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ERIC Number: EJ1355512
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2022-Oct
Pages: 8
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0013-189X
EISSN: EISSN-1935-102X
Critiquing Racial Literacy: Presenting a Continuum of Racial Literacies
Chávez-Moreno, Laura C.
Educational Researcher, v51 n7 p481-488 Oct 2022
"Racial literacy" has contributed powerful advances in multiple disciplines about how race and racism are understood. Many education scholars use the concept to refer to antiracist practices and ideologies, a definition that casts some people as either racially literate or illiterate. In this essay the author draws on examples from education literature to argue that this interdisciplinary conceptual norm hinders scholars' attempts to reveal the dominance of race-evasiveness, however unintentionally, for two reasons. First, describing people as racially literate or illiterate implies that those who adopt race-evasive or racist ideologies are not interpreting racial ideas, which overlooks that all people who live in a racist society engage in literacy practices that make meaning of race. Second, construing racial literacy strictly as antiracist obscures that making meaning of race can be done through hegemonic ideologies. This accepted conceptualization may stymie useful analyses of hegemonic ideologies that predominate in U.S. society and schools. The author presents a "continuum of racial literacies" to differentiate between "hegemonic" and "counterhegemonic racial literacies." The continuum's exposure of "hegemonic racial literacies" encourages scholars to capture the hidden ideologies in literacy practices that may not exhibit an explicit racial focus but nevertheless perpetuate racism. Furthermore, the author suggests eschewing the labels "racially illiterate" and "racially literate" and instead affirms that people become racially literate through both racist and antiracist literacy practices. Instead of "racially illiterate" or "literate," the author submits "consciousness" as a more apt term and connects the continuum's counterhegemonic end to developing "critical-racial consciousness," an antiracist lens.
SAGE Publications. 2455 Teller Road, Thousand Oaks, CA 91320. Tel: 800-818-7243; Tel: 805-499-9774; Fax: 800-583-2665; e-mail: journals@sagepub.com; Web site: https://bibliotheek.ehb.be:2993
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Evaluative
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A