Black Language is Antiracist Language Arts Education: A Pedagogical Call for Black Linguistic Justice

Abstract As a collective, African Americans and their language(s) are no stranger to shared struggle in education. Black students, Black Language, and their ways of knowing, are in search of solidarity in a language education that honors their race, their culture, and their linguistic flexibility. An antiracist language and literacy education that pledges itself to the fight for linguistic justice commits to honoring the humanity of Black students. To provide an antiracist language and literacy education is to teach in a way that respects and cares for the souls of students in language arts classrooms. In this paper, I examine antiracism as a pedagogy within the institution of education by providing an overview of research on antiracist language and literacy education. Antiracist Pedagogy aims at transformation by challenging the individual as well as the structural systems that perpetuate racism (Kailin, 2002; Blakeney in JCP 2:119–132, (2005)). Specifically, I address an antiracist language and literacy education from a pedagogical approach, an Antiracist Black Language Pedagogy (Baker-Bell, 2020), that centers the linguistic, cultural, racial, and intellectual needs of Black students and Black Language speakers. The language and literacy education of Black students requires an approach that names, interrogates, and dismantles the linguistic violence, persecution, dehumanization, and marginalization Black Language speakers experience in and out of schools (Baker-Bell 2020).