Troubling the Waters of Antiblackness: Urban Black Youth Literacies as Humanizing Truths in the "Wake"

• In Event: 79.020 - Division G Vice-Presidential Session: Educational Research in the Wake: Becoming "Undisciplined" Post-Truth, Post-Trump

Abstract

After emancipation, many white northern missionaries, full of zeal, went to the south to educate Blacks (Anderson, 1988; Bush, 2004; Jones, 1992; Williams, 2009). This enthusiasm quickly diminished “as the optimistic teachers themselves began to realize that they had failed to understand the full effects of generations of slavery” (Newby & Tyack, 1971, p. 195). In our current educational era where schools operate as enclosures (Sojoyner, 2016) for Black youth, characterized by a range of anti-Black violence, I argue that educators are still failing to understand slavery’s persistent role in negatively impacting the academic and social lives of Black youth. For example, during U.S. chattel slavery, “slaves were not allowed books, pen, ink, nor paper, to improve their minds.” (Williams, 2009, p. 9). Most recently, a federal district judge in Detroit ruled that Black youth’s access to literacy is not a fundamental right (see Gary B. v Snyder). The aforementioned examples outline the ways U.S. schooling has been directly implicated in antiblackness, serving as a site of miseducation (Woodson, 1933), suppression of Black freedom (Sojoyner, 2016), and Black suffering (Dumas, 2014). The enduring suffering present in the educational lives of Black youth provide evidence that we are currently living in the “wake” or that we occupy and are occupied by “the continuous and changing present of slavery’s as yet unresolved unfolding” (Sharpe, 2016, pp.13-14).

Guided by BlackCrit (Dumas & ross, 2016) and Sociocultural Literacies (Perry, 2012), in this paper I examine the co-creation of an after-school space with Black high school youth, rooted in the ways their critical engagements with literacy served as a method for them to trouble antiblackness in the “wake” as it plays out in society and their urban school. For the students, troubling antiblackness was two-fold in that their literacies led them to (1) outline and detail the pain of being Black in an anti-Black context, while simultaneously (2) uncovering the joy of being Black that comes from persisting in spite of antiblackness. Data for this paper comes from a larger BlackCrit ethnography that I conducted exploring the utility of Black youth’s literacies in understanding and resisting antiblackness at a U.S. urban high school. Specific data points include, critical literacy artifacts, interviews, observations, and audio/video recorded after-school group sessions. As historic and contemporary witnesses and receivers of anti-Black violence, Black youth must actively engage in raising their consciousness in regard to how their school environments, policies, individual educators, and curriculum is rooted in a necessity of violence against their bodies. Engaging Black youth in praxis around troubling antiblackness is not a bleak pedagogy, but rather, “if we are lucky, the knowledge of this positioning avails in particular ways of re/seeing, re/inhabiting, and re/imagining the world” (Sharpe, 2016, p. 22). The Black youth I worked with provide literacy and urban education scholars a clear example of how schools serving Black youth (and all other context and populations) might take up the necessary work of constructing the world in a way that disrupts antiblackness.

Author

• Justin Avery Coles, Fordham Graduate School of Education