Special Issues, Volume 2: Racial Literacy

By Ayanna F. Brown

This volume questions what constitutes literacy in a society organized by race as an inquiry, to deepen the significance for why K–20 learners must develop knowledges that support their abilities to process and ultimately transform racism. With this collection of original essays, editor Ayanna F. Brown helps to push the field of racial literacy into new directions, to avoid niceties and other pitfalls, to get to the heart of racial understanding, to better respond to the needs of our students and society. This volume brings forth emerging scholars who seek to respond to the sociopolitical and sociohistorical aspects of racial literacy as it relates to youth. The scholarship grapples with how educators at every level think through racial literacy in their work and within their experiences. Each contribution adds depth to the question of agency and illuminates why racial literacy work extends social justice efforts to become a call for a culture of teaching and learning that recenters liberation as an active pursuit.

• Language: English
• Publisher: National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE)
• Release date: Nov 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9780814145029

Ayanna F. Brown

DR. AYANNA F. BROWN earned her BS from Tuskegee University in secondary education language arts, her MEd in curriculum and instructional leadership, and her PhD from Vanderbilt University in interdisciplinary studies: language, literacy, and sociology. Her career in education spans both public and private education, including teaching middle-level English language arts and leading college-readiness planning for urban youth with a consortium between Vanderbilt University and Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools. She is an associate professor of education and cultural studies and coordinator for the Middle-Level English Language Arts major at Elmhurst University. Brown is also the author of several peer-reviewed journal articles, several book chapters, and is the coeditor of Critical Consciousness in Curricular Research: Evidence from the Field and has presented her research nationally and internationally. She is co-principal investigator for two National Science Foundation grants, RESULT and PRIDE, which work to increase BIPOC and linguistically diverse STEM majors to become teachers using literacies through culturally relevant and sustaining STEM practices.

Book preview

WHAT CONSTITUTES LITERACY IN A SOCIETY ORGANIZED BY RACE?

Racial Literacy as an Intellectual Imperative

AYANNA F. BROWN

This chapter serves as the introduction and the conceptual framing for this volume on racial literacy. Brown questions what constitutes literacy in a society organized by race as an inquiry to deepen the significance for why K–20 learners must develop knowledges that support their abilities to process and ultimately transform racism. "We must elevate developing multiple forms of literacy practices that seek liberation not regardless of or in spite of racism. We must encourage the ability to read, think, discuss, analyze, create, and develop learning experiences that emancipate youth because of race and racism." Brown challenges the growing study of racial literacy with three propositions for racial literacy scholarship as a means to delimit terminological ideas from the sociopolitical and sociocultural urgency of building K–20 learning that invests in liberatory pedagogies. Brown's propositions center the need for: 1) interdisciplinary study of content knowledge that establishes relevancy and rigor within and across content areas; 2) opposition to processes, practices, and pedagogies that seek to pacify Black and Brown people; and 3) analytical examination racial discourse.

What Constitutes Literacy?

This seemingly rhetorical but frequently asked ques-tion is typically used to locate the complexity within literacy studies. For some, it simply means what does it mean to know and how does one communicate their knowing. For others, it continues to mean how does one acquire information? And more often than not, considerations for literacy are reduced to simply reading printed text (Alvermann). It is also important to consider that questioning literacy can be a preludial approach to study language and how it functions (Brown and Bloome) within various speech commu-nities. More specifically, the ways in which we use language and for diverse purposes impact how literacy is perceived. April Baker Bell asks, What is the purpose of language education in our current racial and political context? (4) The importance of this critical question is rooted in the idea that while public education admits all students across race, class, gender, language and abilities, curricular violence—even in its subtleties—govern the culture of education and teacher practices.

What remains clear in examining the question, what constitutes literacy? is the absence of sociocultural or sociopolitical agency—literacy for and defined by whom? The clarifying questions are necessary if we are able to gauge and unveil what Isabel Wilkerson presents as a critical component to the pillars of caste, a colonial system of racial domination: The only way to keep an entire group of sentient beings in an artificially fixed place, beneath all others and beneath their own talents, is with violence and terror, psychological and physical, to preempt resistance before it can be imagined (151). Literacy when and where and under what circumstances opposes discussions of literacy devoid of place, space, or time. Furthermore, situating literacy in various contexts with analysis of state and national policies positions, both historical and contemporary, demand an unveiling for how the pursuit for literacies can be undermined. An autocratic and monolithic discussion or framing of literacy erases and avoids important factors like socioeconomic status, gender, race, and ability.

Why is this relevant? If we examine literacy in the context of a society, one organized by laws, diverse communities, culture, politics, and forms of expressions, then we can acknowledge the invaluable assertion from New Literacy Studies that has impacted our discussion of literacy and its critical shift to literacies. Brian Street reminds us that this growth is founded upon the rejection by many writers of the dominant view of literacy as a ‘neutral,' technical skills, and the conceptualization of literacy instead as an ideological practice, implicated in power relations and embedded in specific cultural meanings and practices(1). Nearly twenty years and within the burgeoning growth of New Literacy Studies to include African American literacies, racial literacy, urban literacies, digital literacies, etc., Ayanna F. Brown and David Bloome insert two critical questions into a preexisting conversation of the dyna-mism of literacy and literacies. First, how might we understand classroom conversations about language as opportunities to understand students' formulations about their own and others' racial identities? Second, in what ways might classroom conversations about language and race reflect and refract students' interpretations of power and society? What are presented in these questions are the ideas that students can engage in the study of language (or ideas in general) and simultaneously access tools and develop the skills needed to decipher and discern material that is connected to their lives. It is within the nexus of New Literacy Studies and what has become racial literacy that I suggest the discussion of literacy and literacies must be returned to deeper conceptualizations that do not ignore social context and answer the call: Racial literacy for what? Moreover, as we grapple with the demands for classroom teachers to support and engage students in meaning making and critical thinking, we must invite learners to process social complexity as a key component of learning and within multidisciplinary contexts.

There are many terms that have been used to denote understanding matters of race and what it means for classroom teachers' readiness to teach. Consciousness, awareness, competence, racial knowledge, socialization, and racial dispositions are concepts that intersect with psychological, social, and historical contexts that relate to an epistemo-logical basis for how one might think about race in everyday life. H. R. Milner argues "pre-service teachers need to pose tough questions in order to pursue racial competence [emphasis mine] and that students of color desperately need more racially aware, racially sensitive, and racially competent teachers" [emphasis mine] (194). Sharon Tettegah posits the development of a theory to facilitate guidelines for cross-cultural competencies is needed in order to "assist White prospective teachers in developing an awareness of their own racial assumptions" (160). Joyce King's concept of dysconscious, an uncritical habit of mind (including perceptions, attitudes, assumptions, and beliefs), speaks to the dire need for teachers to self-reflect and to develop deliberate thinking about race and racism attending to the needs of students subjugated to racist practices in schools, largely because of the omission of critical thinking by educators. The emergence of Twine's racial literacy from the sociological directly composed in discussions of interracial family life to the political (Guinier) and then to the field of education (Rogers and Mosley) marks an important acknowledgment. It is typical in academe that theoretical concepts are borrowed and applied with new ways of thinking to new areas. However, the seamlessness by which racial literacy quickly moved from sociology to education, by way of legal scholarship, inscribes the significance of the need to further theorize racial literacy within learning, not regardless of students' racial diversity or multicultural identities but because of them. Moreover, while we accept and work to circulate the depths to which race is a social construction and not biologically merited, the vestiges of race (Brown Constructing ) are realities within the structures and systems of life in the United States and other countries and territories that have been subjugated to forms of colonization. We must elevate developing multiple forms of literacy practices that seek liberation, not regardless of or in spite of racism. We must encourage the ability to read, think, discuss, analyze, create, and develop learning experiences that emancipate youth because of race and racism.

The Importance of Social Context: Baby Boomer and Gen Z Closer Than We Think

By the summer of 1963, my mother, Dorothy Jean, was fifteen years old. She was born in Niagara Falls, New York, but spent many of her childhood summers with her Grandma Anna in Alabama. Her summers with uncles, aunts, and cousins, along with her siblings, were during the years of 1958–1965. By the summer of 2020, my daughter, Zawadi, was fourteen, soon to be fifteen later in the year. In a dialogue between grandmother (my mother) and granddaughter (my daughter), they found themselves sharing their similar teenage experiences and feelings that were rooted in racial violence and the need to process how Black deaths by the hands of the police or because of racism seemed to commonplace (Johnson). As fifteen-year-old Black girls, separated by fifty-seven years in age, they were grappling with the exact same topics: racism, police brutality, public speaking, racial violence, fear, and the uncompromising need to do something. While generations apart, their coming-of-age narratives were marked by the same contexts and the disappointment that Black life was inconsequential. Their conversations about racism in the United States transcended and in some ways minimized time as a barrier for mutual understanding and the development of racial literacies. Racism was no longer regional, as children often learn of racial violence being a southern issue. And while my daughter was deeply invested in engaging with activism and youth platforms in our community to cothink and colearn, it did not escape me that her abilities were reinforced through family conversations and community engagement, language, learning, and literacy but not isolated from her racialized identity and her firsthand knowledge of how to use schooling within society. Are all students engaged in learning processes and practices within and outside of school that cultivate intellectual skills, knowledge, discussions, and cognitive practices to develop a level of criticality to understand their own lives in the twenty-first century?

Sociopolitical and Sociocultural Contexts for Youth: What We Do

My daughter and I were cofounders of Forest Park against Racism (FPAR) alongside a team of com-munity members who wanted to respond to police violence in 2022. As a newly organized community group, we wanted to develop an event that was in relationship to Juneteenth, the Black community celebration of liberation from enslavement that is celebrated on June 19th. Meet Us at the Bridge was created to intersect Juneteenth 2020 with a memorial to say the names of Black people killed by the police or whose deaths were incited by racism. There were daily planning meetings, coordination with the state senator, our local mayor's office and the neighboring villages and mayors who would provide resources. What began as a community event on our landmark bridge became a televised march led by the state senator through three adjoining communities that coalesced at the bridge. There, the afternoon's program, memorial, music, speeches, and call to action launched children onto the stage to share their understanding of what was happening to Black people in 2020.

Meanwhile, Ezra, my nine-year-old son, was deeply aware that there was no sanctuary for Black children within racism. Racism did not have regard for his physical or psychological well-being as he learned the names of all of the Black people killed by the police from 2017–2020. As parents of Black children, we are very cognizant that our children's racial awareness is not optional, and in some cases, their survival depends on their knowing how rac-ism reveals itself even in seemingly liberal spaces (Guinier). Ezra was able to make important connections to what he was reading in school that sometimes seemed mythical. The stories of children marching and the youthfulness of the Civil Rights Movement were no longer romanticized with narratives of heroes and brave unique individuals. The school-based English language arts academic literary task of text-to-self connections had an entirely new meaning that was tangible, visible, and experiential.

FIGURE 1

Zawadi C. Brown, age 14, leading the Meeting at the Bridge rally organized by Forest Park against Racism in 2020

FIGURE 2

Ezra C. Brown, age nine, reading his speech at the Meet Us at the Bridge rally organized by Forest Park against Racism in 2020

Ezra was not isolated or insulated from racism. Inasmuch as he was an elementary school student, he used his in/out of school academic knowledge and social cultural knowledge to produce text that would contribute to an occasion. His words were as follows:

Hello. My name is Ezra Brown and I live in Forest Park, Illinois. I am 9 years old.

When will the violence end? When I say vio-lence, I am talking about the language that is used that says you hate me. I am talking [about] the things you do that say, I can only go so far in this world. I am talking about the ways you use your power to try to take mine.

When will children not feel like they are living in the shadows of the police?

The war against racism has been fought for over 400 years, and it is still raging on.

When will this end? You have a choice.

Are you happier watching us choke?

If hate consumes you, you will choke on your own corruption.

We have marched and marched. . . 400 years of marching.

We were marched on your slave ships.

We were marched on the auction blocks.

We were marched through the share cropping field.

We were marched in your chain gangs.

We chose to march in wars where we fought only to return home [to] receive no respect from the United States.

Marching. Marching. Always marching.

Attending decent schools.

Trying to buy candy in the candy store

Trying to pump our gas and play our songs

Playing in the park with our toys

Driving our cars

Watching birds

Walking down the street

Leaving our parties…

Building our schools

We have done it all.

Malcolm Stood

Harriet Led

Booker Created

Martin Marched

They all tried. They succeeded in many ways but not fully.

We are that generation. We are the new generation of heroes that will, I don't say might, that will end this war of violence.

Ezra's call for a discussion of race and toward a deeper theoretical discussion of racial literacy recognizes the significance and role of community and organic intellectualism (Gramsci), where schools serve as one of many places that are responsible and needed to invest in the intellectual and critical development of literate practices within everyday life.

What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. (Ecclesiastes 1:9)

Nearly twenty years ago, racial literacy emerged as a way to conceptualize the needs for biracial families, particularly European White women, to consider how to educate, support, and nurture their Black children (Twine 2004). Twine's sociological analysis was informed by the sociopolitical reality that Black children must be socialized racially as a means to engage fully with the present cultural identities but also with the racial positioning within a white supremacist sociopolitical and social structure. Racial literacy, as constructed within Twine's analysis, was an asset-based approach to embracing race as cultural while simultaneously resisting and fighting racism. Twine (2016) states,

I developed the concept of racial literacy to theorize a form of intellectual and antiracist labor that has not been analyzed in earlier research on interracial families. One of the central dimensions of racial literacy involved visual culture. Parents used the interior design of their homes as a resource to counter the racist depictions of Blacks in public spaces. (969)

As Twine engages the significance of visual literacy as a connecting component to racial literacy, it is appropriate to understand that what is seen and how racialism is represented contributes to thinking practices about race, what it means, and how it functions. The call for this book was rooted in the role of the visual and the experiential. What people witness and experience has significant impact on meaning making. To this end, racial literacy is not a new concept, as it has been the arbiter for how the arts have aided our abilities to think about real life. For example, the mesmerizing and disturbing lyrics of Strange Fruit, a sobering and haunting melody written in 1930s by Abel Meerepol and famously performed by Billie Holiday, began as a poem penned in response and reaction to the incessant crimes against Black life. Specifically, Meerepol authored Bitter Fruit, which later was performed and published as Strange Fruit, to protest the lynching of two Black teenagers in Indiana. In the article The Story behind Billie Holiday's ‘Strange Fruit' (2021), Liz Fields notes that despite strong resistance, especially from radio stations in the South who refused to play ‘Strange Fruit,' the song rose in the charts. The lyrics read:

Southern trees bear a strange fruit / Blood on the leaves and blood at the root /

Black bodies swingin' in the Southern breeze / Strange fruit hangin' from the poplar trees."

Much like Meerepol's terrifying inspiration and Holiday's riveting rendition of the pain felt by Black people during the 1930s, twenty-first century K–12 youth have witnessed and been exposed to racially motivated domestic terrorism in the United States rooted in a) unreconciled historical ideologies and b) the proliferation of curricular violence working to minimize and/or erase the significance of race as a cornerstone by the creation and growth of what is now the United States. Today's youth are not protected from racism and its physical, psychological, and economic contexts any more than the two teens whose bodies swung in the Midwest Indiana breeze in the 1930s. How are youth invited to process the sociopolitical contexts of their lives alongside others? What is the role and responsibility of teachers, families, schooling, and communities in doing this work? What are the social, political, economic, and communal consequences for the absences of discus-sions of race (Brown 2008) for twenty-first century youth when the evidence of racism are overtly violent and covertly deployed despite the rhetoric of inclusivity and post-racialism?

In the same year that France Winddance Twine introduced the terminology racial literacy, Guinier (2004) aligned racial literacy with Derek Bell's theory of interest convergence, offering a principled examination of how racial liberalism contributed to undermining the collective advancement of Black and poor White people by maintaining the interests of White dominance. White people reinforced this dominance by an economic and geographic priority with defer-ence to wealth. Guinier's paradigmatic shift in racial literacy illuminates how race can be used as a convenient decoy where race-based dissention within a Black/White binary distracts other factors that have systemic strongholds on justice-economics and geography. The call for racial literacy, according to Guinier, is to engage in continual and dynamic analysis of how race is used as a tool to maintain the status quo economically, which is inherently political. Racial literacy within this sociopolitical and socioeconomic analysis are described as 1) contextualized and dependent upon the engagement between a reflective and reflexive; 2) relational to race and power and is inherently interdisciplinary, seeking the psychological alongside the interpersonal and structural; and 3) engages an intersectional approach to study the systems where race is present but not always made central.

According to the Google Scholar search engine, between the years of 2004 and 2022, there are approximately 14,300 publications where the ter-minology racial literacy is used in a review within multiple fields of study. Adjusting the search to racial literacy in education, there are approximately 12,600 publications, and if examining teacher edu-cation, there are 14,700. This informal inquiry for the frequency of use of the terminology is significant considering the under theorization. Racial Literacy(ies) require further conceptual developments that are epistemological, ecological, and empirical, and necessitates interdisciplinary efforts, as race and racism are not bound to any singular domain nor are they static. Rogers and Mosley examine elementary students' literate positions that are constructed by and through discussions of race and critical discourse analysis. Sealey-Ruiz's (2013) contributions examine racial literacy within two paradigms: a) racial awareness through writing and the study of race, specifically in English courses, and b) self-awareness and personal growth. As detailed by several other scholars, racial literacy as racial awareness through writing explored how secondary and post-secondary courses would function as an intervention, nearly disrupting the status quo by supporting students' racial awareness and study of self and racial positioning through expository and reflective writing. Price-Dennis's edited volume on racial literacy (2021) captures the range of the contributions to curriculum and pedagogy that align with this domain. However, Sealey-Ruiz's engagement with self-awareness and personal growth extends racial literacy to the socialization and reflective practice (Stevenson) that one's journey, racial reconciliation, and active attempt to access and espouse critical love seeks to transcend systems (Sealey-Ruiz). The rapid growth of racial literacy as the concept suggests nearly an admission that discussions of race alone do not necessarily yield racial literacy (Brown Classroom Conversations). Yet the inverse is also true. Racial literacy cannot be developed without discussions of race. Sealey-Ruiz would add the pursuit of critical love and a familiarity with your own story are the cornerstone, nearly a willful decision that sojourning through racial literacy recognizes the toil and discomfort in unlearning racism.

Sealey-Ruiz underscores the idea that a desired outcome of racial literacy in an outwardly racist society like the United States is for members of the dominant racial category to adopt an antiracist stance and for persons of color to resist a victim stance (12). Accepting that racism is active and is continually reproducing meanings within and beyond the Black/ White binary, the call for antiracist stances belongs to even those colonized by race and may have also adopted White supremacist views. For example, as we examine the newly released video data from the insurrection at the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021, there was diverse racial and ethnic participation among the anarchists that pushed beyond the dominant race. An antiracist stance is an ideological position that we struggle to discuss but includes communities that are not White and contribute to an