The Racial Hauntings of One Black Male Professor and the Disturbance of the Self(ves): Self-Actualization and Racial Storytelling as Pedagogical Practices

Through a series of racialized stories, I illustrate the familial knowledge, racial hauntings, and educational experiences that forge(d) the beginning and the continuing of my racial identity as a Black male. To examine these stories, I employ racial storytelling as a theoretical, methodological, curricular, and pedagogical tool to assist me in a deep excavation of my past, present, and future selves and to illuminate the literacies that my Black male body brings to the classroom. Racial storytelling illustrates how my racial encounters from the past situate themselves in the current moment and still haunt me today. As such, I (re)enter these embodied stories to demonstrate how life moments impact how I think about racial issues in today’s context. The questions that guide this line of inquiry are the following: (a) How can educators employ racial storytelling as a pedagogical and methodological practice? (b) How can language and literacy scholars of Color use the radical (self) imagination as a thought and concept to face our racial ghosts and to analyze our hauntings? In closing, I propose the radical (self) imagination as a recommendation for literacy scholars of Color and language and literacy education.