1,172
Views
11
CrossRef citations to date
0
Altmetric
Research Article

“It’s really geniuses that live in the hood”: Black urban youth curricular un/makings and centering Blackness in slavery’s afterlife

Pages 35-56 | Published online: 18 Jan 2021
 

Abstract

Curriculum within the US was birthed in a context of antiblackness and continues to operate as anti-Black through imagining Black youth as less than and uneducable. However, despite the ways educational space has historically worked to image Black children and communities through deficit lenses, the creation of non-traditional Black curricular spaces has long served as a strategy of resistance. In this paper, I examine the ways Black urban youth leveraged a co-created non-traditional curricular space, grounded in centering Blackness to make sense of their educational experiences. I draw from an academic yearlong (2016–2017) critical ethnography, centered in Black Critical Theory (BlackCrit), to examine what is revealed about Black living and learning and curriculum, through centering Blackness in a non-traditional curricular space. Theoretically framed through BlackCrit and Sharpe’s (Citation2016) concept of wake work, I analyze critical literacy artifacts and interview data to examine how centering antiblackness, a strength-based positioning, facilitated Black curricular un/makings that worked to: 1) center Black empowerment and 2) affirm Black knowledge. I use the term curricular un/makings to represent the ways the Black youth leveraged their life-worlds to disrupt or abandon nation-state curriculum (unmake anti-Black curricular space) to compose new ideations of curriculum and curricular space (make curriculum anew by centering Blackness). Black curricular un/makings represent the intentional process of deconstructing anti-Black curriculum through an unapologetic centering of a Black ethos.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Figure 1. Anita’s To Be a Problem artifact.

Figure 1. Anita’s To Be a Problem artifact.

Figure 2. Maya’s Racism Revisited artifact.

Figure 2. Maya’s Racism Revisited artifact.

Notes

1 I capitalize Black/s throughout this paper, because Blacks represent a specific cultural group or ethnicity (interchangeable here with African-American for my participants), thus Black is a proper noun and requires capitalization. I do not capitalize white as whites do not represent a specific cultural group (Crenshaw, 1991).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Justin A. Coles

Justin A. Coles is an assistant professor in the Department of Curriculum and Teaching in the Graduate School of Education at Fordham University.

Log in via your institution

Log in to Taylor & Francis Online

PDF download + Online access

  • 48 hours access to article PDF & online version
  • Article PDF can be downloaded
  • Article PDF can be printed
USD 53.00 Add to cart

Issue Purchase

  • 30 days online access to complete issue
  • Article PDFs can be downloaded
  • Article PDFs can be printed
USD 250.00 Add to cart

* Local tax will be added as applicable

Related Research

People also read lists articles that other readers of this article have read.

Recommended articles lists articles that we recommend and is powered by our AI driven recommendation engine.

Cited by lists all citing articles based on Crossref citations.
Articles with the Crossref icon will open in a new tab.