The Politics of Ratchetness: Existing While Black Within and Beyond the Classroom

• In Event: Refusing Anti-Blackness in Curriculum Studies: Curricular Confrontations in “the Wake”

Abstract

Despite decades of rigorous research and advocacy for the capacity of Black Literacies to contribute to teaching and learning (Makoni et al, Kirkland, 2013), their marginality persists throughout the field of curriculum studies, and thus, in the pedagogies of schools, exposing a parallel between the marginality of Black lives outside and inside of the classroom (Lyiscott, 2017). Thus, for urban adolescent Black youth, access to the cultural ways of knowing and community practices closely knit with their identities remain virtually non-existent within in-school spaces. These youth navigate such spaces trained to relegate essential aspects of themselves to secondary roles deemed unworthy of traditional intellectual arenas as they adopt dominant linguistic and cultural practices thought to be more fitting for college readiness and access to power. However, Black youth are not merely abandoning the community and linguistic practices that continue to shape them, but instead exist in the tension of in-school and out-of-school environments in complex ways (Fisher, 2008; Kinloch, 2010). This critical ethnographic study explores the ideologically interwoven social locations of race and language in three Black students within an afterschool seminar that sustains multiple literacy practices for social justice education. I utilize the intersections of race and language as an analytic tool to gain an emic understanding of their experiences navigating the contours of anti-Blackness within and beyond the social space of school from sociocultural and human development perspectives. I situate myself within Prophetic Criticism (Prier, 2017) to make explicit the dynamism of Black theoretical and epistemological orientations as central to framing my work; Critical Theory to illuminate the systems of power that sustain educational inequity for Black students; Sociocultural perspectives of language to acknowledge the situated and enmeshed relationships between language and social context; and Human Development to discuss how language can function as a site of racial trauma for Black students. Viewing the seminar as a social space of practice (Gutierrez, 2008) that informs and engages the students’ literate and racial identities, I utilized Critical Ethnographic methods and Critical Discourse Analysis to examine salient literacy events (Brice Heath, 1983) that occurred throughout the seminar. Data sources include audio session recordings, interviews, field notes, and student artifacts. I argue that through continued participation in multiple cultural and linguistic practices deemed unworthy by institutional spaces, Black students participate in a tradition of resistance; that the language and cultural practices of Black students are forged in the context of systemic violences against Black lives and so live in iterative relationship to those violences; and that when the social location of race scrapes against predominantly white institutional spaces there is psychological impact for Black people. Exploring the semiotics of language, culture, and literacies within the repertoires of Black students speaks to broader concerns about what it means to forge literacies, identities, and perspectives from the margins of our society. It begs pressing questions about how Black youth navigate anti-Blackness through language inside and outside of school, and how their fugitive practices can be leveraged to enrich curriculum studies writ large.

Author

• Jamila Lyiscott, University of Massachusetts – Amherst