Young Children of Color in the United States experience the effects of racism on a daily basis. There have been calls for anti-bias and anti-racist education across the field of education, yet most recommendations are based on older students or studies in laboratory settings. Additionally, state and local governments have enacted legislation…

While research has called attention to the phenomena of a link between school and prison for many Black students in the United States, there has been much less examination of the direct impact to Black families, in this case Black mothers. This paper seeks to center the stories of Black mothers to provide a specific type of sense making around…

This critical autoethnography documents how the author navigated the dilemma of learning and teaching history as a racial queer. Through the use of narrative vignettes and reflection, the author examines how a woman of color social studies teacher educator (re)members the past as a way to inform her teaching of history? The first memory dealt with…

This paper uses a Critical Race Theory perspective to explain the everyday racisms -- racial microaggressions -- directed towards students of African and Caribbean descent during a non-statutory Black History unit, at an English secondary school. Applying a racial microaggressions framework to ethnographic data, this paper finds that experiences…

It is imperative to explore multiple approaches to intelligence and public education that fundamentally integrate the ideas and lived experiences of students--with particular interest to those who are most disenfranchised. Within various black communities, the oral traditions transmitted at home are life-affirming "freedom lessons,"…

Scholars have long promoted black history as an appropriate space to promote the development of racial literacy. Few research studies, however, have examined how teacher education uses black history as a heuristic to teach about race. Using racial literacy as a framework, this article examined the varied ways four social studies pre-service…

In this article, we bring attention to absences and deficit assumptions that continue to circulate in relation to environmental education for young Black children in North America. We focus our attention on tracing some of the ways in which racial innocence works to exclude and limit possibilities for young Black children's learning. Our analysis…

Education has been a technology used to sustain black abjection across the African Diaspora. Employing Mills' Racial Contract and Althusser's theory of the Ideological State Apparatuses (ISA) through a racial lens, this article will discuss how white supremacist education has been used to promote the misrecognition of black subjects as sub-human.…

This article brings two black intellectual traditions to bear on the question of charter schools: black Marxism and black nationalism. The authors examine the theoretical and rhetorical devices used to talk about charters schools by focusing on how notions of "black liberation" are deployed by the charter movement, and to what end. The…

Drawing on data from a historical-ethnographic study of the cultural politics of school desegregation in Seattle, USA, the author explores suffering as a recurring theme in the narratives of four black leaders, educators and activists involved in the struggle for black educational opportunity in that city during the post-Civil Rights Era. As these…

This article argues that African Americans, especially males living in urban areas, are physically and mentally trapped on a Devil's Island. The penal colony on the coast of French Guiana is a metaphor for the boundaries and constraints that close off opportunities and constrain African American historical knowledge. The article argues that…

This article examines the Black male crisis thesis promulgated by the social science literature, public policy, and mainstream discourse, respectively. The authors contend that the stock-story that the majority of African American males are "at-risk" for engaging in self-destructive behavior or on the verge of extinction perpetuates a discourse of…

This is an exploratory study of racism in a genre of children's literature that has been largely overlooked by research and teaching in multicultural children's literature: sports biographies and, in particular, the biographies of African American professional football players. By examining the race bias of this genre of children's literature, the…

Since slavery, attempted enclosures upon Black spaces of cultural production and autonomy (i.e. music, language, art) have manifested in various forms. In the context of the post-industrial terrain of urban southern California, the formation of the prison is the dominant model of forced enclosure in the lives of Black people. Moving beyond the…