six African immigrant youth identities, languages, and literacies. I utilized narrative analysis (Reisman, 2008), narrative portraiture (Lawrence-Lightfoot & Davis, 1997) and constant comparative analysis (Strauss & Corbin, 1998) to interpret the data.
One significant finding is that feeling linguistically and socially othered by Black American peers at school compelled Blessing to construct a Black American identity through multiliteracy employments, such as wearing Black urban fashion, transitioning to natural hair, and speaking Black language (Baker-Bell, 2020; Smitherman, 1997) to feel included at school. Her Black American identity caused her friends back home to question her Nigerian identity during their WhatsApp interactions, which she negotiated by speaking Nigerian Pidgin and using a digital news app to stay abreast of Nigerian news. Second, Blessing’s English teacher’s pedagogical stance and curricular materials assisted in her Black American identity construction. Anti-racist novels and multimodal writing assignment options enabled Blessing to speak back to anti-Black ideologies at school and to her mother at home. These findings highlight the criticality of multiliterate and language practices in dismantling static racial and ethnic identity categories for African immigrant youth as well as their role in permitting them to construct hybrid identities that reflect connections to the United States and their native country.

Author

• Lakeya Afolalu, University of Washington
  Presenting Author