Like racism in U.S. society, antiblackness or the human races necessity for violence against Black people is an immutable fact. The idea that Blackness is inherently problematic in the public imaginary—needing to be marginalized or disposed of—directly frames how urban schools are organized for the education of Black children. This is a problem of public schooling for which my research aims to respond. The tendency to view schools as free of antiblackness (read violence free) undermines changes in schooling curriculum, climate, and policy that work toward equity for Black children. Instead, the prevailing belief that schools are free of antiblackness (or the view of not considering antiblackness at all) perpetuate antiblackness and the associated violence that disproportionately impacts Black children. The purpose of my literacy driven BlackCrit Ethnography, was to unearth what Black youth’s critical engagements with literacy reveal about antiblackness as it operationalizes as symbolic violence in their urban schooling and societal experiences. Specifically, I relied on the language and literacy practices Black youth embody as they navigate urban education in ways that pinpoint the criticality of Blackness and antiblackness in their lives. My study was guided by the following questions: (1) What understandings of antiblackness emerge through Black youth’s critical engagements with literacy? (2) How do Black youth’s understandings of antiblackness through critical engagements with literacy function as resistance to antiblackness? Data collection for my project included audio-visual recorded after-school sessions, literacy artifacts, observations, interviews, dialogic journaling, and student academic and disciplinary data. The study took place during the 2016-2017 academic year with nine Black youth (six girls, three boys) at an urban high school in Philadelphia, PA. The Black youth informed me how they operate as texts that are deeply critical of antiblackness. In order to exist in an anti-Black nation-state, the youth demonstrated the ways they individually and collectively operate as critical textual sites or archives of Blackness, that when properly engaged, have the potential to be expressed in ways that oppose and lessen the material and psychic impacts of antiblackness. Moreover, the space we cultivated that was Black-centric, proved to be crucial for affirming and cultivating the development of these textualities. Despite the precarity of Black life resulting from the many ways antiblackness is sustained in U.S. social institutions such as public schools, this research establishes the brilliance of Black youth to center their joy as a radical act of resistance to the symbolic violence of antiblackness. They do this through strategic, purposeful engagements with literacy.
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