The Work Before: A Model for Coalitional Alliance Toward Black Futures in Technical Communication

ABSTRACT

This article offers an approach to providing identity-specific routes for engagement in pro-Black futures in distributed ways. We outline a model designed for Black practitioners and non-Black practitioners in professional environments to navigate their complex relationships given the historical, cultural, and social nature of coalitional work. We demonstrate this model as a possible pathway for situated and distributed everyday coalitional work through reflective and introspective storytelling based on individual and shared positionality.

KEYWORDS:

• Black technical and professional communication
• coalition
• reflection
• positionality
• Afrofuturism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Asante (1991) describes Afrocentricity as centering the point of view and culture of members of the African diaspora. As he notes, “Afrocentricity does not condone ethnocentric valorization at the expense of degrading other groups’ perspective” (p. 172).

2. Drawing on Eshun (2003), Morris (2012) describes Afrofuturism as not only “posit[ing] that blacks will exist in the future, as opposed to being harbingers of social chaos and collapse, but in ‘recovering the histories of counter-futures,’ Afrofuturism insists that blacks fundamentally are the future and that Afrodiasporic cultural practices are vital to imagining the continuance of human society” (p. 153).

3. Black feminist scholars have worked to illustrate that oppressions are linked, interlocking, and dynamic, where systems of race don’t merely add to systems of gender but rather multiply their effects (e.g., Collins, 2000; Crenshaw, 1989; Davis, 1995; King, 1995; McDougald, 1995).

4. I’m intentional to use both whiteness and white supremacy here to illustrate the ways in which these two structures shape and inform each other and my positionality. Specifically, following Leonardo (2009), I posit that whiteness and white supremacy must be understood as different, but dynamic. Whiteness is a product of, and no less violent than, white supremacy.

5. Black and Black queer people are mentioned here juxtaposed to bring attention to the holistic amalgamation of identities salient to me in this moment. This is not to say, however, that by adding them both here in text that these groups are discreet; instead, it is to call specific attention to current languaging practices that refer to Black people broadly that may exclude Black queer people implicitly.

Additional information

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors

Notes on contributors

Floyd Pouncil

Floyd Pouncil (they/him) is a doctoral student in the Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures at Michigan State University. Their praxis exists at the intersections of organizational theory, embodiment, Black feminism, and education design.

Nick Sanders

Nick Sanders (he/him) is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures at Michigan State University. His research interests investigate the intersection of antiracist pedagogy and administration, community literacy, critical whiteness studies, and teacher/consultant education.