This article examines the role of play-based early childhood programs in perpetuating or interrupting messages of white supremacy which murder the spirits of Black children while reinforcing a sense of entitlement in white children. We ask educators to consider what children's play might look like if pro-Black teaching and anti-racist teaching…

How do you ensure that no student is invisible in your classroom? How do you make the distinction between equity as the vehicle versus equity as the goal for each of your students? What measures do you take to ensure that you are growing as a culturally relevant practitioner? Can your students, particularly your Black students, articulate, beyond…

As sociologists with a keen interest in supporting anti-racist research and educational initiatives, Dr. Taylor's paper providing Stuart Whigham and Jason Arday with an engaging and insightful interest to a contrasting disciplinary approach to achieving equality in educational outcomes for Black students through her psychologically-informed…

"Talking College" shows that language is fundamental to Black and African American culture and that linguistic justice is crucial to advancing racial justice, both on college campuses and throughout society. Writing from a linguistics-informed, Black-centered educational framework, the authors draw extensively on Black college students'…

Black mattering is contested terrain. As we write this, more than 25 states and municipalities have proposed or passed legislation banning critical race theory (CRT) and the incorporation of material(s) that upset the normative curricular and pedagogical conditions of whiteness. Against this backdrop, "what is mattering for Black…

The scholarly paper explores how racial justice and college credentials have become conflated despite the higher education system being a site of anti-Blackness. The argument is advanced through analyzing critiques of higher education--stratification, lack of support, un(der)employment, and consumerism--on Kanye West's first album "The…

In 2022, many are coming to understand that racism is a proverbial pollutant in the water people in the U.S drink. Moreover, it is a toxin all members of a race-based society consume, and all must address. In this paper, I share my reflexive journey facing and dismantling racism in my own teaching praxis--examining ways I have upheld structures of…

In the early 1960s, colleges and universities in the United States launched dozens of new pre-college programmes for low-income and predominantly African American high school students. Many of these initiatives were inspired by the civil rights movement. Moved by the sit-ins, marches and boycotts that had riveted the nation, a range of educators…

This paper examines how Black community-based youth workers navigate anti-Black racism in their educational programming with Black youth in a majority white college town widely recognized as 'nice,' 'liberal,' and 'progressive' with stark racial disparities between its Black and white residents. With racial liberalism and BlackCrit as theoretical…

It is well known that Black students have higher expectations for attending college than their White and non-White peers, yet consistently lag behind in degree attainment. It is important then that practitioners use differentiated approaches with and researchers offer disaggregated analyses of historically underrepresented racial/ethnic…

In the face of persistent racial injustice, critical literacy approaches to instruction frequently involve investigating and altering unjust racialized power structures through critical action. However, what happens when youth have become understandably skeptical of action for change? This analysis uses healing frameworks to explore the critical…

This work analyzed three grade 9 English Language Arts classroom discussions and contributions by Black youth as resistance acts. Using a framework of resistance based on an indigenous understanding of progress provided insight into how student resistance emerged in language as metaphor and stories. Thematic analysis of the three classroom…

In response to anti-Black policing in 2020 that led to the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, Black children and teens turned to poetry as a means to channel their self-described terror, rage, pain, horror, tiredness, and need for change. Reminiscent of the poetry of the Black Arts Movement and works published in "The Black…

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…

Purpose: Historically, literacy education and research have been dominated by white supremacist narratives that marginalize and deficitize the literate practices of Black students. As anti-Blackness proliferates in US schools, Black youth suffer social, psychological, intellectual, and physical traumas. Despite relentless attacks of…