Critiquing Racial Literacy: Presenting a Continuum of Racial Literacies

Racial literacy has contributed powerful advances in multiple disciplines about how race and racism are understood. Many education scholars use the concept to refer to antiracist practices and ideologies, a definition that casts some people as either racially literate or illiterate. In this essay the author draws on examples from education literature to argue that this interdisciplinary conceptual norm hinders scholars’ attempts to reveal the dominance of race-evasiveness, however unintentionally, for two reasons. First, describing people as racially literate or illiterate implies that those who adopt race-evasive or racist ideologies are not interpreting racial ideas, which overlooks that all people who live in a racist society engage in literacy practices that make meaning of race. Second, construing racial literacy strictly as antiracist obscures that making meaning of race can be done through hegemonic ideologies. This accepted conceptualization may stymie useful analyses of hegemonic ideologies that predominate in U.S. society and schools. The author presents a continuum of racial literacies to differentiate between hegemonic and counterhegemonic racial literacies. The continuum’s exposure of hegemonic racial literacies encourages scholars to capture the hidden ideologies in literacy practices that may not exhibit an explicit racial focus but nevertheless perpetuate racism. Furthermore, the author suggests eschewing the labels “racially illiterate” and “racially literate” and instead affirms that people become racially literate through both racist and antiracist literacy practices. Instead of racially illiterate or literate, the author submits consciousness as a more apt term and connects the continuum’s counterhegemonic end to developing critical-racial consciousness, an antiracist lens.