“Love Liberates:” A Kitchen Table Talk on Black Liberatory Education

ABSTRACT

Rooted in the Black feminist tradition, this kitchen table talk brings together scholars who are doing work in the name of liberation. We begin by naming people who ground us in our beings and our work, and from these offerings, we discuss the power of love in the fight for liberation with the hopes of cultivating educational spaces for Black students where they feel loved, seen, validated, and heard. Furthermore, the disruption of the ways knowledge is circulated and produced in the academy was profound in our dialogue of people and organizations that are doing liberatory work centering Black youth for educational justice. We conclude with an exclamation of the necessity of radical self-care through narratives honoring ourselves and the communities in which we serve.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. Contemporary ballroom culture is an underground culture consisting of balls (competitions) and houses (chosen families) that emerged during the 1920s in Harlem. Ballroom culture was created by Black and Brown LGBTQ+ individuals as a space where they could affirm their racial, gender, and sexual identities without fear of rejection or abuse (for more see Reid, 2022).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Dasmen Richards

Dasmen Richards is a PhD student in K-12 Educational Administration and Leadership at Michigan State University. Her research goals are to honor, center, and validate Black girlhoods. Specifically, her research interests are centered around how Black girls share their lived experiences through storytelling and how the process of storytelling cultivates joy.

Gholnecsar (Gholdy) Muhammad

Gholnecsar (Gholdy) Muhammad is an associate professor of Literacy, Language, and Culture at the University of Illinois-Chicago. She studies Black historical excellence within educational communities with goals of reframing curriculum and instruction today. She is the author of the best-selling book, Cultivating Genius: An Equity Model for Culturally and Historically Responsive Literacy. She also co-authored the book, Black girls’ literacies: An Edited Volume, published by Routledge.

Wallace Grace

Wallace Grace is a PhD Candidate in Education Policy Studies in the Social Sciences and Education Concentration at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. As a practitioner, Wallace has spent 15 years in K-12 education working in schools, districts, and education nonprofits in D.C., Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Chicago, and Atlanta. His dissertation project is a quantitative exploration of preschool Black boys’ social and emotional well-being and learning across the primary ecologies of their early childhood.

Kara May

Kara May is an educator with over 20 years of experience who is invested in providing unparalleled opportunities for middle and high school students through her work as Director of Art in Motion (AIM), a creative arts charter school on the South Side of Chicago. She believes in the importance of Community, Creativity, Love, and Excellence, and strives to embed each element in all aspects of her work at AIM.

Shamari Reid

Shamari Reid is an assistant professor in the Department of Teaching and Learning at New York University. His work explores how Black trans and queer youth and their communities sustain themselves amidst oppression, as well as how we can collaborate with these communities to better transform schools into sites of equitable opportunities for Black LGBTQ+ youth. He was selected as one of the 2020-2022 Fellows in the NCTE Research Foundation’s Cultivating New Voices Among Scholars of Color Program.

M. Billye Sankofa Waters

M. Billye Sankofa Waters is an assistant professor with the University of Washington Tacoma. She identifies as a Hip Hop generation Black girl from the Southside of Chicago who curates storytelling toward everyday practices of liberation. She grounds her work in Black storytelling/critical literacies, qualitative research methods, community praxis and liberatory education, Black feminism, and critical race theory.

Maisha Winn

Maisha Winn is the Chancellor’s Leadership Professor and the Co-Founder and Co-director (with Torry Winn) of the Transformative Justice in Education (TJE) Center in the School of Education at the University of California, Davis. Her research examines the ways in which teachers and adult allies for youth in schools and in out-of-school contexts practice “justice” in the teaching of literacy.