Racial Justice

Literacy without love is just words on a page, but educators can create real, actionable, and sustainable classroom practices rooted in love, in a time when we need it the most. O ur purpose in this commentary is to describe how school communities work together to build relationships and develop inquiry teams through loveful practices. Through this examination, possibilities for shaping literacy culture through love-ful pedagogies within and across schools are elevated. This commentary is a dialogue between the two of us to explain how loveful pedagogy is deeply connected to learners' motivation in school and, especially, learners' love of literacy. Our ideational partner, Cornelius Minor, is included in the dialogue, particularly when we describe our work with adolescents in school spaces. In the first section, Kass explains the emotive work that underscores becoming literate, beginning with developmental learning stages. She delineates how the relational trust that adolescents both crave and need begins during early childhood and is often compromised as they experience more schooling. Marcus identifies that the work of building relational trust starts with self-assessment of both youth and their educators, capitalizing on an adapted form of Chapman's (2010) love languages. Marcus interrogates the idea of imperfect love, calling on educators to present a more vulnerable version of themselves to their learners. Kass then connects the inner work to the outer, posing a framework for intraschool collegial discourse that she and her partner, Cornelius, model in schools, while also providing a critical "shapes of love" relational continuum for educators to more critically examine interactions that take place between teachers and students within a school. Kass: Developmental Consideration Becoming literate is emotional work. From the time human beings are born, they engage in multiple literacies, constructing new knowledge and powerful ideas that, together, bridge new understandings. With those new understandings, humans are constantly being challenged and provoked with new information. Imagine a baby. The sound of the door opening, she had learned, means that her grown-up has arrived home! Whoops, it's the grocery delivery person. Disappointment ensues. Anger and sadness build, the baby's fists clench, tears well up, and crying commences. There's no need to worry, though, because another grown-up, different from the one expected than the delivery person, comforts the baby, reassuring her with "Shhhh" sounds and telling her that the caregiver she expected will be home before too long. Then, the baby begins to relax, because even though she doesn't understand the caregiver's words, this person is soothing, smiling, and the baby can feel a vibe, something that she will later know to be called love. The International Literacy Association (n.d.) defines literacies as the distinct written and oral language practices evident across varying social circumstances, domains, and classes. As such, literacies are plural, with multiple manifestations, that cover various aspects of human life and social organization (e.g., school literacy, workplace literacy, science literacy).

The deleterious effects of microaggressions on members of marginalized groups are well documented. Less clear are the practice skills needed to intervene when microaggressions take place, particularly in ways that maintain strong relationships with students, colleagues and/or clients. Furthermore, too often discussions of responses to microaggressions are restricted to the position of bystander, ignoring the ways that human service providers may also perpetrate or be targets of injustice. Using vignettes from our practice experience, we provide guiding principles for constructive microaggression intervention from three key social locations: perpetrator, witness, and target.

Social movement scholars have described activist burnout-when the stressors of activism become so overwhelming they debilitate activists' abilities to remain engaged-as a formidable threat to the sustainability of social movements. However, studies designed to map the causes of burnout have failed to account for ways burnout might operate differently for privileged-identity activists such as white antiracism activists and marginalized-identity activists such as antiracism activists of color. Building on previous studies of activist burnout in racial justice activists and examinations of the roles of white activists in antiracism movements, this study represents one attempt to fill this gap. We analyzed data from interviews with racial justice activists of color in the United States who have experienced burnout to identify the ways they attributed their burnout to the attitudes and behaviors-the racism-of white activists. These included (1) harboring unevolved or racist views, (2) undermining or invalidating the racial justice work of activists of color, (3) being unwilling to step up and take action when needed, (4) exhibiting white fragility, and (5) taking credit for participants’ racial justice work and ideas. Implications for racial justice movements and the participation of white activists are discussed.

In 2013, the city of Tulsa, Oklahoma ‘renamed’ Brady Street in its downtown arts district to M.B. Brady Street and designated the road as Reconciliation Way to rid itself of ties to Wyatt ‘Tate’ Brady, the original namesake. Tate Brady, a Ku Klux Klan leader, participated in a 1921 massacre that killed, injured, and displaced many black Tulsans. Honoring M.B. Brady, a Civil War photographer with the same last name but no ties to Tulsa, was part of a neoliberal compromise to ensure the name change would have the least disruptive impact on the financial interests of white business owners on the road. The Tulsa case demonstrates how convenience and practicality—although represented as a matter of neoliberal ‘nonpolitics’—is nonetheless a political technology used to justify sanitizing controversial histories and prioritizing capital accumulation over social justice. The faux renaming of Brady prompts a
critical consideration of how neoliberalism weakens cities’ ability to engage in the restorative ‘memory-work’ of recovering (from) past racial violence. Our study contributes to the study of neoliberal place naming, struggles over urban space and memory, and the possibilities and limits of street naming as a vehicle for (re) claiming a black sense of place.