A BlackCrit Re/Imagining of Urban Schooling Social Education Through Black Youth Enactments of Black Storywork

This article highlights the organizing role of Blackness and anti-Blackness in the social worlds of nine Black adolescents at an urban high school. Outside and within urban schooling, Black youth understand that anti-Blackness prompts the negotiation of two distinct social worlds—Black and non-Black—however, urban schooling invisibilizes this distinction. Based on a yearlong BlackCrit ethnography, I analyze three scripts of participants’ dialogic storying, which informs a re/imagining of urban schooling social education that explicitly addresses anti-Blackness. Through my findings, I outline sources of anti-Blackness in the lives of participants, explaining its operation at three levels: individual, institutional, and societal.