Rooted In and Across Place: Black Families’ Geographies of Communal and Educational Care

• In Event: Honoring Black and Indigenous People’s Place and Land Relations: Educational Engagement in and Beyond Schools

Abstract

Purpose

Detroit, a city once dubbed ‘America’s Blackest City’ is home to vibrant familial and communal histories of self-determination, advocacy, and placemaking (Boyd, 2017). However, structural racism and disinvestment have led to austere privatizing policies affecting Detroit’s public school system and communities. Faced with such conditions, many Black families have departed the city in recent decades to surrounding suburbs. Yet, many families have maintained pride in Detroit and have worked to create community across fraught municipal boundaries (Author, 2022; Fullilove, 2016).

In this paper, I focus on a vignette representing one family’s continued ties to Detroit after relocating from the city. This vignette uplifts how Black families’ socio-spatial networks of care and intergenerational place-based experiences remain significant to their desires and efforts towards the holistic wellbeing of their children amid geographic movement.

Theoretical Framing

Black Geographies theoretical frames are engaged to understand the positioned and communal geographies Black families form in the places where they experience care and communality (Cox, 2015; Hunter et al., 2016; McKittrick, 2011). Families positioned and communal geographies, or sense of place, can tell more nuanced stories and provide alternate vantage points to dominant spatial and temporal records that often inform student and family engagement practices in schools (e.g. deficit narratives and practices affecting students that move from urban to suburban communities).

Methods, Data Sources, & Analysis

Data draws from a critical phenomenological study (Salamon, 2018) examining how seven Black families’ racial and spatial subjectivities influenced their perceptions of place and school and community choice-making in the Detroit metropolitan region. I engaged in 21 in-depth interviews with Black families residing in two Detroit area suburbs that have experienced notable growth in Black/ African American residents. Secondarily, I employed document analysis and observation to better understand the histories and places families named in their experiences. A constant comparative analysis approach was used to make sense of data throughout collection and analysis (Boeijie, 2002).

Findings

Past experiences of community life oriented Black families in this study even as they relocated or were displaced to suburban schools and communities. Indeed, the people, communities, and schools that formed the places families called home or remained connected to were integral to their identity, sense of support, and conceptions of engagement in learning. For instance, parents recalled how the support of neighbors and extended family were integral to their upbringing and therefore, they sought to maintain relationships in Detroit while also fostering community in the suburbs where they resided. As such, relationality in and to places oriented families’ perceptions of what constitutes beneficial learning experiences for their children—both in and beyond schools.

Significance

Black families’ navigation of changing U.S. metropolitan regions can reflect their communal and racial epistemologies of place—or ways of knowing and being rooted in particular places. Educational leaders and policymakers must work to understand the multifaceted ways Black families live in community across places and time to support and honor their educational priorities and communal wellbeing.

Author

• Dana Gabrielle Nickson, University of Washington