(SCY5) Challenging Hate through Black and Indigenous Frameworks: Centreing Love, Joy, and Critical Solidarities

This session explores work that shifts from childhood innocence and sentiments of youth as social problems to the many ways that children and youth are deeply affected by challenging threats to their existence. The papers in this session bolster Blackness and Indigeneity by centering Black flourishing practices and anti-colonial resistance strategies. The three papers in this session include: Awakening the African Personality to re-imagine Possibilities in Pursuit of Inclusive Black Futurities, Writing historical wrongs: Why Black children deserve the joy of pro-Black play-based learning, and Mica, Talk That Talk: Reflections on Power-Consciousness in Action Research with Black Girls. Tags: Children And Youth, Education

Organizers: Janelle Brady, Toronto Metropolitan University, Rachel Berman, Toronto Metropolitan University; Chairs: Janelle Brady, Toronto Metropolitan University, Rachel Berman, Toronto Metropolitan University

Presentations

Verne Hippolyte-Smith, OISE, University of Toronto

Awakening the African Personality to re-imagine Possibilities in Pursuit of Inclusive Black Futurities

In thinking of the operations of systemic anti-Black racism across multigenerational processes of inclusion for the Black diaspora in Canada, Black youth in Canada display resistance to foster their inclusion. Alienated and uprooted from their ontological and historical roots, the self-conceptualization of the Black subject is constructed within an anti-Black, epidermalized and self-negating consciousness (Fanon, 2001). While some Black children and youth internalize this false Black identity inscribed to their existence, which can be manifested through negative self-actualizations, others find ways to resist and subvert the epistemic violence (Hill Collins, 2019) which has constructed the white myth of Blackness, by staying connected to their roots and cultural knowledge. In this paper, we explore how second-generation Black Canadian youth in Ontario resist succumbing to the self-fulfilling prophecy spawned by dispossession, alienation, and internalization to forge Black futurities. We interrogate the youth’s understanding of and engagement with Black indigenous knowledge, families, and communities. Our positionality as two academic Black women passionate about Black thought led us to draw on Negritude as an onto-epistemological theoretical and practical framework, and utilize a qualitative research method (Lindlof and Taylor, 2018) consisting of semi-structured interviews with Black youth, and content analysis to interpret the data. Negritude offers a deeper critical consciousness of Black ontology and identity that transcends corporeal and visual realms of understanding the Black self, allowing us to subvert the corollary of colonialism and white supremacy (Césaire, 1939). Negritude is proposed as a humanism (Senghor, 2004) which delineates a pan-psyche that converges the political with the emotional which is saliently fecund in spirituality, cosmology, art, language and the word (Damas, 1974). Semi-structured interviews facilitate access to the subjectivities and racial and cultural meanings Black youth express, and content analysis enables identifying and linking themes related to their lived experiences of Black youth and the experiential knowledge of their families and communities. While all the participants have fashioned methods of resistance centered in family connectivity, the passing on of strong values associated with Black culture in shaping identity and sense of belonging, and transglobal relationships with their indigenous roots, they lack a deeper understanding and grounding of “enfleshed” African ontology and Afrocentric and Black indigenous epistemes and praxis, which can strengthen their sense of belonging and help to better strategize to insure an inclusive and equitable anti-racist future. Thus, there is an urgent need for radical action specific to the Black personality and embodiment. By engaging Negritude, young people can connect to a deeper ontological understanding of Blackness as an anti-thesis to the Eurocentric consciousness, therefore unearthing and awakening an unapologetic boldness or “Black Swagger,” which is a prerequisite for audacious Black imaginaries and futurity. That will allow to cultivate and amplify more self-assured Black voices and propel resilience into meaningful transformation. Therefore, to hold the potential for deeper impact on disrupting and assure the continued forging and development of inclusive Black futurities it is imperative to truly ground oneself into their Black ancestral indigenous knowledge.

---

Non-presenting author: Amal Maddibo, OISE, University of Toronto

Kerry-Ann Escayg, University of Nebraska- Omaha

Writing historical wrongs: Why Black children deserve the joy of pro-Black play-based learning.

A variety of play-based learning approaches continue to receive institutional support in early years learning spaces managed by public and private organizations. Even as scholars urgently critique play-based learning methods in the early years by identifying the theoretical underpinnings of such pedagogies as Eurocentric (Kinard et al., 2021) and more specifically, how these approaches negate the salience of race and racism in the lives of Black children (Escayg, 2021,2022), we advocate instead for the adoption of both critical anti-racist and pro-Black play-based pedagogies in praxis. Indeed, when applied effectively, the preceding formative strategies may sustain Black children’s positive racial identities while promoting the joy-filled and psychologically safe early learning environments so critical to Black children’s well-being in the US and Canada.  Additionally, narratives of the enslaved—based on data culled from interviews with survivors of the slave trade for the 1936 to 1938 Federal Writers’ Project (for example)—proffer historically and sociologically rich lessons congruent with the current scholarly gestures toward an examination of how and to what extent the “white gaze” and whiteness, in general, inform Black children’s experiences in play-based environments. Most notably, although enslaved Black children engaged in play activities, such was often performed against a backdrop of control, surveillance, and physical and psychological violence (Harris, 2021). The foregrounding of the narratives of the enslaved ultimately brings current developments in pedagogical scholarship into sharper focus, making the case for this presentation as an act of temporal justice. Through the incorporation of storytelling formats and a creative approach that privileges Black children’s voices past and present, the proposed presentation recommends a broadly pro-Black pedagogy to address the historical wrongs and contemporary anti-Black racism that pervade social systems and often deny Black children’s sense of self (thereby thwarting opportunities for them to thrive in the early years of childhood). In this presentation, I will discuss the defining features of pro-Black play-based learning and provide practical classroom examples. Clarified by the transformative power of joy, hope, and resistance, such curricular components would be useful for researchers and practitioners committed to disrupting anti-Black racism in the early years classroom while safeguarding the youngest hearts and souls of our children as they learn to navigate racialized and increasingly hostile learning spaces overshadowed by the specter of a brutal, inhumane, and unjust past.

Stephanie Fearon, York University

Mica, Talk That Talk: Reflections on Power-Consciousness in Action Research with Black Girls

Canada boasts a diverse and longstanding Black population. The country’s relationship with Black Canadian communities is marred by practices of enslavement and segregation, and racially restrictive immigration policies (Aladejebi, 2021; Maynard, 2017). Black scholars point to the ways that Atlantic chattel slavery and its afterlives continue to unfold in Canadian institutions like education (Brand, 2020; Maynard, 2017; Walcott Abdillahi, 2019). In these afterlives, anti-Black racism is endemic to Canadian public schools and profoundly shapes the lives of Black children (Walcott and Abdillahi, 2019; Maynard, 2017). A growing number of Black scholars and community members uphold the collection of race-based data as an integral component to disrupting and dismantling the hate and violence wielded against Black children in Canadian schools (Walcott, 2020). Indeed, empirical inquiries on Black life are vital to establishing policies, practices, and pedagogies for the wellbeing and academic achievement of Black Canadian children. University-based researchers have long been at the helm in developing and facilitating empirical inquiries on Black Canadian communities. However, Black Canadians’ relationships with academic institutions are fraught and tenuous (Walcott, 2020). Black people have long denounced research emanating from these institutions as extractive and exploitative. Black Canadians decry the power hierarchies and oppressive discourses inherent in Eurocentric research processes (Fearon, 2023). In fact, Black leaders accuse these empirical inquiries as benefiting the researchers collecting the data more than the Black people being researched (Walcott, 2020). In this arts-informed autoethnography, I investigate my own practice as a University professor with a research profile focused on the experiences of Black Canadian women and girls in schools. I am particularly interested in the ways that I use an endarkened feminist epistemology and the arts to shift the power imbued in my researchers identity to the Black girls with whom I collaborate. In so doing, I imagine and advance a power-conscious inquiry process that is useful for researchers wishing to embrace a collaborative ethic grounded in Black onto-epistemologies when working with Black girls. Specifically, I explore the ways that I create conditions whereby I, the researcher, can be cognizant of power relations and disrupt the prevalent researcher/researched dichotomy and more deeply invite Black girls to become collaborators and share power within the inquiry (Stewart, 2022). The following questions guide my autoethnography: How might educational researchers imagine and develop a power-conscious collaborative inquiry process with Black girls? How might this process attend to and disrupt the prevalent researcher/researched dichotomy? How might this inquiry process shift the power imbued in a researcher’s identity to Black girls? I begin this paper by providing a critique on power and its manifestations in Eurocentric forms of inquiry. I, then, present the tenets of a power-conscious framework grounded in an endarkened feminist epistemology (Stewart, 2022). Through a creative non-fiction short story, I showcase how I partnered with three Black Canadian girls to reconceptualize their role in the research process. Centering my work with Mica, a 10-year-old Black girl in a special education program, I highlight my research journey to embracing a collaborative ethic. To this end, with humility, I showcase the shortcomings and successes I faced when working with Black girls in a power-conscious collaborative inquiry. The paper concludes with a series of reflective questions challenging scholars to engage in power-conscious collaborative research with Black girls.