Cross-Talkin’: Black parents and youths’ resistance, education, and action

Abstract

In this three-part article, we present two studies of Black political education and resistance to archive and document examples of the ongoing struggle for educational equity. In the first portion of the article, Goss’s study uses an analysis of race, power, and policy to map the evolution of school discipline reform legislation, and advocacy efforts enacted by members of a particular parent community organization. Using archival and life history interview data, Patel presents a cross-generational examination of the internal political education and external public pedagogies that Black youth engaged in during the 1960s and how that echoes into various contemporary social movements for Black and brown young peoples’ rights. The article closes with a duoethnographic discussion in which both authors contribute what is contextually salient across both studies in the interest of what readers might consider about education, resistance, and freedom struggles in their own spaces.

Keywords:

• Black political education
• parent organizing
• youth organizing
• anti-Black racism
• coloniality

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 Goss is a Black woman scholar; Patel is a South Asian first generation woman scholar. Our use of ‘we’ refers to the long-standing history of anti-Black racism and resistance.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Adrienne C. Goss

Adrienne Goss is an assistant professor of education and social policy at Rhode Island College. Her research focuses on how education policies affect minoritized and low-income children and youth, and how parents and community members can become more involved in the process of school reform.

Leigh Patel

Leigh Patel is a professor of urban education at the University of Pittsburgh's School of Education. She is also a proud national board member of Education for Liberation. Her research focuses on the ways that education is both an efficient machine of social reproduction and holds the potential to be a tool for liberation.