If “Black Lives Matter in Literacy Research,” Then Take This Racial Turn: Developing Racial Literacies

Abstract

When I look back before 2020, before the murder of Mr. George Floyd in particular, and think about this special issue, “Black Lives Matter in Literacy Research,” a question comes to my mind: Are we, the field of literacy research, sure that we want to include literacy research among the incalculable responses (already in progress) to racist killings, anti-Blackness, Black living and dying, and ongoing injustices in the United States of America? In other words, will Black human beings matter to our field? With the hope that our field of literacy research is finally taking this racial turn as an institution, I introduce the post-White orientation as well as practice of race theory (PRT) and argue for the lifelong development of racial literacies among fellow literacy researchers. In short, this article is designed to support the development of racial literacies in the field of literacy research with the aim of affecting research, practice, and policy.

Black Lives Matter Panel: A Generous Invitation to The Archive

“…A commitment to interrogation and de-/reconstruction is displayed with the aim of "dismantling" various forms of antihuman racialization; therefore, race is not regarded as a thing of the past or as coming to an end anytime soon. Finally, while race and racism are not explicitly defined in this exchange, all of the elements above align with the consequential social practice view of race as defined in practice of race theory or PRT (Croom, 2016;Croom, 2020b). Accordingly, "race is thinking and doing as if we or others have race for good or ill consequences" (Croom, 2020b, p. 536).…”

“…The first key element that we have selected from our panel discussion interrogates race and racism. We begin here because race and racism are often un(der)theorized in the field of literacy research and education more broadly (Croom, 2020a(Croom, , 2020b. In the following exchange, note that the common sense view of race is rejected.…”

Righting the Literacy Teacher Education Debt: A Matter of Justice

“…The overwhelming whiteness and Eurocentrism of "academic language" and "literacy" (Baker-Bell, 2020;Baker-Bell et al, 2017;Croom, 2020) need to be understood as a historical component of the literacy teacher education debt. Here I briefly discuss a parcel of this historical debt: the anti-Black racism of what counts as language and literacy.…”

A Year of Equity literacy: community actions and invitations

“…Researchers have leveraged equity literacy to guide school leaders (Green & Rodgers, 2017), White preservice teachers and teacher educators (Soslau & Bell, 2018), and teacher professional development (Gorski, 2016b) to confront and address inequality in education. Green expanded the concept of equity literacy into community advocacy work, combined with racial literacy (see Croom, 2020; Green, 2017) as a flexible heuristic for confronting inequity in school/community partnerships (Green, 2017, 2018). Green positions community‐driven equity literacy as most importantly about recognising and leveraging community assets in order to impactfully navigate community power structures.…”