The Pain and the Wounds: A Call for Critical Race English Education in the Wake of Racial Violence

For the kids who die are like iron in the blood of the people-And the old and rich don't want the peopleTo taste the iron of the kids who die,Don't want the people to get wise of their own power-Langston Hughes, Kids Who Die, 1938The days of Black bodies hanging from trees and bearing the brunt of fire hoses been supplanted with a contemporary form of racism covertly etched within the American fabric. The recent deaths of Black and Brown men and women, the forced disappearance of Indigenous youth, and the violence against transgender individuals have generated new civil rights urgencies in Black and Brown communities and spirited academic discourse in higher educational spaces regarding the plight of people of color in America (Johnson & Bryan, 2016). Therefore, we1 come to this project bearing soul wounds and heavy hearts, anxiety and anger, tears and fire. We sifted through a series of events and melded our wounds into a project that could heal us, our families, our communities, and Black, Brown, and other marginalized youth affected by racial violence. We sit with the heavy hauntings (Gordon, 1997, 2011) of Black and Brown death: photographs, videos, social media hashtags, well-known and underreported news stories. We reflect on Gordon's (2011) conception of haunting, which he uses to describe those singular and yet when home becomes unfamiliar, when your bearings on the world lose direction, when the overand-done-with comes alive, when what's been in your blind field comes into view (p. 1). When we sat with the repetitive instances of young Black and Brown lives lost within the streets, buildings, communities, and country they called home, the following is what came to view.On May 3, 2010, while sleeping on the couch, 7-year-old Aiyana StanleyJones was shot and killed by Detroit police officer Joseph Weekley. On the night of February 26, 2012, 17-year-old Trayvon Martin was killed by neighborhood watch member George Zimmerman as he walked from a convenience store to his father's home. As she left a party on March 21, 2012, 22-year-old Rekia Boyd was shot by off-duty Chicago police detective Dante Servin. While listening to music with friends on November 23, 2012, 17-year-old Jordan Davis was shot and killed by Michael Dunn. On September 14, 2013, after being involved in a severe car accident, 24-year-old Jonathan Ferrell was shot and killed by North Carolina Police officer Randall Kerrick. Less than two months later on November 2, 19-year-old Renisha McBride was shot and killed in Dearborn, Michigan, by Theodore Wafer after knocking on his door and seeking help following a car accident she had near Wafer's home. Jonathen Santellana, 17, was fatally shot on November 13, 2013, in Houston, Texas, by Rey Garza, an off-duty plain-clothes police officer, who suspected Santellana of having illegal drugs. On November 22, 2014, Cleveland police officer Timothy Loehmann shot and killed 12-year-old Tamir Rice while he played with a toy gun outside of a Cleveland recreation center. While out driving with her friends on the morning of January 26, 2015, 17-year-old Jessica Jessie Hernandez died after Denver police opened fire on her car. On March 28, 2015, police shot and killed 26-year-old Megan Hockaday after entering her Oxnard, California, home. She was a mother of three. Alesia Thomas (July 22, 2012), Tanisha Anderson (November 12, 2014), Jennifer Lobato (March 2, 2015), and Sandra Bland (July 13, 2015) lost their lives while in police custody. On June 12, 2016, between 2:02 and 5:15 a.m., Omar Mateen entered Pulse-a nightclub in Orlando, Florida, frequented by LGBTQ persons of color-and killed 49 people, wounding at least 53 more. Ninety percent of those who died were or of Hispanic descent, including Mexican, Colombian and Dominican (Alvarez & Madigan, 2016).During the week that the United States celebrated the nation's freedom from British colonial rule, we grappled with what it means to be Brown, Black, and American. …