Black Living for Black Liberation: Black Students' Creative Multimodal Renderings of Resistance to Anti-Blackness

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

Abstract

Historically, literacy education and research have been dominated by white supremacist narratives that marginalize and deficitize the literate practices of Black students. As anti-Blackness proliferates in U.S. schools, Black youth suffer social, psychological, intellectual, and racial traumas (Dumas, 2014; Jones, 2020; Love, 2019). Despite relentless attacks of anti-Blackness, Black youth fight valiantly through a range of creative outlets, including multimodal renderings, that enable them to move beyond negative stereotypes, maintain their creativity, and manifest the present and future lives they desire and so deeply deserve (Author 2, 2020; Author 3, 2020; Author 1, 2019; Muhammad & Womack, 2015). Guided by the question How do Black students' multimodal renderings demonstrate creativity and love in ways that disrupt anti-Blackness?, we critically examine four multimodal renderings created by Black elementary and middle school students to understand how Black youth author a more racially just society and envision self-determined, joyful futures. We take up Black Livingness (McKittrick, 2021; Quashie, 2021)--Black hope, emotionality, and futures--as a theoretical framework and employ visual methodologies (Author 2, 2020; Serafini, 2014) to analyze themes of Black life, love, and hope in the young people’s multimodal renderings. We elaborate on two key thematic findings: 1) the Black youth imagined liberatory Black living and demanded racial justice by critiquing racial injustices in society while celebrating the beauty, joy, and love of personal career aspirations through their creative multimodal renderings, and 2) the Black youth practiced liberatory Black living in their creative multimodal renderings by resisting deficit perspectives rooted in anti-Black discourses. Our findings suggest that Black youth creatively compose multimodal renderings that are humanizing, allowing their thoughts, feelings, and experiences to guide their critiques of the present world and envision new personal and societal futures. We conclude with a theorization of a Black Livingness Pedagogy that centers care for Black youth.

Authors

• Autumn A. Griffin, University of Pennsylvania

• Jennifer Danridge Turner, University of Maryland - College Park