Embodying Asian-Black Solidarity Through Researcher Positionality

• In Event: Reframing Asian American Racialization and Interrogating the Specificity of Anti-Blackness

Abstract

Purpose. Scholars of Black language and literacies document the ingenious ways Black communities developed new ways of communicating, which have educated Black children from colonialism to modern Jim Crow (Richardson, 2003). Yet our current white teacher demographic and white teacher preparation do very little to tap into this rich linguistic resource for learning (Author, 2022; Author & Lee, 2020). My journey as a teacher sought Black linguistic justice (Baker-Bell, 2020) for the Black students and families with whom I was in community. This conceptual paper traces the journey of a Chinese American’s researcher positionality in pursuing inquiry, praxis, and advocacy in and for Black language and education.

Mode of Inquiry/Theoretical Framing. My mode of inquiry is through a theoretical synthesis of concepts from the areas of Black Language, raciolinguistics, and notions of teacher embodiment. Specifically, I utilize linguistic and sociolinguistic theories that document how Black communities innovated new forms of survivance and communication in spite of the malevolence of slavery (Baugh, 1999; Smitherman, 1977). Raciolinguistic theory explicates the reality of language and race being interchangeably used to police Black bodies in schools, policies, and society at large (Alim & Smitherman, 2012; Boutte et al., 2021). I draw on Teacher Embodiment as Lived Pedagogy (Author, 2021) to understand how my racial and linguistic experiences in life are interconnected to and a lived expression of my scholarly work.

Data Sources/Substantiated Conclusions. I leverage the lived experiences within the context of my own Asian American onto-epistemology as data sources. As a Chinese American elementary and middle-school teacher, I was ill-equipped and unprepared to teach in a classroom with majority Black students. My eight-year journey in public schools, however, forced me to reckon and wrestle with the pervasive anti-Blackness in society, which is often housed in the microcosm of schools. Enrolling in graduate school simultaneous to this period awoke me to the vast disparities between research and practice in the area of Black Language. I utilized extant literature to engage in self-reflexivity, which required me to move beyond the Model Minority Myth and understand how that paradigm is undergirded by anti-Black and white hegemonic ideologies. I will discuss how Asian-Black solidarity in my researcher positionality came from my teacher embodiment as I journeyed against anti-Blackness. These theoretical contributions have implications for non-Black teachers of color and white teachers as they educate Black students.

Scholarly Significance. Poon et al. (2016) call for scholarship related to Asian Americans in higher education with new imaginings beyond the Model Minority Myth, and that reframe how we exist within a white supremacist society. Concomitantly, critique of the Black-White binary paradigm pushes against how non-Black racialized groups interpret the positioning of Black communities and scholarship (Dumas & ross, 2016). This paper draws on my researcher positionality to conceptualize how an Asian Black solidarity framing might imagine new ways of being within the Asian American community. This conceptualization works in conjunction with other Asian American scholars engaged in cross-racial solidarity building (Liu, et al., 2023).

Author

• Alice Y. Lee, University of California - Riverside