Abstract
For so long, the literacies of Black learners have been ignored, pathologized, and silenced. In addition, an overly broad focus on multiple dimensions of “diversity” often leads us to ignore the unique role anti-Blackness plays in literacy teaching, learning, and research. As scholar Gloria Ladson-Billings (2016) wrote, Literacy and race have been intricately linked for centuries and, until we begin to unpack those linkages, we will continue to struggle to make sense of how race operates in our research and scholarship. . . . We must demonstrate that Black Literate Lives Matter! (p. 10)
In this moment in 2020, we recognize the need to amplify and center research that critiques anti-Black racist ideologies that oppress literacy learners and educators across contexts. The recent killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery have fueled an unprecedented national and global call to affirm and attest that unless Black lives matter, no lives matter. This movement has direct implications for literacy research and the literate lives of all. In short, if Black literacies don’t matter, then Black lives can’t matter.
Many of the pieces in this volume feature Black female voices, and many of the citations reference prominent Black women scholars. This issue aligns with and reflects the movement started by three Black women activists in 2013: Black Lives Matter (BLM). In 2013, the African American Policy Forum (AAPF) started the hashtag #SayHerName as part of the BLM movement. The energy from these roots centers the value of Black lives, including Black female and LGBTQ+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer) lives, and permeates this volume on racial literacy and Black literacy research. While it is unconventional for an editorial team, we have decided to honor individual author preferences related to the capitalization and italicization of Black/black and White/white and derivations of these words (e.g., whiteness/Whiteness, blackness/Blackness). We believe that authors’ chosen presentation of these words is intentional and we choose to honor those intentions over conventions.
The volume opens with Kinloch et al.’s look at Black rejection of dominant linguistic and cultural practices by analyzing instances of injustice and activism as well as literacy research in the form of counternarratives in storytelling. Kinloch concludes “Black Lives Matter: Storying, Identities, and Counternarrative Production” with implications for literacy studies that highlight cultural equality, racial and social justice, and linguistic equality as it affects Black literacy research.
In their piece, “Hey Black Child: Do You Know Who You Are?” Wynter-Hoyte and Smith use Critical Race Theory and Black Critical theory to supplant a colonized first-grade curriculum and replace it with an Afrocentric one that celebrates Black identities, communities, and literacies. In the next piece, “Disrupting Anti-Blackness: Justice-Oriented Solidarity,” Jackson centers Blackness in a high school classroom using critical autoethnographic counterstorytelling. The author proposes a justice-oriented solidarity framework as a tool for scholars and practitioners to use to transform classrooms into anti-racist learning spaces. Authors of both pieces seamlessly blend theory, practice, and activism demonstrating how Black lives and literacies matter in classrooms.
The next two pieces address the intersectionality of race and gender. Kelly features Black female experiences in “‘The Things That Free Us’: Subversive Literacies of Liberation,” partly by examining how literacy practices are deployed to challenge oppression based on race and gender. This longitudinal study uses Black feminist theory to study the development of critical consciousness for two Black women. In “Refusals, Re-Turns, and Retheorizations of Affective Literacies: A Thrice-Told Data Tale,” Thiel and Dernikos apply Crawley’s theory of sonic epistemologies to children in an early childhood education context. The analysis of data from boys playing in a makerspace calls for retheorizing affect in relation to Blackness while avoiding reinscription of Whiteness in literacy education contexts.
The title of Toliver’s piece, “Can I Get a Witness? Speculative Fiction as Testimony and Counterstory,” highlights visibility in a space where erasure is the norm. Just as the BLM movement and the AAPF hashtag #SayHerName demand visibility and witnessing, folding social justice into literacy research spaces contributes to rehumanizing scholarly approaches that value Black female knowledge and experiences in higher education scholarship, which has traditionally been complicit with silence and erasure. The research participant in Toliver’s work centers Black female experiences by using speculative fiction as testimony and counterstory, demanding a new reality in which witnesses are compelled to respond to real, true, and authentic Black experiences.
The issue closes with an evocative call for literacy scholars to center racial literacies for the long term and with the goal of affecting future research, practice, and policy. In “If ‘Black Lives Matter in Literacy Research’, Then Take This Racial Turn: Developing Racial Literacies,” Croom advocates for the application of practice of race theory to move the field toward the intentional construction of a post-White racialized field. Taken together, the work in this volume provides an example of scholarship and practice that align with BLM and #SayHerName and demands a comprehensive model for how equity and justice might permeate the field of literacy research and, by extension, teacher training programs and school classrooms.