Teaching black history as a racial literacy project

From Margins to Center: Developing Cultural Citizenship Education Through the Teaching of Asian American History

“…In general, social studies curriculum rarely includes meaningful representations of communities of color (Wills, 2001), who may only be present when relevant to Anglo-European experiences or actions (Cornbleth, 1997). Many scholars of social studies education have attended to the need to critically reframe traditional narratives of African Americans (Busey & Walker, 2017;King, 2016;Vickery, 2017b;Woodson, 2016), Latinx (Author, 2016;Cruz, 2002;Santiago, 2017), and Native Americans (Craig & Davis, 2015;Dunbar-Ortiz, 2014;Shear, Knowles, Soden, & Castro, 2015), however the field continues to neglect curricular representations of Asian Americans. Asian Americans are nearly invisible in K-12 history educational standards Heilig, Brown, & Brown, 2012;Noboa, 2012;Pang, 2006) and textbooks (Harada, 2000;Hartlep & Scott, 2016;Suh, An, & Forest, 2015), typically addressed just twice in secondary U.S. history: upon the enactment of Chinese exclusion in 1882 and during the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II (Noboa, 2012).…”

Racial Code Words, Re‐Memberings and Black Kids’ Civic Imaginations: A Critical Race Ethnography of a Post‐Civil Rights Leader

“…Data for this study illustrate how the exclusionary politics of how civil rights leadership is represented resulted in my participants feeling estranged (see L. J. King ; Tillet ) from civic life and from the range of possibilities for civil rights struggle. No matter how presumably neutral, the language we use to support thinking about history, democracy, and racial struggle is not easily disentangled from the practices and conditions that sustain racial power disparities within society.…”

“…As these figures became universal symbols of multicultural ideals of the United States (Alridge ), civil rights leader became code for a certain type of black activists. L. King () argued that “history provides a blueprint for where [people] still must go and what they still must be” (76). His argument is validated by my participants’ reflections on the individuals presented to them as historical civil rights leaders, and the ways that they interpreted these representations to make decisions about what civil rights leadership was, what it is, and what it must be in the future.…”

“…Because there are no established criteria for determining what type of political contribution warrants the designation of civil rights leader, individuals and groups have defined and applied the term in ways that support their own interests and “cultural politics” (Carlson ). Stories about civil rights leaders tend to valorize certain activist identities and performances and ignore others, resulting in superficial and often ahistorical portrayals of the black freedom struggle (Alridge ; Carlson ; L. King ; Swartz ; Woodson ). Data for this article are drawn from a larger, three‐year ethnographic research project on the political, economic, cultural, and moral patterns used to structure narratives about civil rights leadership for a group of black teenagers in Saginaw, MI.…”

Interpreting Black History: Toward a Black History Framework for Teacher Education

“…Second, Black history develops racial literacy (L. J. King, 2016). Racially literate teachers effectively broach topics and have nuanced understandings about race and racism, and develop critical dispositions toward racial justice in K-12 education (Sealey-Ruiz & Greene, 2015).…”