The Parents’ Perspectives: Black Anglophone Caribbean Students' Negotiation of Race and Language in K–12 Schools

• In Event: Invisible No Longer: Understanding the Experiences of Black Immigrants in the U.S. Educational Landscape

Abstract

Black Anglophone Caribbean immigrant students are among the thousands of immigrants who enter US schools every year (Passel & Cohn, 2012). Even as the representation of Black immigrants from the Anglophone Caribbean increases in US schools, scholarly research is lacking regarding their educational experiences and the negotiation of race and language in K-12 educational spaces. Coleman-King (2014) asserted that racism is an inescapable marker of the Black experience in the United States. As a Black Anglophone Caribbean mother in the United States with a Black child in the K-12 educational space, racism was indeed an inexorable influence alongside language discrimination in my child’s experiences. The reality is, the impacts of racism do not exist in a vacuum and are often intimately connected to other vectors of oppression in school (Kohli et al., 2017). Language is one such vector. Critical race theory (CRT), in which this study was grounded, pays attention to the intersectionality of race and other repressive forces related to gender, class, sexuality, and religion; however, language tends to be neglected. Nevertheless, applied linguistic scholars have begun to examine how race and language are interconnected (e.g., Alim et al., 2016; Flores & Rosa, 2015; Kubota & Lin, 2009). Hence, in the context of this study, the experiences of racism and language of Black Anglophone Caribbean students served as the primary emphasis. This study employed the narratives of Black Anglophone Caribbean parents to illuminate their children's experiences in K-12 educational spaces in the US. I conducted a total of eight (8) individual in-depth interviews to explore multiple dimensions of the parents’ narratives through counterstorytelling. Counterstorytelling seeks to reveal the stories of minoritized populations who have common experiences that often go untold (Harper, 2009). Data were analyzed through the lens of CRT and the raciolinguistic framework. CRT provided a suitable framework for this study because it not only centers race at the core of its analysis, but it also recognizes other forms of oppression, which had important implications for Black Anglophone Caribbean students (Parker, 1998). Additionally, this study drew on the raciolinguistic framework to analyze language negotiation. Using a raciolinguistic lens to examine both racial and linguistic positioning allows us to understand how language and race come to be perceived and experienced in relation to one another (Rosa & Flores, 2015). Themes that emerged from the study challenge the notion that educational institutions are colorblind, progressive, and multicultural spaces. The parents relayed uncomfortable recollections of their children being subjected to unequal treatment, policed and criminalized, surveilled and singled out, sentenced, and silenced. They also experienced occurrences of segregation, acts of racial discrimination and microaggressions, cultural incongruence, and language discrimination. For example, one parent recounted a teacher telling her son, “Why [do you] even bother to come to school…[I] hardly have a Black boy pass through the class that turn out good.” These narratives bring voice to Black Anglophone Caribbean parents’ unheard stories and reflect a need to better support Black immigrant parents and students in addressing racial and linguistic discrimination in schools.

Author

• Thacher Tracion Loutin, University of Florida