Feeling Black: Black Urban High School Youth and Visceral Geographies of Anti-Black Racism

Jenkins, DeMarcus A.

doi:10.1080/10665684.2022.2131196

Cited by 9 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 35 publications

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“…Data from this article are drawn from a larger, two-year critical race ethnographic research project on how the racial messages that are orbiting a predominantly Latinx high school shape Black students’ racial and academic identity formation (Jenkins, 2022). Although the larger project includes several secondary schools in a single district, the data that follow are drawn from conversations with students who attended Manzano High School (MHS), which serves approximately 3,000 students.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Here, I understand antiblackness as a spatial and social grammar where Blackness is constructed as inherently problematic, disposable, and dispossessed of geography, agency, and any sense of social or cultural regard. In addition, very little research has examined Black students’ experiences with antiblack racism at predominantly Latinx secondary schools (Jenkins, 2022). This study addresses this gap.…”

Section: Schools As Racialized Spacesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This study furthers our understanding of Black students’ experiences within racialized organizations (Ray, 2019), such as schools. Elsewhere, I explore this phenomenon by investigating Black students’ academic and social experiences attending high schools in borderland contexts (Jenkins, 2022). Here, I build on and extend my previous work by turning my analysis to Black students who, I argue, are of and in a space while at the same time not quite belonging to it.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Seen and Unseen: Narratives of In/Visibility of Black Youth Who Attend a Predominantly Latinx High School

Jenkins

2023

Teachers College Record: The Voice of Scholarship in Education

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Background/Context: Scholars have identified how antiblackness operates as a specific organizational culture across the educational enterprise by examining Black students in various schooling contexts. However, there remains limited empirical research exploring Black students’ unique experiences in predominantly Latinx educational settings. The presence of Black bodies in institutions like schools from which they have been historically or conceptually excluded, marginalized, or “othered” presents an intriguing context to investigate the intersection of race, place, and the politics of visibility. Research Design: Drawing from an extensive ethnographic project on antiblackness in borderland contexts, this article interrogates Black students’ narratives of in/visibility—stories detailing moments when they felt seen and unseen. I used purposive sampling and recruited 20 Black students to participate in focus groups and individual interviews. Focus groups and interviews were semi-structured, using open-ended questions but centered on circumstances related to in/visibility. I also conducted observations in classrooms, hallways, the cafeteria, and other locations across the school campus. Data Collection and Analysis: Data analysis for this study included coding and recoding transcripts and field notes, and writing analytic memos. The analytic memos served as a site of conversation about the data where I could think deeply about the experiences that my participants shared. Coding and writing analytic memos were concurrent data analytic activities. During analysis, I paid close attention to how students described moments of invisibility, visibility, and hypervisibility. I conducted thematic coding and analysis of the data, which generated key themes. Finally, I reorganized emerging themes several times in relation to the extant literature and theoretical framework. Findings: Building on prior research on antiblackness in education, I use the notions of seen and unseen to describe Black students’ experiences with antiblack structures, practices, and encounters with their non-Black peers and adults. Black youth narratives reveal that their Blackness is simultaneously rendered hypervisible and invisible through the everydayness of antiblackness. The data also reveal that their racialized experiences with in/visibility were concurrently spatial and had implications for how Black students navigated the physical geographies of schools. I found that unseeing is an active process of not acknowledging the bias accompanying explicit practices that enable different people to exist differently in the same space. To unsee is a rejection of the specificity of Black that encodes how Black students navigate spaces where they are not the somatic norm. Further, this posture impacts Black bodies by making them feel simultaneously like outsiders and insiders. As a result, some bodies are deemed as having the right to belong, while others are marked as trespassers. Conclusions and Recommendations Racial moments have material, emotional, and educational consequences for Black students. Being “different” from the somatic norm renders Black bodies simultaneously highly visible and invisible. Research tends to collapse Black and Latinx students into a broader category of “students of color” without disaggregating the distinctive ways in which racialized school systems impact these groups differently. Further, the data presented here demonstrate how antiblack racism shapes the experiences of Black students and draws attention to the urgency of dismantling the people of color colorblindness in research analysis.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Schools As Racialized Spacesmentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Seen and Unseen: Narratives of In/Visibility of Black Youth Who Attend a Predominantly Latinx High School

Jenkins

2023

Teachers College Record: The Voice of Scholarship in Education

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“…Interactions between police or School Resource Officers (hereafter SROs) and Black youth often reveal the manifestations of antiblackness. For example, antiblackness renders Black children as threatening or suspicious regardless of what their bodies are physically doing (Coles & Powell, 2020;Jenkins, 2022;Jenkins, 2023b;Morris, 2016;Warren and Coles, 2020;Warren et al, 2022); in need of constant oversight and supervision (Browne, 2015;Okello, 2022). Such perspectives underlie the institutional foundations of contemporary policing in the United States as evidenced by early manifestations of law enforcement in southern states like Louisiana, Georgia, and South Carolina where uniformed officers were empowered to monitor and enforce discipline upon the enslaved (Muhammad, 2019).…”

Section: Antiblackness Law Enforcement and The Project Of American Sc...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Towards Anti-Carceral Leadership: Remaking Public Schools to Refuse Black Students’ Surveillance, Containment, and Control

Jenkins,

Warren

2024

Educational Policy

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The social movement for #PoliceFreeSchools (and the adjacent campaign on college and university campuses called #PoliceFreeCampuses) welcomes an opportunity to reimagine school discipline and safety in contradistinction to current carceral forms. Scholars have moved away from notions of “school to prison pipeline” by demonstrating the many ways schools are organized as carceral spaces (e.g., school-prison nexus). A conceptual framework of Anti-carceral leadership is put forward in this paper to underscore the need for a leadership paradigm that actively refuses the logics of the carceral state (e.g., social control). The paper underscores how the logics of antiblackness may sustain mechanisms of social control in education policy intended to undo racialized harm. The tensions of be(com)ing an anti-carceral leader and its significance for undoing technologies of punishment, confinement, and constraint that reinforce schooling as a site of Black pain and suffering are discussed.

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“…Data from the last 20-plus years consistently reveal that students who are not white, who speak English as a second language, who have disabilities, who identify as LGBTQIA+, or who are impacted by poverty feel a deep sense of not belonging. They feel excluded and marginalized in the space where they spend a significant proportion of their daily lives (Coles, 2019; Jenkins, 2022).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Safe, seen, and ready to learn

McDaniel-Hall,

Weisling

2024

Phi Delta Kappan

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For far too many students, schools are not places of belonging. This is due, in part, to the cultural mismatch between schools and students that, despite even the best of intentions, too often leads to student harm and negative student outcomes. Gloria McDaniel-Hall and Nina F. Weisling provide insights for understanding why belonging is vital to student learning, how teachers can recognize when they fall short of building spaces where all students feel they belong, and suggestions for starting to learn, unlearn, and relearn so that all students feel safe, seen, and ready to learn.

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Feeling Black: Black Urban High School Youth and Visceral Geographies of Anti-Black Racism

Cited by 9 publications

References 35 publications

Seen and Unseen: Narratives of In/Visibility of Black Youth Who Attend a Predominantly Latinx High School

Seen and Unseen: Narratives of In/Visibility of Black Youth Who Attend a Predominantly Latinx High School

Towards Anti-Carceral Leadership: Remaking Public Schools to Refuse Black Students’ Surveillance, Containment, and Control

Safe, seen, and ready to learn

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