Name It and Reclaim It: Black Youth Using Social Media to Disrupt Pedagogies of Ignorance

• In Event: Pedagogies of Ignorance and Authoritarian Epistemologies: Cyborg Surveillance States, Meme Warfare, and MAGA Drag Queens

Abstract

Objectives or purposes
Black youth intimately understand the condition of social death that Wilderson (1956) theorizes—a state in which Black people are denied civic belonging and positioned outside the realm of humanity. Defined as “a structural position of accumulation and fungibility,” Black existence is rendered non-existent within the dominant social order (p. 40). This apocalyptic condition, born from systemic anti-Blackness, has long shaped educational contexts. Yet, efforts to reimagine education around Black knowledges are continually obstructed by what Talbert (2020) refers to as pedagogies of white ignorance: sustained practices that silence, erase, or devalue Black students’ experiences.

Such ignorance refuses to recognize the complexity of Black identity, disregarding Black histories and epistemologies (Warren & Coles, 2020). The recent wave of Black history “bans” across the U.S. represents an intensification of these efforts to codify ignorance through policy. However, as Dillard (2000) argues, Black intellectual traditions have long existed outside of school walls—in oral, embodied, spiritual, and everyday resistance practices. Accordingly, this paper explores how five Black high school students in the Midwest used social media platforms (Snapchat, TikTok, Instagram) to challenge racialized harm in their schools—subverting the very platforms often used to enforce surveillance and marginalization.

Perspective(s) or theoretical framework
Student actions are theorized through Browne’s (2015) dark sousveillance—the use of observation and documentation to resist anti-Black surveillance structures. After students received racial slurs and stereotype-laden videos via social media and were instructed by administrators to “forgive and forget,” students named and reclaimed these experiences through counter-narratives. Their resistance highlights how Black youth use digital tools to challenge epistemic erasure and assert political visibility.

Methods, techniques, or modes of inquiry
Informed by McKittrick (2021) and Scheurich (2014), congregation meetings were used as a critical qualitative method. These autonomous spaces functioned as strategy sessions and healing circles, allowing Black students to articulate harm, resist marginalization, and develop collective responses beyond institutional oversight.

Data sources
Data includes transcripts, social media messages, and video exchanges. As Dillard (2000) asserts, “our knowledge is often rooted in experience, in memory, in survival” (p. 662), offering a framework to interpret these resistant forms of Black knowledge-making.

Results
Students described white peers’ performative ignorance—“they played dumb”—as a tactic for upholding racial hierarchies and avoiding accountability; students used social media to intervene. Through documenting racist incidents and sharing counternarratives online, they disrupted dominant narratives that cast Black youth as misinformed or overly sensitive. Their dark sousveillance refused institutional gaslighting and remade education on their terms. By confronting school-based silencing with public, communal documentation, they enacted a critical pedagogy grounded in Black epistemology, solidarity, and visibility.

Scientific or scholarly significance
This paper contributes to scholarship on Black epistemologies, educational resistance, and critical media literacies. Black youth reclaimed agency through digital sousveillance and collective documentation. When students named and interrupted pedagogies of white ignorance, social media became a site of counter-education. Here youth-led resistance repurposes surveillance tools for liberation and generates new pedagogical possibilities rooted in community, truth-telling, and refusal.

Author

• Janelle Grant-Ashbaugh, Grand Valley State University