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By engaging in critical literacy, participants theorized Blackness and antiblackness. The purpose of this study was to have participants theorize Blackness and antiblackness through their engagements with critical literacy.

The authors used a youth-centered and informed Black critical-race grounded methodology.

Participants’ unique and varied revelations of Blackness as Vitality, Blackness as Cognizance and Blackness as Expansive Community, served to withstand, confront and transcend encounters with antiblackness in English curricula.

This paper provides a model for how to engage Black youth as a means to disrupt anti-Black English education spaces.

This study provides a foundation for future research efforts of Black English outer spaces as they relate to English education. Findings in this study may also inform existing English educator practices.

This study theorized both the role and the flexible nature of Black English outer spaces. It defined the multi-ethnic nature of Blackness. It proposed that affirmations of Blackness sharpened participants’ critical literacies in Black English outer spaces as a transformative intervention to anti-Black English education spaces.

This study aims to explore the textual and sociopolitical relationships of kinship writing as 15 youth wrote politically charged poetry while participating in a four-week summer writing program grounded in a Black studies curriculum.

The authors explore the following research questions: How do youth writers draw upon each other’s writing to compose sociopolitical kinship poems when writing about critical issues affecting Black lives? What topics and oppressions do youth choose to write about and how do they write about these topics?

The authors found that the youth wrote across multiple topics affecting Black lives in their kinship poems. These include the appropriation of black beauty, gun violence and police brutality, love and Black lives, the need for equality, negative depictions and misrepresentations of Black people, the neglect and omission of Black lives and suppression of freedom. The youth took up various critical issues in their poems, which addressed what they deemed as most urgent in the lives of Black people, and these selected topics were highly historicized. We also found that the youth used the content, styles and audience of the original poems to pen their own pieces.

Writing with another peer afforded collaborative writing and spaces for youth to read and interrogate the world while building criticality through their writing.

Kinship writing is a genre in which one piece of writing has a relationship with another piece of writing. Kinship writing carries significance in the Black literary community as the history of Black education has been interlaced with ideals of social learning, community, family and kinship. This literary approach contributes to ways Black people used each other’s writings to offer healing, comfort and care in a turmoil filled world.

Purpose – The purpose of this study is to gain greater understanding of the ways that youth “do race” in the post-Civil Rights United States. Scholars have studied racial discourse and meaning among adults but have not rigorously investigated the patterns of discourse among youth.

Methodology – I analyze in-depth interviews and in and out-of-school observations drawn from three racially mixed fourth-grade classrooms in a city that I call Rolling Acres. Among the 31 families, 21 of the children identified as White and 10 identified as Black. Rolling Acres is a midsized city of over 100,000 residents where 75 percent of its residents identify as White and 9 percent identify as Black.

Findings – Youth maintain complex understandings of the importance of race, but mediate the expression of these sentiments based on their social identities and public scripts. Both Black and White children first suggest race does not matter when asked, but then describe that race is important to others in their school. White youth suggest Black youth are the perpetuators of racial antagonisms and perpetuate racial significance through their actions. Black youth suggest White youth do not typically antagonize over race, but when they do the perpetrators are acting out of individual beliefs and thus are limited in impact.

Originality – Through an exclusive concentration on the voices of the young, new patterns of understanding and discourse are uncovered, which may relate to later divergences in racial meaning in adulthood between Blacks and Whites.

This paper explores the changing shape of black youth cultures and youth crime since the 1970s and the emergence of ‘gangs’ in the 21st century, against the backdrop of Britain's changing social, economic and cultural conditions. Using a structural‐cultural conceptual framework, it demonstrates that like much black youth crime in the 1980s and 1990s, gang membership amongst black young males can, in part, be explained as a dysfunctional cultural adaptation to socio‐structural pressures. Yet, while tackling poverty, social and economic disadvantage and racism will alleviate some of their pressures, many young people feel they are trapped in ‘violent worlds’ and have developed a sense of nihilism, which now appears to be a more pressing problem.

Death by suicide among Black people in the USA have increased by 35.6% within the past decade. Among youth under the age of 24 years old, death by suicide among Black youth have risen substantially. Researchers have found that structural inequities (e.g. educational attainment) and state-specific variables (e.g. minimum wage, incarceration rates) may increase risk for suicide among Black people compared to White people in the USA. Given the limited understanding of how such factors systematically affect Black and White communities differently, this paper aims to examine these relationships across US states using publicly available data from 2015 to 2019.

Data were aggregated from various national sources including the National Center for Education Statistics, the Department of Labor, the FBI’s Crime in the US Reports and the Census Bureau. Four generalized estimating equations (GEE) models were used to examine the impact of state-level variables on suicide rates: Black adults suicide rate, Black youth (24 years and younger) suicide rate, White adult suicide rate and White youth suicide rate. Each model includes state-level hate group rates, minimum wage, violent crime rates, gross vacancy rates, and race-specific state-level poverty rates, incarceration rates and graduation rates.

Across all GEE models, suicide rates rose between 2015–2019 (ß = 1.11 – 2.78; ß = 0.91 – 1.82; ß = 0.52 – 3.09; ß = 0.16 – 1.53). For the Black adult suicide rate, state rates increased as the proportion of Black incarceration rose (ß = 1.14) but fell as the gross housing vacancy rates increased (ß = −1.52). Among Black youth, state suicide rates rose as Black incarcerations increased (ß = 0.93). For the adult White suicide rate, state rates increased as White incarceration (ß = 1.05) and percent uninsured increased (ß = 1.83), but fell as White graduation rates increased (ß = −2.36). Finally, among White youth, state suicide rates increased as the White incarceration rate rose (ß = 0.55) and as the violent crime rate rose (ß = 0.55) but decreased as state minimum wages (ß = −0.61), White poverty rates (ß = −0.40) and graduation rates increased (ß = −0.97).

This work underscores how structural factors are associated with suicide rates, and how such factors differentially impact White and Black communities.

This chapter challenges the notion that Black males in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) are missing from the discipline and proposes a model that presents underrepresentation as a function of Black males being both intentionally undiscovered and/or deliberately disconnected from particular academic disciplines. Our work offers a tangible and implementable yet aligned theory/method/exemplar for supporting the STEM genius of Black males through a hip-hop development (HHD) approach that aligns with a unique pedagogical method rooted in hip-hop culture.

In this chapter, we describe a hip-hop based science program as an intervention that combats STEM undiscovery and disconnectedness. We suggest that this program (through its theoretical and methodological roots) provides a set of practices that have the potential to bolster both academic content knowledge and knowledge of self. We argue that this program supports the development of the students' full socioemotional selves – which is a necessary prerequisite to pursuing academic content knowledge.

Increased life expectancies and decreased birthrates have placed enormous financial pressure on the Social Security system. Because significant reforms are needed to ensure its financial solvency, our study examines the acceptability of proposals to reform the system. Given the potentially divergent views suggested by prior research, we selected participants from the following four groups (1) younger black taxpayers, (2) younger white taxpayers, (3) older black taxpayers, and (4) older white taxpayers. While there was agreement among the groups on several of the proposals, in general, the differences between the generations were more pronounced than the differences between the racial groups.

School transitions have long been associated with drops in academic motivation. Literature is reviewed on both the transition from elementary school to middle school and the transition from middle school to high school, showing how changes in school context, combined with developmental changes in the child, may lead to either positive or negative changes in academic motivation. We summarize literature on school transitions for American youth in general as well as the limited literature on these transitions and their motivational consequences among African American youth. Contextual changes that occur with school transitions (e.g., race composition of schools and classrooms) co-occur with youths’ growing awareness of race, influencing the identity development and academic motivation of African American youth through several mechanisms. Three such mechanisms are discussed in detail. Race and gender academic stereotypes have the potential to shape youths’ self-perceptions, values, and goals. Racial discrimination occurs both at an institutional level (e.g., differences in school quality that place African American youth at a disadvantage) and at a personal level (e.g., a teacher’s failure to recommend a high-achieving Black child for an honors class). Racial identity can serve both as a protective factor and as a risk factor. Suggestions for future research include a closer study of specific aspects of school contexts that shape motivation, the role of families, ways in which school policies and pedagogical practices affect transition experiences, and the examination of ways in which school transitions are opportunities for fresh starts and positive change in African American youth.

Black Panther depicted a positive representation of Black culture. The film transcended Black minds to believe in power, excellence, and intelligence. Black youth posted images on social media using the Wakanda pose as a symbol of pride. The film not only countered the stereotypical generalized ideologies of African culture, values, and customs, but it capsized false narratives by including the historical context of Black scientist with a female character. Articles summarizing depictions of Black Panther and its influence on Black youth assert that the character of Shuri and her perfection of the sciences contributed to pathways for young Black girls to join science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) programs. Other factors contribute to the increase of Black girls in STEM programs, but the image of Shuri's character in a position of power of the sciences pinpoints representation as key to cerebral pictures and reflections of Black female excellence in the sciences. However, representation is minimal among Black male youth in STEM programs.

Although it is true that African American male youth have Black male representation in media through sports figures, rappers, and hip-hop artists, inquiring minds need to know that Black male representation in the sciences and mathematics is the formula to how young minds view themselves and their relation to the world. Accordingly, this underrepresentation of Black male youth in STEM programs leads to the big “what if” question. If LeBron James conducted a critical analysis using physics and mathematics to make a 3-point shot, then what is the likelihood that young Black males' interest in the STEM programs would increase?

Historically, literacy education and research have been dominated by white supremacist narratives that marginalize and deficitize the literate practices of Black students. As anti-Blackness proliferates in US schools, Black youth suffer social, psychological, intellectual, and physical traumas. Despite relentless attacks of anti-Blackness, Black youth fight valiantly through a range of creative outlets, including multimodal compositions, that enable them to move beyond negative stereotypes, maintain their creativity, and manifest the present and future lives they desire and so deeply deserve.

This study aims to answer the question “How do Black students' multimodal renderings demonstrate creativity and love in ways that disrupt anti-Blackness?” The authors critically examine four multimodal compositions created by Black elementary and middle school students to understand how Black youth author a more racially just society and envision self-determined, joyful futures. The authors take up Black Livingness as a theoretical framework and use visual methodologies to analyze themes of Black life, love and hope in the young people’s multimodal renderings.

The findings suggest that Black youth creatively compose multimodal renderings that are humanizing, allowing their thoughts, feelings and experiences to guide their critiques of the present world and envision new personal and societal futures. The authors conclude with a theorization of a Black Livingness Pedagogy that centers care for Black youth.

Recognizing that “the creation and use of images [is] a practice of decolonizing methodology” (Brown, 2013, loc. 2323), the authors examine Black student-created multimodal compositional practices to understand how Black youth author a more racially just society and envision self-determined, joyful futures.