"Young, Literate, and Black ... and That's a Fact!" Black Teen Literacy as Agentive Acts Toward Justice and Thrival

• In Event: Disrupting Antiblackness in the Pursuit of Educational Equity, Truth, and Justice

Abstract

Within the liberating educational tradition of Black Americans, literacy has always been a tool leveraged to author our identities, assert our dignity, affirm our humanity, and claim our freedoms on our own terms, unapologetically (Fisher, 2009; Perry, Steele, & Hillard, 2003). Literacy as an emancipatory tool is especially needed within an educational system with documented abusive spaces (de los Ríos, Martinez, Musser, Canady, Camangian, Quijada, 2019; Howard, 2015; Winn, Graham, & Renjitham-Alfred, 2019) where curricular evisceration (Sojoyner, 2017), curriculum violence (Ighodaro & Wiggan, 2010), and spirit murdering (Love, 2016) happen regularly. As a result, it becomes increasingly vital to interrupt/disrupt racist (Kinloch, Burkhard, & Penn, 2020; Milner, 2015) and anti-Blackness (Grant, Woodson, & Dumas, 2021; Nasir, Givens, & Chatmon, 2019) educational efforts and to create other liberating literacy learning spaces for, with, and by Black adolescents to support and ensure their thrival, a sentiment/concept I often use to illustrate minoritized young peoples’ joyful, visionary, and restorative pursuit of learning and growth as they negotiate their everyday lives despite an existence within the legacy and immediacy of white supremacy, its epistemologies, axiologies, ontologies, and agents of harm.
Utilizing and building upon emancipatory educational frameworks that serve the interests and futures of African descended people who live, learn, work, and love on colonized U.S. soil, this presentation shares the outcomes from a 4-year qualitative investigation that explored the literate lives of Black urban adolescents. Specifically, the presentation showcases written pieces by Black youth to illustrate how they use literacy to resist, challenge, and respond to anti-racist, anti-Black schooling and educational efforts just like their ancestors, foreparents, and progenitors through a memoir (the past), a short-verse poem (the present), and a science fiction short narrative (the future). I want to illuminate how Black teens access and use literacy as agentive acts pushing forward discussions of justice and advocating change for themselves and their peers (Hunter & Colón, 2020). By doing so, our young, literate Black young people give us new possibilities to consider, the chance to dream forward collectively, and to imagine the unimaginable without fear, all of which are required features for any form of liberation to occur.

Author

• Jevon D. Hunter, Buffalo State University - SUNY
  Presenting Author