Resisting Racial Battle Fatigue: Cultivating a Restful Black Fugitive Space for Youth to Thrive,Speak,and Write

Abstract

This critical ethnography highlights the counterstories of three high school students and their teacher and how they engaged in Black educational fugitivity, joy, and critical literacy practices in an after-school program. These counterstories reveal that participants engaged in fugitivity and literacy to resist racial battle fatigue at their predominantly white school. The study is situated in critical race theory, but also draws on a BlackCrit framework to better understand how anti-Blackness, racial battle fatigue, and fugitivity shape the literate lives of youth living in urban settings.