CRT and School Libraries

In the latest edition of Knowledge Quest, Dr. Kafi Kumasi uses Critical Race Theory (CRT) to interrogate school library practices and school librarians’ belief systems as they relate to serving and supporting urban youth of color. The article offers several areas for examining this issue through the lens of CRT including: 1) disrupting cultural deficit views about youth of color; 2) honoring students’ voices and life experiences; 3) recognizing structural inequalities; and 4) understanding whiteness. This work has implications for helping school librarians develop the cultural competencies and dispositions necessary for creating library programs that support and affirm urban youth of color. 

The citation for this article is:

Kumasi, K. (2012). Roses in the Concrete: A Critical Race Perspective on Urban Youth and School Libraries. Knowledge Quest, 40 (5), pp 32-37. 

The article can accessed at:  http://tinyurl.com/6wk7v9d
 

Minority babies outnumbered white newborns in 2011

Today it was announced that minority babies outnumbered white newborns in 2011 for the first time in U.S. history. What does this mean for school libraires? For public libraries? For the publishing industry? How does this relate to and impact the literacy achievement of African American male youth?

Counterstories and Voice

In the first chapter to our book, Urban Teens in the Library, Denise Agosto and I argue that in order to successfully provide library services to urban teens, we must move beyond the racial and socioeconomic biases that pervade the popular culture, as well as our own preconceptions (misconceptions) and see them as individuals, not as members of a stereotyped group. The same is true for African American male youth. Many educators, administrators, policymakers, and members of the general public "buy" into stereotypes and interpret cultural and racial differences as a deficit.  This often leads schools to lower their academic expectations of African American male youth, to track them into remedial classes, or to place a disproportionate number in special education. As Chimamanda Adichie explains in her TED talk, The Danger of a Single Story, “the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.”

One of the central tenets of Critical Race Theory (CRT) is the concept of voice. CRT research suggests that one of the key ways to shift the lens through which we view African American male youth (i.e. move beyond the single story) is through the use of personal narrative and story.

Sharon Flake’s poem “You Don’t Even Know Me” is a powerful example of a counterstory—a story that challenges the story of the dominant culture. In the poem, performed in a video by students from Roseville High School in Minnesota, a black teen rebukes his teachers, neighbors, and even his friends for making assumptions about his academic ability, his career aspirations, and his behavior based on stereotypes: “You know/ I’ve been wondering lately/ Trying to figure out just how it could be/ That you can see me so often/ And don’t know a thing about me” (2010, p. 4).

We have invited a group of young men from North Carolina Central University, UNC Charlotte, and a local high school to participate in the summit—to tell us their stories and to help us reimagine what libraries should look like and be like in order to truly meet the needs of African American male youth.

How have you involved African American male youth in your library programming and planning? In your research? How have you given them voice? What counterstories did they tell?

Welcome to the conversation!

In a recent report entitled A Call for Change: The Social and Educational Factors Contributing to the Outcomes of Black Males in Urban Schools, the Council of the Great City Schools calls the achievement gap for African-American males a “national catastrophe” and notes that “there is no concerted national effort to improve the education, social and employment outcomes of African-American males” (p. 11).  Next month in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, the library community will come together with authors, publishers, policymakers, researchers, and educators in a summit entitled Building a Bridge to Literacy for African-American Male Youth: A Call to Action for the Library Community. Our goal is to become part of the national effort to improve the quality of education and life for African-American males in the United States.  Over the course of two and a half days, we will share our experiences, our challenges, and our ideas in three areas: research (what is known about the literacy development and needs of African-American male youth and additional gaps that need to be filled); programs & services (what programs and services work to support the literacy needs of African-American male youth and what gaps exist); and resources (what resources are needed to enable school and public libraries to effectively address the literacy needs of African-American male youth).

Taking action on the national crisis surrounding the literacy achievement of African-American males is an extension of the mission of public and school libraries to support lifelong learning.  We believe the library community is eager to embrace this challenge, but we can’t do it alone.  We hope that you will use this blog to join our discussion by providing us with feedback on our stories and ideas and by sharing your own.  You can get involved in other ways too: visit the summit website, follow our Twitter hashtag (#bridge2lit), and be on the lookout for our upcoming webinar and white paper after the conclusion of the summit.  As we continue to plan for the summit itself, a key theme that we keep returning to is the idea that words – whether written or read, spoken or heard – are powerful.  So we hope that you add your words to ours by contributing to the media surrounding this effort. Welcome to the conversation!