Seen and Unseen: Narratives of In/Visibility of Black Youth Who Attend a Predominantly Latinx High School

Abstract

Background/Context:

Scholars have identified how antiblackness operates as a specific organizational culture across the educational enterprise by examining Black students in various schooling contexts. However, there remains limited empirical research exploring Black students’ unique experiences in predominantly Latinx educational settings. The presence of Black bodies in institutions like schools from which they have been historically or conceptually excluded, marginalized, or “othered” presents an intriguing context to investigate the intersection of race, place, and the politics of visibility.

Research Design:

Drawing from an extensive ethnographic project on antiblackness in borderland contexts, this article interrogates Black students’ narratives of in/visibility—stories detailing moments when they felt seen and unseen. I used purposive sampling and recruited 20 Black students to participate in focus groups and individual interviews. Focus groups and interviews were semi-structured, using open-ended questions but centered on circumstances related to in/visibility. I also conducted observations in classrooms, hallways, the cafeteria, and other locations across the school campus.

Data Collection and Analysis:

Data analysis for this study included coding and recoding transcripts and field notes, and writing analytic memos. The analytic memos served as a site of conversation about the data where I could think deeply about the experiences that my participants shared. Coding and writing analytic memos were concurrent data analytic activities. During analysis, I paid close attention to how students described moments of invisibility, visibility, and hypervisibility. I conducted thematic coding and analysis of the data, which generated key themes. Finally, I reorganized emerging themes several times in relation to the extant literature and theoretical framework.

Findings:

Building on prior research on antiblackness in education, I use the notions of seen and unseen to describe Black students’ experiences with antiblack structures, practices, and encounters with their non-Black peers and adults. Black youth narratives reveal that their Blackness is simultaneously rendered hypervisible and invisible through the everydayness of antiblackness. The data also reveal that their racialized experiences with in/visibility were concurrently spatial and had implications for how Black students navigated the physical geographies of schools. I found that unseeing is an active process of not acknowledging the bias accompanying explicit practices that enable different people to exist differently in the same space. To unsee is a rejection of the specificity of Black that encodes how Black students navigate spaces where they are not the somatic norm. Further, this posture impacts Black bodies by making them feel simultaneously like outsiders and insiders. As a result, some bodies are deemed as having the right to belong, while others are marked as trespassers.

Conclusions and Recommendations

Racial moments have material, emotional, and educational consequences for Black students. Being “different” from the somatic norm renders Black bodies simultaneously highly visible and invisible. Research tends to collapse Black and Latinx students into a broader category of “students of color” without disaggregating the distinctive ways in which racialized school systems impact these groups differently. Further, the data presented here demonstrate how antiblack racism shapes the experiences of Black students and draws attention to the urgency of dismantling the people of color colorblindness in research analysis.