Dig Real Deep for Me: Understanding Racial Literacy Through a BlackCrit Lens and Articulating a Black Racial Literacy

• In Event: Black Literacies: Centering BlackCrit and Listening to Black Students' Experiences

Abstract

Racial literacy is commonly understood as a practice where one displays the ability to identify, read, and disrupt racism. Racial literacy has evolved from being either racially literate or illiterate to understanding racial literacy as a skill that everyone possesses, but this skill is operationalized in different ways. This means that folx who adopt race-evasive practices or racist ideologies are engaging in racial literacy practices, albeit ones that sustain racism. With this in mind, I take up antiblackness and integrate understandings of BlackCrit and racial literacy to develop the concept of Black racial literacy, a concept which will help us better understand the spectrum of racial literacy and disrupt the binarial way of thinking about being racially literate or illiterate.

Author

• Jordan Bell, Erikson Institute