This article highlights the organizing role of Blackness and anti-Blackness in the social worlds of nine Black adolescents at an urban high school. Outside and within urban schooling, Black youth understand that anti-Blackness prompts the negotiation of two distinct social worlds—Black and non-Black—however, urban schooling invisibilizes this distinction. Based on a yearlong BlackCrit ethnography, I analyze three scripts of participants’ dialogic storying, which informs a re/imagining of urban schooling social education that explicitly addresses anti-Blackness. Through my findings, I outline sources of anti-Blackness in the lives of participants, explaining its operation at three levels: individual, institutional, and societal.
AllenQ. (2013). “They think minority means lesser than” Black middle-class sons and fathers resisting microaggressions in the school. Urban Education, 48(2), 171–197.
2.
AnnammaS. A.AnyonY.JosephN. M.FarrarJ.GreerE.DowningB.SimmonsJ. (2019). Black girls and school discipline: The complexities of being overrepresented and understudied. Urban Education, 54(2), 211–242.
3.
ArchibaldJ. A. (2008). Indigenous storywork: Educating the heart, mind, body, and spirit. University of British Columbia Press.
4.
Baker-BellA. (2019). Dismantling anti-Black linguistic racism in English language arts classrooms: Toward an anti-racist Black language pedagogy. Theory Into Practice, 59, 8–21.
5.
Banks-WallaceJ. (2002). Talk that talk: Storytelling and analysis rooted in African American oral tradition. Qualitative Health Research, 12(3), 410–426.
6.
BellD. (1991). Racial realism. Connecticut Law Review, 24(2), 363–379.
7.
BurgessR. G. (1984). In the field: An introduction to field research. Routledge.
8.
CamangianP. (2010). Starting with self: Teaching autoethnography to foster critically caring literacies. Research in the Teaching of English, 45(2), 179–204.
9.
ColesJ. A. (2016). Black lives, too, matter in schools: An exploration of symbolic violence against Black youth in America’s schools. Urban Education Research and Policy Annuals, 4(2), 17–33.
10.
ColesJ. A. (2019). The Black literacies of urban high school youth countering antiblackness in the context of neoliberal multiculturalism. Journal of Language & Literacy Education, 15(2), 1–35.
11.
ColesJ. A.PowellT. (2020). A BlackCrit analysis on Black urban youth and suspension disproportionality as anti-Black symbolic violence. Race Ethnicity and Education, 23(1), 113–133.
12.
CreswellJ. W. (2012). Educational research: Planning, conducting, and evaluating quantitative and qualitative research (4th ed.). Pearson Education.
13.
DavisG. Y.StevensonH. C. (2006). Racial socialization experiences and symptoms of depression among Black youth. Journal of Child and Family Studies, 15(3), 293–307.
14.
DayI. (2015). Being or nothingness: Indigeneity, antiblackness, and settler colonial critique. Critical Ethnic Studies, 1(2), 102–121.
15.
DeiG. J. S. (2017). Reframing Blackness and Black solidarities through anti-colonial and decolonial prisms. Springer.
16.
Du BoisW. E. B. (2007). The souls of Black folk. Oxford University Press.
17.
DumasM. J. (2016). Against the dark: Antiblackness in education policy and discourse. Theory Into Practice, 55(1), 11–19.
18.
DumasM. J.rossK. M. (2016). “Be real Black for me”: Imagining BlackCrit in education. Urban Education, 51(4), 415–442.
19.
EllisJ. M.RowleyL. L.NellumC. J.SmithC. D. (2018). From alienation to efficacy: An examination of racial identity and racial academic stereotypes among Black male adolescents. Urban Education, 53(7), 899–928.
20.
FeaginJ. R. (2014). Racist America: Roots, current realities, and future reparations (3rd ed.). Routledge.
21.
FlennaughT. (2017). “Life skills”: A single-sex classroom intervention for Black boys transitioning from middle school to high school. Journal of Urban Learning, Teaching, and Research, 13, 53–62.
22.
GoldsteinR. A. (2005). Symbolic and institutional violence and critical educational spaces: In the name of education. Journal of Peace Education, 2(1), 33–52.
23.
GordonL. R. (Ed.). (1997). Existence in Black: An anthology of Black existential philosophy. Routledge.
24.
HaddixM.Sealey-RuizY. (2012). Cultivating digital and popular literacies as empowering and emancipatory acts among urban youth. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 56(3), 189–192.
25.
HamletJ. D. (2011). Word! The African American oral tradition and its rhetorical impact on American popular culture. Black History Bulletin, 74(1), 27–31.
26.
HammersleyM.AtkinsonP. (1995). Ethnography: Principles in practice. Routledge.
27.
HarrisC. I. (1993). Whiteness as property. Harvard Law Review, 106(8), 1707–1791.
28.
HartmanS. V. (2007). Lose your mother: A journey along the Atlantic slave route. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.
29.
HaynesC.StewartS.AllenE. (2016). Three paths, one struggle: Black women and girls battling invisibility in US classrooms. The Journal of Negro Education, 85(3), 380–391.
30.
HillM. L. (2017). Nobody: Casualties of America’s war on the vulnerable, from Ferguson to Flint and beyond. Simon & Schuster.
31.
HillM. L. (2018). “Thank you, Black Twitter”: State violence, digital counterpublics, and pedagogies of resistance. Urban Education, 53(2), 286–302.
32.
Hines-DatiriD.Carter AndrewsD. J. (2017). The effects of zero tolerance policies on Black girls: Using critical race feminism and figured worlds to examine school discipline. Urban Education, 1–22.
33.
JohnsonL. L.JacksonJ.StovallD. O.BaszileD. T. (2017). “Loving Blackness to death”: (Re) Imagining ELA classrooms in a time of racial chaos. English Journal, 106(4), 60–66.
34.
KinlochV. (2010). Harlem on our minds: Place, race, and the literacies of urban youth. Teachers College Press.
35.
KinlochV.San PedroT. (2014). The space between listening and storying: Foundations for projects in humanization. In ParisD.WinnM. T. (Eds.), Humanizing research: Decolonizing qualitative inquiry with youth and communities (pp. 21–42). SAGE.
36.
KirklandD. E. (2013). A search past silence: The literacy of young Black men. Teachers College Press.
37.
KnausC. B. (2009). Shut up and listen: Applied critical race theory in the classroom. Race Ethnicity and Education, 12(2), 133–154.
38.
KrugerD. (1988). An introduction to phenomenological psychology (2nd ed.). Juta.
39.
LeCompteM. D.PreissleJ. (1993). Ethnography and qualitative design in educational research (2nd ed.). Academic Press. (Original work published 1984)
40.
LeCompteM. D.SchensulJ. J. (2010). Designing & conducting ethnographic research: An introduction (2nd ed.). AltaMira Press.
41.
LewisC. W.JamesM.HancockS.Hill-JacksonV. (2008). Framing African American students’ success and failure in urban settings: A typology for change. Urban Education, 43(2), 127–153.
42.
LindseyT. B. (2018). Ain’t nobody got time for that: Anti-Black girl violence in the era of #SayHerName. Urban Education, 53(2), 162–175.
LoveB. L. (2014). “I see Trayvon Martin”: What teachers can learn from the tragic death of a young Black male. The Urban Review, 46(2), 292–306.
45.
LoveB. L. (2016). Anti-Black state violence, classroom edition: The spirit murdering of Black children. Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy, 13(1), 22–25.
46.
MasseyD. S.DentonN. A. (1993). American aparrtheid: Segregtion and the making of the underclass. Harvard University Press.
MelamedJ. (2011). Represent and destroy: Rationalizing violence in the new racial capitalism. University of Minnesota Press.
49.
MilnerH. R.IV. (2012). But what is urban education?Urban Education, 47(3), 556–551.
50.
MoragaC.AnzaldúaG. (1983). Entering the lives of others: Theory in the flesh. In MoragaC.AnzaldúaG. (Eds.), This bridge called my back: Writings by radical women of color (pp. 23–57). Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press.
51.
NelsonS. L.RidgewayM. L.BakerT. L.GreenC. D.CampbellT. (2019). Continued disparate discipline: Theorizing state takeover districts’ impact on the continued oppression of Black girls. Urban Education, 1–29.
52.
NogueraP. A. (2003). The trouble with Black boys: The role and influence of environmental and cultural factors on the academic performance of African American males. Urban Education, 38(4), 431–459.
53.
NyachaeT. M.OhitoE. O. (2019). No disrespect: A womanist critique of respectability discourses in extracurricular programming for Black girls. Urban Education.
54.
ParisD. (2011). Language across difference: Ethnicity, communication, and youth identities in changing urban schools. Cambridge University Press.
55.
Purcell-GatesV. (2011). Ethnographic research. In DukeN. K.MalletteM. H. (Eds.), Literacy research methodologies (2nd ed., pp. 135–154). Guilford Press.
56.
RitchieJ.LewisJ.ElamG. (2003). Designing and selecting samples. In RithcieJ.LewisJ. (Eds.), Qualitative research practice: A guide for social science students and researchers (pp. 77–108). SAGE.
SaldanaJ. (2009). The coding manual for qualitative researchers. SAGE.
59.
San PedroT.KinlochV. (2017). Toward projects in humanization: Research on co-creating and sustaining dialogic relationships. American Educational Research Journal, 54(Suppl. 1), 373S–394S.
60.
ScheurichJ. J.YoungM. D. (1997). Coloring epistemologies: Are our research epistemologies racially biased?Educational Researcher, 26(4), 4–16.
61.
SharpeC. (2016). In the wake: On Blackness and being. Duke University Press.
62.
SkerrettA.BomerR. (2011). Borderzones in adolescents’ literacy practices: Connecting out-of-school literacies to the reading curriculum. Urban Education, 46(6), 1256–1279.
63.
SkibaR. J.MichaelR. S.NardoA. C.PetersonR. L. (2002). The color of discipline: Sources of racial and gender disproportionality in school punishment. The Urban Review, 34(4), 317–342.
64.
SmedleyA.SmedleyB. D. (2005). Race as biology is fiction, racism as a social problem is real: Anthropological and historical perspectives on the social construction of race. American Psychologist, 60(1), 16–26.
65.
SmithA. (2012). Indigeneity, settler colonialism, White supremacy. In Martinez HoSangD.LaBennettO.PulidoL. (Eds.), Racial formation in the twenty-first century (pp. 66–90). University of California Press.
66.
SojoynerD. M. (2016). First strike: Educational enclosures in Black Los Angeles. University of Minnesota Press.
67.
StanfieldJ. (1985). The ethnocentric basis of social science knowledge production. Review of Research in Education, 12, 387–415.
68.
StichA. E.CipolloneK. (2017). In and through the urban educational “reform churn” the illustrative power of qualitative longitudinal research. Urban Education, 1–27.
69.
TyackD. B. (1974). The one best system: A history of American urban education. Harvard University Press.
70.
WarrenC. A. (2017). Urban preparation: Young Black men moving from Chicago’s South Side to success in higher education. Harvard Education Press.
71.
WarrenC. A.MarcianoJ. E. (2018). Activating student voice through Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR): Policy-making that strengthens urban education reform. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 31(8), 684–707.
72.
WildersonF. B.III. (2010). Red, White & Black: Cinema and the structure of US antagonisms. Duke University Press.
73.
WolfeP. (2006). Settler colonialism and the elimination of the Native. Journal of Genocide Research, 8(4), 387–409.
74.
WoodlandM. H. (2016). After-school programs: A resource for young Black males and other urban youth. Urban Education, 51(7), 770–796.
75.
WunC. (2016). Unaccounted foundations: Black girls, anti-Black racism, and punishment in schools. Critical Sociology, 42(4–5), 737–750.
76.
WynterS. (1989). Beyond the word of man: Glissant and the new discourse of the Antilles. World Literature Today, 63(4), 637–648.
77.
ZwiersJ.CrawfordM. (2011). Academic conversations: Classroom talk that fosters critical thinking and content understandings. Stenhouse Publishers.
