#Sippingtea: Two Black Female Literacy Scholars Sharing Counter-Stories to Redefine Our Roles in the Academy

Through this piece, we draw upon critical race theory and Collins’s Afrocentric feminist epistemology to highlight the importance of storytelling as a knowledge validation system in Black women’s language. We illuminate and analyze a dialogic performance of two Black female literacy scholars in a coffee house “sipping tea,” sharing stories about their joint triumphs and challenges with teaching through equity-based pedagogies. The article takes its political and poetical inspiration from this dialogic performance placed in the center of the article. The dialogue is meant to enliven and represent the Afrocentric feminist discourse patterns that undergird our relationships with one another as Black sister scholars as well as our relationships to our classroom teaching and research. We offer discussions of literacy research and theory, personal experience/ethos, linguistic knowledge, and critique of racism. Our article has implications for strengthening the academy’s understanding of Black female bodies/language in White university spaces still hell-bent on not welcoming/employing either.