"What Am I Without Being Black?" Youth Rupturing Anti-Blackness in Black English Outer Spaces

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session 15
  In Roundtable Session: Honoring Black Youth Living: Dismantling Anti-Black Literacy Education Systems and Imagining Futures

Abstract

The mainstream literacy teaching and learning presented in U.S. English classrooms deny “Black youths’ own proclivities, interests, experiences, and engagements with/in literacy practice” (Johnson & Sullivan, 2020, p. 421). We engaged in a (Black) critical race English education (Baker-Bell et al., 2017; Johnson, 2018; Johnson et al., 2017) project designed to disrupt antiblackness by centering the Black literacies of youth in an out-of-school English space. Sexton (2011) signaled the need for Black living and learning to orient itself towards alternative planets, explaining “Black life is not lived in the world that the world lives in, but it is lived underground, in outer space [emphasis added]” (Sexton, 2011, p. 28). How can an English education above ground, characterized here as being tethered to whiteness and antiblackness, humanize Black youth and communities? We see the creation and/or the support of what we conceptualize as Black English outer spaces as a necessary curricular tool to sustain Black youth literacies and lifeways. We define Black English outer spaces as all textual-driven Black spaces and places, which might materialize in a variety of forms (e.g., physical, digital, spiritual, and psychic places/spaces), centered in and/or created for the composition of the full range of Black textual expressivities. Guided by a youth-centered and informed Black critical-race grounded methodology, we investigated what theorizations of Blackness emerge, as gathered from Black youth’s literacies, in a Black English outer space called L.I.T. (Literacy Inspiring Transformation) City. Primary data collected included multimodal critical literacy artifacts produced by students that theorized Blackness and antiblackness. Data also included: life history interviews, focus groups, audio-recorded L.I.T. City sessions, participant observations, field notes, photographs, and researcher memos. Our empirical study found that affirmations of Blackness in a Black-centric outer space sharpened participants’ critical literacies as a transformative intervention to antiblackness. Specifically, participants’ unique and varied revelations of Blackness as Vitality, Blackness as Cognizance, and Blackness as Expansive Community, served to withstand, confront, and transcend encounters with antiblackness in English curricula.

Authors

• Justin Avery Coles, UMass Amherst College of Education

• maria soto