Black Mothers as Bad Teachers: Intersectional Raciolinguistic Erasure in Teacher Preparation Curricula

• In Event: “Descriptive Adequacy” and the Overdetermination of Blackness: A Dilemma and Meditation in Language Education Research

Abstract

Language both constructs and reflects reality. As such, depictions of Black communities, families and learners within curricular texts that anchor teacher preparation programs have the potential to construct, challenge or distort how said groups and individuals are perceived (Feiman-Nemser & Buchmann, 1985; Austin et al., 2021) by pre-service teachers. This truism increases in gravity within urban spaces in that the K-12 schools pre-service teachers are preparing to enter are overwhelmingly segregated (Alim, 2005). As such, with teacher educator and pre-service demographics maintaining their constitution as between 79% (National Center for Education Statistics, 2020) and 81% white (Geiger, 2020), respectively, not only are schools composed of majority minoritized students, their teachers and those who prepare them often are generally unfamiliar with their lifeways. This results in a disproportionate reliance on textual and curricular representations to familiarize (Cross, 2016) early career teachers with Black communities. As teacher educators, the selection of curricular texts to prepare K-12 teachers must, as a result, be curated from a critical perspective that situates engagement with teacher preparation texts through an intersectional raciolinguistic lens.

A raciolinguistic perspective recognizes the conaturalization of race and language (Flores & Rosa, 2015) rooted in European colonialism (Flores & Rosa, 2019) which results in beliefs about racial inferiority being projected onto the language practices of racialized users. Rooted in Black and women of color feminisms, Flores and Rosa (2019) position the raciolinguistic perspective to map complex narratives surrounding racialized and gendered communities as these processes take shape across various domains inclusive of language. Taken together, the intersection at which Black women, particularly those who mother, find themselves when describing the rearing and advocacy practices in which they engage to protect and care for their children, becomes mired and misrepresented in teacher preparation. This particular form of curriculum-based gendered antiBlackness is uniquely damaging when the silence and distortion surrounding Black mothering (Dumas, 2013) is funneled through curricular texts that rationalize the challenges Black youth face in U.S. K-12 schooling.

In this paper, I conduct a critical intersectional raciolinguistic analysis of a canonical teacher preparation text, “Unequal childhoods: Class, race, and family life,” (Lareau, 2003) and reveal class-centric representations of Black communities as poorly preparing Black youth for U.S. public schooling. This is achieved through narrating Black motherhood as culturally deficient without regard for the direct input or complex navigating of antiBlackness on behalf of these women as relayed through their first-person experiences. This critical analysis of a popularized sociological text used widely in higher education humanities and education courses, I argue, is symbolic of the ways in which Black mothers are depicted as bad teachers (Gumbs, 2016) due to policy-based and popular culture echoes of Black familial dysfunction. Incorporating texts like these, rather than familiarizing pre-service teachers with racially and economically diverse students based on the systemically antiBlack worlds they are forced to navigate, obscures their labor to survive through erasure, racial misrepresentation and depicting schools as necessary locations for white saviorism to transpire.

Author

• Tasha Austin, University at Buffalo - SUNY