Abstract
In this academic counternarrative, we examine how Black students and adults get positioned by, and come to resist, discourses that favor dominant linguistic and cultural practices. We ask, How do Black youth and adults resist the gaze of whiteness, or dominant discourses, in schools and communities, and what are pedagogical implications of such resistances? We address these questions by discussing three contemporary examples of injustices experienced by Rachel Jeantel, Amariyanna Copeny, and Black youth who continue the activism of Colin Kaepernik. Thereafter, we analyze data from three research vignettes of Black teachers and Youth of Color who produce counternarratives through storying. In our conclusion, we advocate for a pedagogical agenda in literacy studies grounded in cultural equality and linguistic, racial, and social justice for Black people and other People of Color. We situate this work as an academic counternarrative—an analysis of young people’s unapologetic affirmation of Black humanity, brilliance, and power.
Keywords
Introduction
As though our lives have no meaning and no depth without the White gaze.
In the United States, the diverse ways of knowing, being, and doing of many People of Color (e.g., Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and Pacific Islander) are negatively positioned by discourses that favor mainstream linguistic and cultural practices, or dominant academic English (DAE). This positioning is grounded in what Toni Morrison refers to as “the White gaze”—the white oppressor or literary imagination that renders the lives, cultural practices, and intellectual traditions of People of Color invisible if they are not aligned with whiteness (TheAncestorsGift, 1998). This gaze assumes that the lives of People of Color, especially Black folks, “have no meaning and no depth” without it (TheAncestorsGift, 1998). Rejecting this gaze, Morrison calls for “projects that come from within, unapologetic about what they are, what they are saying, and what they intend for other African Americans or anybody else to know” (as cited in Begley, 2013). We believe that such projects must, as Paris and Alim (2014) suggest, “move away from the pervasiveness of pedagogies that are too closely aligned with linguistic, literate, and cultural hegemony” and, as they continue, move toward “a pedagogical agenda that does not concern itself with the seemingly panoptic ‘White gaze’ (Morrison, 1998) that permeates educational research and practice with and for students of color, their teachers, and their schools” (p. 86).
Adhering to Morrison’s call for “projects that come from within,” we reframe this
Thus, in this academic counternarrative, we are responsive to the question, How do Black youth and adults resist the gaze of whiteness, or dominant discourses, in schools and communities, and what are pedagogical implications of such resistances? To address this question, we reject pedagogies that advance deficit policies and racist expectations, and insist on “a pedagogical agenda” grounded in cultural equality and linguistic, racial, and social justice. This agenda rejects dehumanizing pedagogical practices directed toward Black youth in schools, and it supports Black youth and adults to embrace their rich cultural and linguistic practices throughout society. Simultaneously, this agenda attends to who Black people are, the storying practices they employ, and the multiple forms of resistance they use to reject monolingual and monocultural norms.
To unpack these ideas in relation to how Black people resist linguistic and racial injustices, we organize this academic counternarrative around the following concepts:
To consider these ideas in relation to how Black youth and adults resist the gaze of whiteness, we first discuss research on storying and literature on identity and race that emphasize how Black people language experiences against the backdrop of monolingualism and racism. Then, we examine how this body of research speaks to contemporary examples of linguistic and racial injustices experienced by three Black people in the United States: Rachel Jeantel (witness in the George Zimmerman murder trial), Amariyanna Copeny (“Little Miss Flint”), and Black youth who continue the activism of Colin Kaepernik. For us, these examples reiterate the importance of counternarrative production as a storying strategy for Black people as well as other People of Color to assert agency as they critique hegemonic power and structural racism.
The literature review on storying, identity, and race; the discussion of counterstories as a storying strategy; and the contemporary examples allow us to describe our methodological approach and the valuable role of data triangulation in our academic counternarrative. From there, we focus on three research vignettes of how students and a teacher resist the white gaze within classrooms. In our conclusion, we indicate why the research vignettes and contemporary examples push us toward a linguistically, racially, and socially just pedagogical agenda responsive to the storying practices, identities, and counternarrative production of Black youth and adults and, by necessary extension, of other People of Color, too.
Research on Storying, Identity, and Race
Storying, which we describe as an active resistance to dominant discourses (e.g., DAE, whiteness, racist ideologies) through utilization of other discourses (e.g., African American Language, cultural definitions of self), is intertwined with the identities, cultures, and subjugated knowledges of those who have been historically excluded from Storying as a form of research becomes an action in the telling and listening of stories that address questions relevant to education, such as: What lessons, cultures, histories, and ontologies are sustained (Paris, 2012) and at times revitalized (McCarty & Lee, 2014) through the stories we dialogically share? How are stories positioned in relation to the people with whom researchers work and within the questions we seek to address? Through relationship building, how might our ontologies and epistemologies lead to fertile spaces of discovery in the purposeful telling and receiving of stories as research? (p. 379S)
The aforementioned questions and the stories and storying processes we share throughout this academic counternarrative encourage us to listen to, tell, and interrogate stories about racism, injustice, and activism by and from Black people and other People of Color.
In relation to identities, there has been much theorization around the very definitions of this concept, especially when identity categories produce essentialist notions of individuals (McCall, 2005). In their discussion of the categorization of identities in literacy research, Lee and Anderson (2009) argue that identity categories, such as “working-class Mexican American,” can perpetuate stereotypical views of students and can impact their academic engagements. They assert that “the use of such categories without further descriptions assumes that these categories hold the same social meaning to the participants, researchers, and consumers of the research, thereby reinforcing stereotyped and static notions of identities for different persons” (p. 189).
Static identity categories are steeped in hegemonic discourses, making race, gender, ability, sexual orientation, and heritage and native languages sites of erasure and marginalization. To reject essentializing ideologies of identities, particularly Black identities, it is important to conceptualize identities within larger conversations on storying, language education, and race. In so doing, we come to view identities as representing the shifting positions people occupy, and the ways people’s racial, cultural, and linguistic practices play significant roles in how they story their experiences and themselves to resist normalization.
Writing about the negotiation of identities in multilingual contexts, Blackledge and Pavlenko (2001) insist that “a dominant ideology of homogeneity in heterogeneous societies raises questions of social justice, as such ideology potentially excludes and discriminates against those who are either unable or unwilling to fit the norm” (p. 243). Within their argument is the idea that culturally and linguistically diverse spaces serve not only as sites that support the development and negotiation of identities, but also as sites that oppress people who resist language normalization. Blackledge and Pavlenko’s research connects to intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1991; McCall, 2005) in that it provides a productive lens for examining the multiplicative and often overlapping nature of identities as well as the various ways people experience oppression and/or become oppressors.
While the intersectional nature of identities must be kept in the fore in discussions about student and teacher identities, language use, and acts of resistance to dominant discourses, it is also necessary to examine ideas of
As racial identification is (re)produced by individuals within the socio-geopolitical contexts they navigate, the bodies of Students and Teachers of Color are daily read in particular historicized, contextualized ways as they enter into schools. According to Ibrahim (2014), before opening our mouths to speak, racialized people “produce and perform complex languages on the surface of our bodies: in and through our modes of dress, walk, and talk; in our hair,
In addition to what is spoken about or read onto racialized bodies, linguistic choices also impact how the identities of students and teachers get (de)valued in classrooms. Meacham (2002) argues that Black students who enter higher education are expected to conform to dominant standards of appearance, behavior, and language use. Because of the pressure to conform, Meacham situates Black experience as “a place set apart from the mainstream for the purpose of cultivating an alternative framework of common sense, a common sense based upon African American cultural needs” (p. 185). In this way, Black experiences, which differ for each person, denote Black people’s heterogeneous encounters with, and ongoing negotiations of, race and racism. Insofar as the explicit connections of language to identity are concerned, Smitherman (2000) argues that African American identity is “bound up with Black identity and culture” (p. 129), and in this boundedness, African American Language, or Black English, resists normalizing language and cultural and behavioral practices. These resistances allow us to argue that Black youth and adults, as well as other Youth and Adults of Color, do have a right to their own languages, cultural practices, and community and intellectual traditions.
Counternarrative Production as Storying
Teachers who know that students have a right to their own language (Kinloch, 2010; Smitherman, 1977), and that education is a “practice of freedom” (hooks, 1994), should utilize humanizing practices that center student voices, cultures, and experiences. In this centering, teachers can encourage students to understand practices of resistance. This point supports our belief that counterstory, or counternarrative production, is a storying strategy that students and teachers can use for such purposes. Through counterstories, classrooms become sites of empowerment where students can use their own languages as well as DAE and the rhetorical strategies of both to assert their agency and openly critique hegemonic power, structural racism, and educational inequities in relation to their identities and storying. In this section, we briefly discuss what counterstories are and the ways educational researchers take up counterstories in theory and practice. Doing so allows us to examine how counterstory is an important storying strategy that intentionally uses narratives to resist and counter normalized practices and ways of being that get imposed onto others.
What Are Counterstories or Counternarratives?
A counterstory, or counternarrative production, represents the knowledges, perspectives, and experiences of Black people and others marginalized by racial oppression and white dominance (Smith et al., 2007). As early as the late 18th century, many former slaves published accounts of their lives in bondage. One such person was Harriet Jacobs (1861), who sought to counter negative public perceptions about Black women in the South. In her published narrative, she wrote, But I do earnestly desire to arouse the women of the North to a realizing sense of the condition of two millions of women in the South, still in bondage, suffering what I suffered, and most of them far worse. (p. 6)
She continued, “I want to add my testimony to that of abler pens to convince the people of the Free States what Slavery really is” (p. 6). In addition to Jacobs’s narrative and the rich body of other slave narratives, counterstories are also prevalent in different aspects of Black life: in Gil Scott Heron’s poetry, Dead Prez’s rap music, India Arie’s songs, and Chadwick Boseman’s acting, as well as in Negro spirituals, in chain gang chants, and on protest signs.
Matsuda (1987) encourages us to “look to the bottom” for counterstories, which are historically and contemporaneously absent from dominant narratives of life in the United States. “The bottom” includes People of Color (e.g., Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and Pacific Islander) who have been systematically excluded from “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Yet these very people offer rich perspectives relevant to critiquing U.S. social life, power structures, and government policies. A key feature of institutionalized white supremacy, which is the cornerstone of policy and practice in the United States, is the denial of the full humanity of People of Color. Counterstories challenge dominant narratives of race, equal opportunity, and responsibility and thereby advance movements toward justice. By “looking to the bottom” and taking into account “the actual experience, culture, and intellectual tradition of people of color in America” (Matsuda, 1987, p. 325), scholarship, jurisprudence, and societal discourses are strengthened.
Counternarrative Production in Education
Critical race scholars in education (Crenshaw, 1991; Delgado, 2006; Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995; Solórzano & Yosso, 2002) use counterstories to challenge narratives that ignore or undervalue communities whose members are non-white and economically disadvantaged. In critically examining these narratives, Solórzano and Yosso (2002) uncover “how students of color experience and respond to the U.S. educational system” (p. 37). In academic scholarship, counterstories take a variety of forms, including the personal narrative of the writer, retelling of other people’s stories, and composite stories. Composite counterstories allow researchers to bring together quantitative and qualitative data to illustrate realities facing communities subjugated by oppression. For example, Smith et al. (2007) constructed a composite story to demonstrate how derogatory beliefs about Black men shape the campus climate at a fictional university. The account details a campus debacle sparked after white students in blackface enacted prank robberies for which Black students suffered harassment. Although the story is fictional, the realities it highlights are relevant to conversations about how Black people experience oppression, whereas white people experience privilege. When developing composite stories, Solórzano and Yosso (2002) advocate for “theoretical sensitivity” and “cultural intuition” to understand and interpret the nuances in data, and to privilege personal and community experiences.
Insofar as classroom and community contexts are concerned, counterstories emphasize critical literacies and relationship-building among people who experience marginalization. Gachago et al. (2014) investigate how Black South African students in a teacher training program shared digital counterstories that promoted healing and community building. Students critiqued social oppression, discussed not being alone in their experiences with oppression, and examined strategies others used to persevere. This example points to the need to view classrooms and communities as sites of resistance and affirmation. On this point, Kynard (2010) discusses “Cyber Sista-Cipher,” an online space that served as a “hush harbor” for Black girls and their Black woman professor to discuss “school, school assignments, school discussions, school writing, and racist or Western assumptions” (p. 35). “Cyber Sista-Cipher” openly used African American Language in their communications without the threat of assumed intellectual deficiency. Their counternarratives enacted “daily subversion and resistance of the dominant discourses that decided what counted as valued language, experience, and knowledge” (p. 41).
There are additional studies on the importance of counterstories in literacy education. For instance, in Jackson’s (2008) research on writing and writing centers, she examined how the writings produced by a Latinx student in tutor–tutee sessions in a college writing center countered dominant ideas about who should and should not have access to college, who can and cannot write, and whose stories and lived experiences are valid or not valid. For Jackson, writing centers can be sites where minoritized students are encouraged to critique “institutional and disciplinary stories told about them” in ways that motivate them to produce counterstories. The production of counterstories is significant for how Black students and teachers critique and resist how people
In the remainder of this academic counternarrative, we examine how literature on storying, identity, and counterstories relates to contemporary examples from young people (Rachel Jeantel, Amariyanna “Little Miss Flint” Copeny, and youth who advance Colin Kaepernick’s activism) whose experiences at the crossroads of racism, (in)justice, and activism played out in the public domain. We consider how their actions not only resist the white gaze, but also rely on critical literacies to highlight pervasive social problems. Thereafter, we connect these examples to vignettes from our research data on how young people and adults engage in counternarratives as a storying strategy to resist racist discourses in schools. This discussion leads us to propose a pedagogical agenda grounded in linguistic, racial, and social justice for Black lives.
Racism, Injustice, and Activism: Contemporary Examples
Rachel Jeantel
In June 2013, Rachel Jeantel testified as a witness for the prosecution of George Zimmerman. She was on the phone with Trayvon Martin when Zimmerman followed, attacked, and shot him dead; she was the last person to speak to Martin before he died. Jeantel, a 19-year-old Black student at the time, was characterized in the courts as rude, angry, uncooperative, and aggressive because of how she storied her testimony. That is, to tell her story about the murder of her best friend, she unapologetically used “her own particular, idiosyncratic black girl idiom, a mashup of her Haitian and Dominican working-class background, her U.S. Southern upbringing, and the three languages—Haitian Kreyol (or Creole), Spanish and English—that she speaks” (Cooper, 2013, p. 1). Unsurprisingly, mainstream white America did not approve; a disapproval often directed toward Black youth inside schools, in the media, online, and in other public contexts—a disapproval that Black people experience all too often.
Because of sociohistorical narratives of deficit and deviance that are ascribed to their bodies and language, as well as the marginalized positions they are often relegated to within society, each time a young Black person speaks in public, they open themselves up to being critiqued by the white gaze. As Erevelles (2014) describes, the “heavy-set, dark-skinned African American teenage girl [Jeantel], fidgeting self-consciously in the glare of television cameras and strangers’ eyes, represents the embodiment of irreducible difference that their White upper-class privileged heteronormative patriarchal masculinity finds impossible to bridge” (as cited in Lawrence-Brown & Sapon-Shevin, 2014, p. ix). Zimmerman’s attorney viewed her as “untrustworthy, uncouth, uneducated, and sometimes stupid” (p. ix). Jeantel was publicly constructed as deviant, not only because of how she was storying her experiences, but also because of how others read her Black body and used offensive language to talk about her (see Smith, 2013, for more on Jeantel’s interview with Piers Morgan). Jeantel told her story and advocated for her and her friend’s truth, life, and humanity, despite the racist treatment she received from representatives of U.S. legal, government, and media institutions.
“Little Miss Flint”
During President Barack Obama’s second term, activists increasingly raised awareness about the water crisis in Flint, Michigan. The voice of then 10-year-old Amariyanna “Mari” Copeny, also known as “Little Miss Flint,” demanded justice for the children of Flint. A few years later, she penned a letter to President Obama, asking him to visit the town and take action. In addition to inviting the president, Copeny noted, “I am one of the children that is effected by this water, and I’ve been doing my best to march in protest and to speak out for all the kids that live here in Flint” (Los Angeles Times Staff, 2016).
In his response, President Obama not only announced his visit to Flint but also promised to acknowledge Amariyanna’s voice and the issues facing her community. More recently, Amariyanna has been using social media to engage in online fundraising to create experiences for other children in her town (e.g., going to see the movie
Black Youth Respond to Colin Kaepernick’s Protest
When former football star Colin Kaepernick began kneeling during the national anthem performance at the NFL football games in September 2016, he did so to raise awareness around police violence against Black people in the United States. Kaepernick stated, “There are bodies in the street and people are getting paid leave and getting away with murder” (as cited in Wyche, 2016). His peaceful protest garnered awareness and controversy, with some calling him unpatriotic. Black youth across the country were inspired to join in this protest to be in solidarity with Kaepernick and to increase demands for freedom, justice, and equality for Black people—especially regarding their treatment by police and the criminal justice system. As young Black people began kneeling as protest on sports fields, they also shared their own stories about what it means to be young and Black in the United States. For example, a team of high school football players who attend an all-Black private school in Maryland decided to kneel because, as senior Josiah Gill stated, “We’re aware of what’s going on in this country as Black males” (as cited in Ortiz, 2018). For Gill, “what’s going on” includes frightening encounters with police—like the time he and a friend were pulled over by a white police officer who said they were playing their music too loud. The officer demanded they step outside of the car for a search. Gill recalls that they were careful to not make any sudden movements and to follow the officer’s commands. They took such cautions even though, as he told the officer, “We don’t have anything on us” (as cited in Ortiz, 2018). Gill and his teammates believed that by taking a knee on the field, they could use their platform to raise awareness about their experiences with racism.
Students and teachers across the country also honored Kaepernick as a leader in the fight for civil rights, and some voiced their concern over administrative censorship of his image in schools. For example, when the assistant principal of Abby Kelley Foster High School in Massachusetts removed a poster of Kaepernick that students had displayed, student council vice president Naleigha Evans posted on Twitter, Abby Kelley, a school full of BLACK students refuses to allow us to recognize Kaepernick and all the people effected by police brutality because the admin have police in their family and they take offense to police brutality . . . RIDICULOUS. (as cited in Shaner, 2019)
In openly protesting what she viewed as unfair treatment by school authorities, Evans and her classmates started a movement. Their activism included a petition, signed by the “Abby Kelley 7,” requesting stories and testimonies from current and former students of the school about their experiences with racial discrimination there. The letter, also circulated on Twitter, states, “We are currently working to make a permanent change, starting with the school’s policies which allow for bias towards students” (Evans, 2019). The letter requests support from the Abby Kelley community as follows: “Explain how the situation made you feel. Explain how the situation may still effect you. We need to make sure that they understand how it makes us feel . . . even after we leave AKF” (Evans, 2019). Alongside the letter, Evans commented, “I hope they didn’t think we were done” (Evans, 2019).
The aforementioned accounts illustrate how young Black people, aware of the entrenchment of racism in their daily lives within and beyond schools, also understand the power of storying to advocate for equity.
Rachel Jeantel, “Little Miss Flint,” and Kaepernick-Inspired Youth
Collectively, the contemporary examples represent how youth story their experiences, assert their identities, and engage in counternarrative production to resist “the weighty forces of racism, patriarchy, economic inequality, homophobia, and ecological abuse on our necks” (West, 1994, p. 159). Their embodiment of strength in the face of racist discourses of power and privilege allude to West’s argument that there remains an ongoing need to “point out the vicious effects of our racial divide and the pernicious consequences of our maldistribution of wealth and power” (p. 159). One way to do this work is by looking closely at how youth tell stories about their experiences in schools and society as they resist monolingualism, marginalization, and racism, and as they develop counternarratives that center their linguistic modes of expression, identities, and counternarrative production.
Counternarrative Production as a Storying Strategy
The following vignettes derive from qualitative data (e.g., teacher researcher notes, participant observations, interviews, and participant writings) collected from research studies on the languages, literacies, and community engagements of Students and Teachers of Color in urban educational contexts. Before we describe the methodological framings that guided each study, it is important that we talk about the valuable role of triangulation in our methodological approach, which occurred within and across each study.
Triangulation Within and Across the Data Sets
Triangulation of data, which refers to a combination of research methods or data sources (Creswell & Miller, 2000; Denzin & Lincoln, 2005; Taylor et al., 2016), occurred in both studies from which the following research vignettes derive. According to Taylor et al. (2016), triangulation is often thought of as a way of checking out insights gleaned from different informants or different sources of data. By drawing on other types and sources of data, observers also gain a deeper and clearer understanding of the setting and people being studied. (pp. 93–94)
Relatedly, Denzin and Lincoln (2005) contend that while “triangulation is not a tool or a strategy of validation but an alternative to validation,” it is “a strategy that adds rigor, breadth, complexity, richness, and depth to any inquiry” (p. 5).
We triangulated data for each individual study by using multiple methods (e.g., interviews, observations, and written artifacts) to collect data, which allowed us to highlight the complexity of our research approach. In addition, we triangulated data across the two studies to better understand how various youth and adults, within different spatial-temporal conditions, resist the white gaze. Although uncommon, data triangulation across studies allowed us to map out the richness of human behavior, interaction, and responses to persistent issues related to linguistic and racial injustices. This type of triangulation encouraged us to identify larger pedagogical implications of resisting “the gaze” in teaching and learning.
Methodology and Method for Each Study
The first research vignette represents an exchange among students in one of Valerie’s earlier college-level writing courses in the state of Texas. The course enrolled approximately 25 first-year students, many of whom were first-generation college Students of Color. Although the course was a freshman-level composition course, students spent a majority of the time thinking, debating, and writing about what it means for them to have a right to their own language. This occurred through whole-class collaborations on the design of a shared reading list that included chapters from Pat Mora’s
Students participated in group discussions, facilitated class sessions, wrote journals and essays, interviewed peers and family members, and completed a project on language rights and identity. As the teacher and researcher, Valerie collected their writings, journaled about the collaborative classroom exchanges, and conducted interviews. Data were coded for recurring themes of language, rights, and, struggle, and reflective notes were made about how students produced narratives on these themes to counter normalized expectations of success and belonging.
The second and third research vignettes derive from a long-term participatory action research study in the state of New York. In the study, Valerie was first a participant observer inside a high school English language arts class where she observed the language practices of 29 students and their teacher. She was interested in learning about how students were invited—by their Black woman teacher who utilized African American Language—to use their own language forms to engage in academic tasks. Over time, Valerie began to work closely with a smaller subset of students who talked about their language and writing practices as well as their school and community engagements. Together, they discussed a variety of topics: the utility of Black English in school and society, what it means to be a traitor to Black English, and the effects of gentrification on the sociopolitical engagements of a community of Black residents.
Throughout her time as a participant observer, learner, and researcher, Valerie documented observations in an ethnographic journal and participated in audio- and video-recorded sessions with youth and their teacher in the school and community. They exchanged writing journals and interviewed other students, teachers, and community members about language rights, identity, and gentrification. Surveys on gentrification were distributed to approximately 168 students and their teachers in Grades 9 through 12 at the school. Additional surveys were distributed to students participating in after-school or summer educational initiatives at community organizations. Data were coded and digitized for recurring themes of community, struggle, and resistance. With participants, Valerie analyzed data for relative meaning. Doing so encouraged participants to have additional conversations about decentering monolingualism and monoculturalism. Eventually, she invited Carlotta and Tanja to re-analyze data as part of a layered process involving nuanced forms of cross-study data triangulation.
Storying, Identity, and Counternarrative Production
Research Vignette 1
The belief that “it [getting crazy looks] has more to do with who’s talkin’ and what language form that person’s usin’” served as an entry into a series of conversations on language rights, identity, and marginalization with undergraduate college students and Valerie in an English composition course in Houston, Texas. These conversations stemmed from student observations about the location of the university—in close proximity to bayous, a county jail, the downtown area, and historic urban communities—and the idea that the students in this course are on the margins. Hence, when Valerie asked, “What does it mean to be on the margins?” students referenced receiving “crazy looks,” not being understood by peers, and popular perceptions of acceptable language as “proper or standard or . . . sound[ing] like the teacher.” They associated the location of this university with how they thought others identified them: as on the margins and as nonspeakers of DAE.
It was important for students to have space and time inside the classroom to explore meanings of language rights and the consequences of language oppression in reaching an understanding, in the words of Victoria, that they have a “right to use language to deny being on the margins.” Victoria, a young African American woman who felt passionately about students’ language rights, explained, Why not talk up with our language . . . if we don’t, they’ll think they can talk for us. Did you give ’em permission to talk for you? Do you run the risk of being labeled inferior, even when you conform to their standards? Should you risk being seen for who you are by using your language? Why we think we gotta live by other people’s standards when they don’t live by ours?
There was a moment of silence, followed by additional questions from Victoria: “You see yourself as less than? You living by other people’s standards and they don’t know nothing about you?” José, a Latinx student, replied, “We’re not marginal. Why we living under their rules?” Victoria’s and José’s questions sparked ongoing conversations not only about the rights of students to their own languages and linguistic varieties, but also about whiteness, white middle-class values, and how students in this class—mainly Black and Latinx—could resist how others negatively position them. These conversations led Valerie to invite students to collaborate on the selection of course readings and the design of assignments on language rights, language oppression, and racism.
José volunteered to facilitate a conversation on June Jordan’s essay, “Problems of Language in a Democratic State,” and Victoria asked whether she could do the same thing, but for a chapter from Geneva Smitherman’s book Nevertheless and notwithstanding differences of power, money, race, gender, age and class, there remains one currency common to all of us. There remains one thing that makes possible exchange, shared memory, self-affirmation and collective identity. And isn’t that currency known and available to everybody regardless of this and that? And isn’t that common currency therefore the basis for a democratic state that will not discriminate between the stronger and the weak? And isn’t that indispensable, indiscriminate, or non-discriminating, currency, our language? Isn’t that so? (Jordan, 2002, pp. 223–224)
José said he agreed with Jordan’s claim that everyone has a right to language. However, “our common currency, language,” according to José, is really not that common because it does not make all of us equal or strong or rich . . . For the people in power in this democracy, Standard English is superior to all others. And what Jordan really wants to know is what the hell are we doing about it?
Relatedly, Victoria’s discussion of Smitherman’s (2000) text highlighted the importance of teachers encouraging students to understand that Black English “can be/is power, that they can/must develop that power, and that ultimately in the struggle for Black liberation,” Black English is a necessary form of communication (p. 131). Victoria directed everyone to the following passage: Let me say right from the bell, this piece is not to be taken as an indictment of ALL English teachers in inner city Black schools, for there are, to be sure, a few brave, enlightened souls who are doing an excellent job in the ghetto. To them, I say: just keep on keepin’ on. But to those others, that whole heap of English teachers who be castigating Black students for using a “nonstandard” dialect—I got this to say: the question in the title [English teacher, why you be doing the thangs you don’t do?] is directed to you, and if the shoe fits, put it on. (Smitherman, 2000, p. 123)
Victoria used this passage to discuss her experiences with teachers who admonished her for using Black English. “They might as well had called me stupid,” shared Victoria, “for how they talked about me because of my language.” She continued, I take from Smitherman power . . . to use Black English to make sense of the world, of myself. I felt like I was in oppressive relationships in school, like the person who’s supposed to love you, yells at you for how you talk. That ain’t love.
To this, Denise, another young African American woman in the class, shared, “That’s hate for who we are. You internalize that hate and soon enough you stop talking.”
Victoria and José used course readings to examine the power of language to oppress or to free people from others’ negative perceptions of them. They produced counternarratives to language their experiences regarding language rights, linguistic oppression, and systemic marginalization experienced by countless Black and Brown students. They asked important questions: “What the hell are we doing about it [that DAE is deemed
Victoria and her peers have refused to stop using Black English to survive in a society that, according to Denise, “wants us to hate our skin,” to which Victoria added, “and language.” Victoria’s, José’s, and their peers’ selection and discussion of course texts and, later, their essays, group work, and additional presentations, collectively represented their attempts to counter negative perceptions about the languages of Students of Color. They refused to remain silent and, similar to the contemporary examples we discussed earlier, they were aware that storying their experiences was oftentimes read, under the guise of whiteness, as oppositional and offensive because they did not conform to white expectations.
Research Vignette 2
During a series of interview sessions, mediated by questions codesigned by Valerie and youth participants on language rights, Phillip and Khaleeq shared their understandings of Black English and DAE, and debated larger assumptions of what it means to talk right or talk wrong. When Valerie asked Phillip and Khaleeq, “What does the phrase ‘students’ right to their own language’ mean to you?” Phillip replied that teachers do not want students to use the language they know inside classrooms because of negative assumptions they have of students. Phillip shared, “Some teachers don’t care about their students and will think that he is only using his own language because he doesn’t care.” For Phillip and Khaleeq, as long as teachers have negative perceptions of students’ languages and linguistic abilities, then students will never have a right to their own language. Khaleeq attributed teachers’ resistances to students having a right to their own language to their lack of awareness that there are multiple languages and language varieties, and to the misconception that Black English is not a language of communication and survival. According to Khaleeq, “They see it as slang. They dismiss it without learning what it is,” to which Phillip added, “They don’t want to know why it’s important for Black people.”
In many ways, Phillip and Khaleeq were coming to terms with their understandings of language rights in relation to perceptions others have of Black English (as “slang”) and DAE (as “standard”). They debated the validity and utility of Black English as connected to Black people’s historical contributions, struggles for human rights, and demands for educational and political justice. They talked about how Black English gets enacted upon Black bodies even in the absence of oral communicative exchanges (see Ibrahim, 2014). On this latter point, Phillip explained, “Black English is what we speak, wear, who we are. It’s my culture, my walk, it’s like, who I am. I don’t think about it much, but someone’ll say something about me or how I look or talk, and it’s like, oh, you judgin’ ’cause of what you
Phillip added, “Students have a right to language. Personally, that’s why I’mah use Black English. Like I said, I’m not a traitor to Black English.”
Additional evidence that neither Phillip nor Khaleeq is a language traitor surfaces in discussions of the “Students’ Right to Their Own Language” (Conference on College Composition and Communication, 1974) resolution. When Valerie explained that the resolution points to a political time in the United States when an increasing amount of racially, ethnically, and linguistically diverse students sought admittance into colleges and universities, Phillip and Khaleeq highlighted the obvious: the racist discourse around educating “other people’s children” in classrooms that have historically operated under the guise of whiteness (e.g., monolingual environments, traditional instructional approaches, standardized assessments, and the exclusion of diverse texts from the curricula). Phillip did not hesitate to respond: They think they gotta find a way to let us in their spaces. They gotta
Khaleeq replied, “Don’t be fooled, they know our way . . . act like they created it. No different from how they talk Black English and look down on us when we do.” This latter point by Khaleeq echoes earlier sentiments expressed by Phillip, who claims, “It’s kinda funny to say ‘Students’ Right to Their Own Language’ when Black people never had a right to anything in this country for years. Not just Black people, all minorities” (see Kinloch, 2010, p. 124).
There is no question that Phillip and Khaleeq believe that Black English is a language of communication. They are aware of the larger linguistic and racial codes that operate in schools and society, codes that render Black English as slang, as a language of otherness, and as substandard to DAE. However, they resist these codes by asserting their narratives about language rights and about not being a language traitor. Their resistances are revealed in their understandings of the utility and validity of Black English by Black people and in their awareness of the ongoing reappropriation of Black English by white people. Khaleeq’s and Phillip’s perspectives, grounded in conversations about language, identity, and counternarrative production, are significant to highlight. For one, they understand language, generally, and Black English, particularly, as a tool of resistance against discourses that relegate the languages they speak and the bodies they inhabit to spaces of marginality. They are aware of the normalizing, monolingual practices—defined by whiteness and the gaze—that are used to educate
Their counternarratives—that is, their intentional use of stories to counter normalized practices characterized by white middle-class expectations—revealed their active resistance to dominance and their belief that oppositional pedagogies must get enacted in schools. For Phillip, Black English is “a language that Black people use. It’s about communicating and not forgetting where you come from” and for Khaleeq, “Teachers gotta find ways to
Research Vignette 3
In the first two research vignettes, the focus is on how students story their experiences through counternarrative production. In this third vignette, the focus shifts to the storying experiences of a high school English teacher, Ms. L, who believes it is an injustice to “become someone I’m not by changing my language, my identity.” From our data analysis, we have documented specific ways Ms. L rejects “oppressive teaching.” When asked what she means by “oppressive teaching,” Ms. L described teaching that “rejects students and who they are, where they’re from, their strengths . . . that forces them to be in compliance or be complacent with, can I say, uhm, institutional racism?” During a series of interviews, Ms. L referred to the power of language to either encourage students to “know their brilliance” or “destroy their dreams.” When asked for further explanation about Black students and the power of language, Ms. L stated, Some people think you’ve gotta act or talk a certain way to be successful, to have a voice and be heard. You [Valerie] speak Black English, I speak Black English. My students speak Black English . . . anything wrong with us? No. It’s about communicating and knowing the codes to survive based on
Ms. L’s rejection of oppressive teaching and her commitment to encouraging Black students to “respond and resist” materialized in how she interacted with them. She inquired into their lives in ways that demonstrated the extent to which she listened to them and cared about their well-being (e.g., “How’s your mother?” “How was the game?” “You going to the community meeting?” “You need extra guidance on that assignment?”). She made time in class for students to elaborate on their ideas (“When you describe Assata Shakur as an activist, you mean what?” “How would you put Assata Shakur, Malcolm X, and Langston Hughes in conversation? What would that be like? What would you say?”).
As a Black woman teacher who unapologetically uses Black English and DAE in the classroom, Ms. L encourages students to language their experiences alongside her own experiences. During a lesson on reading racial stereotypes in literature and popular culture, Ms. L displayed a variety of images of Black women, to which Katrina, a Black girl in the class, remarked, “Makes me think about women in my family. We all related, but we got different shapes and like hair texture and skin shade.” Katrina added, “Looking at these images and thinking about my family, I get mad ’cause I’ve had, you know [there’s a pause, to which Ms. L says, ‘What you feeling?’], I’ve had white people say we ugly, not pretty, too dark, too light, you know . . . like we be different.” Ms. L commented, Look at us in this room and the beauty. We different. What’s wrong with that? I remember what people said about my hair: “Girl, perm that. It’s nappy. Too big. It’s too thick.” You come to translate that into people really saying, “Can you stop looking Black?” which means, “Look white and take on white values of beauty. Y’all know that ain’t happenin” [laughter].
Katrina’s and Ms. L’s confessions about being ridiculed for how they look speak to the pervasive ways many Black women are read as “different” and “not pretty enough” in comparison with whiteness. Of these expectations, Ms. L encourages Black students to utilize counternarratives as a storying strategy to resist dehumanizing, demoralizing representations. Doing so allows Ms. L to view students as collaborators, leaders, and knowers who engage in counternarrative production to define, for themselves, their own standards and ways of being.
How she stories her experiences in relation to images of beauty, racist portrayals of Black people in popular culture, and “oppressive teaching,” for example, is reflective of how she teaches her classes and affirms the lives, literacies, and language rights of Black students. Ms. L’s teaching does not include traditional instructional approaches that encapsulate much of the public discourse around teaching and teacher education in the United States—a discourse that favors testing drills, standardized testing assessments, worksheets, and rote memorization. Instead, her approach positions teachers and students as knowers and doers, and centers acts of resistance through critical inquiry, collaboration, problem-solving, and socially just interactions. Ms. L works to question how people construct them and . . . to interrogate these constructions because they’re racially driven. We use language to do this. We use what we read and what’s happening in the world. We bring our experiences in. We talk . . . to resist and respond.
Using “language for action” is indicative of Ms. L’s commitment to working with students to language their various experiences through counternarrative production. Ms. L and her students resist oppressive ideologies about who they are and who they should be because they understand their right to language and how they see themselves: as strong and beautiful, Black and proud, smart and different, and destined for greatness, or, as Victoria described, “I’m Black. I’m me. Anybody got a problem with it, don’t bring it to me.” Their discussion of racism, linguistic forms of oppression, and biased standards of beauty leads them to reject renderings of Black bodies as deviant and marginal. Simultaneously, their discussions enhance their awareness of the duality of their identity positions or, for DuBois (1903/1965), that “peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.” DuBois continues, “One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder” (p. 45).
Discussion and Conclusion
What do the contemporary examples and research vignettes reveal about storying, identity, and counternarrative production? How do these examples point to how some youth and adults use language to resist dominant discourses? What are the pedagogical implications of such resistances?
First, we believe it is necessary, in schools and throughout society, to recognize the value of counternarrative production as a legitimate storying strategy that Black people and other People of Color employ to make sense of their lives and to reject racist, public portrayals of their identities. Youth of Color need to be provided the time and space to confront negative depictions others might have of them in ways that motivate them to do what Ms. L refers to as “respond and resist.” From inviting young people to collaborate on the selection of course materials and collectively design assignments, to encouraging them to posit and synthesize responses to texts in ways that allow them to be reflexive of their lived experiences with oppression, young people do use language to resist white dominance. They gain a rich understanding of the larger linguistic, racial, and material consequences of Blackness, and of the power and agency that come with being Black or a Person of Color
In addition, schools must create spaces and provide opportunities for Black youth to engage in counternarrative production by inviting them to use the language they already know inside schools as they gain other communicative forms. Doing so promotes cultural and linguistic flexibility and discourages young people from leaving their identities outside schools. This can stimulate young people’s inquiries into the roles played by storying (the multiple ways people employ communicative tools and practices to voice experiences) and counternarrative production (the intentional use of narratives to resist white, middle-class practices).
From this work, an important implication that emerges is the movement toward a pedagogical agenda grounded in cultural equality and linguistic, racial, and social justice. Insofar as Black youth are concerned, this agenda needs to be responsive to who they are—the realities they bring with them into schools, the languages they use in their everyday interactions, and the ways they identify themselves against the backdrop of how they believe others see and identify them. This agenda must attend to the negative depictions of Black youth and adults in schools and society in ways that decenter the gaze of whiteness and, instead, center the rich, complex practices, heritages, and cultural ways of knowing, being, and doing within Black communities and other Communities of Color. It is necessary that this agenda promotes honest, loving, and humanizing interactions among Black youth and adults and positive self-images within (what must become) equitable educational environments.
Finally, we believe this pedagogical agenda must allow for difficult dialogues to occur about the public assault against Blackness—as experienced by Jeantel, “Little Miss Flint,” and Kaepernik-inspired youth. It must make room for Black youth and adults to story their experiences with, and feelings toward, such assaults in ways that value their identities and counternarrative production, in ways that reaffirm their agency and power, and in ways that lead to the eradication of racist policies and practices that are so heavily steeped within U.S. institutions, including public schools. Otherwise, this agenda will not lead to cultural equality and linguistic, racial, and social justice for Black students, but will continue to reiterate the power of whiteness and the white gaze, “as though our lives have no meaning and no depth without” it (Morrison, as cited in TheAncestorsGift, 1998).
Some Closing Thoughts
We end this academic counternarrative by offering the following suggestions for literacy educators and researchers:
Recognize that Black lives matter, and center Black lives in the curricula and in pedagogical engagements.
Revisit and revise school policies in conversation with students and families. Consider how traditional policies center whiteness and facilitate silencing, exclusion, and the criminalization of Black youth and other Students of Color.
Co-create course readings with students, and encourage them to draw from the list for assignments, presentations, and discussions, as well as for group and independent studies.
Participate in the National Council for Teachers of English African American Read-In as well as NCTE’s many Member Gatherings (see www.ncte.org).
Invite students to create counternarrative journals and blogs as a way to make space for them to talk about and to write their own stories and to respond to events that inaccurately and negatively depict Black youth and Communities of Color.
Teach Jamila Lyiscott’s (2014) TED Talk,
Study Gholdy Muhammad’s (2020) new book,
Form teacher–researcher–student study groups on Bettina Love’s (2019) book,
And remember, truly remember and know, that Black lives matter.
Supplemental Material
966372__Valerie_Kinloch – Supplemental material for Black Lives Matter: Storying, Identities, and Counternarratives
Supplemental material, 966372__Valerie_Kinloch for Black Lives Matter: Storying, Identities, and Counternarratives by Valerie Kinloch, Carlotta Penn and Tanja Burkhard in Journal of Literacy Research
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
References
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