Healing and Humanizing through Black History and Culture: Lessons from the Black Aliveness Youth Project in Massachusetts

Session Submission Type: Workshop

Abstract

Everywhere that Black youth turn, they are bombarded and inundated with images of Black death and Black suffering; in the media, in their schools, and in their communities. In the opening chapter of Black Aliveness, or a Poetics of Being, Kevin Quashe engages Black feminist literary aesthetics to remind us that while “antiblackness is total in the world… it is not total in the Black world.” In order to heal and prepare Black youth to become leaders for social change, they must be exposed to a Black world defined by liveliness, achievement, and possibility. The Black Aliveness Project (BAP) in Massachusetts connects high school youth to Black college mentors who lead workshops focused on Black history and culture to promote their intellectual, artistic, and holistic development. The project's core curriculum culminates in students’ production of artistic autobiographies, with the goal of promoting collective healing and meaning-making through a process of self-definition.

The workshop will begin with an opening self-reflection activity borrowed directly from the BAP Core Curriculum. Participants will reflect on three questions: (1) Who are you and where do you come from? (2) What is something that you’re good at or something that is going well for you? (3) How has learning about Black history and culture helped you understand your own personal history and responsibility to the future? Following the self-reflection activity, BAP youth workers will introduce the program, its core values, and the healing and humanizing pedagogy central to our practice. Workshop participants will then have the opportunity to create their own autobiographical artifact that reflects the design and mission of the Black Aliveness curriculum. We will conclude with remarks from program leadership on the liberatory roles of education and self-narrative in the African American intellectual tradition before transitioning to Q&A.

Sub Unit

• 107th Meeting of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History

Chair

• Zenzile Saharee Riddick, Harvard Graduate School of Education

Leaders

• Alvalyn Dixon-Gardner, Tufts University

• Naheim Washington, Tufts University

• Hamel Haile, Tufts University

Commentator

• Christian Walkes, Harvard University